#than just a linear plot which is accompanied by the world

[autumnoakes]

hi im ranting (positively! this game kills me but in a good way) about breath of the wild again

i know it's controversial but i love the way the story of the game is told. because you start the game in the middle, perhaps near the end, of the story. the game is entirely through link's perspective and he wakes up knowing and remembering nothing. in turn, the player starts off knowing nothing. the past is revealed as the story goes along, and the player learns about the past and about the land as link does. there are little tidbits about hyrule and about the calamity scattered across the land. an old woman in hateno village tells you of an age of desolation that she grew up in. the travellers you see on the road are younger people because they're described by older characters as more bold, whereas the older characters grew up being told to never leave the village, it's too dangerous outside (compare this even to tears of the kingdom, where travellers are more common because the land has been safer. even older characters have left their home to travel elsewhere (not including the lurelin villagers)). battlefields are still strewn with old rusty weapons and deactivated guardians that no one but monsters will go near. myths and legends about the princess and hero have been passed down, to the point where their legitmacy is questioned and everyone has a different opinion on them.

it's environmental storytelling. it's things like seeing drawings and a bow in zelda's study and seeing a child reading a storybook with a hero that wears a blue tunic similar to link's. it's the stories that the villagers share about old myths that turn out to be true. it's the ruins scattered across the land, long since overtaken by monster camps but still unmistakably being houses that people once lived in. it's the utter lack of civilization anywhere remotely near the castle and the feeling of dread in the ruins of the town that surrounds it. it's a kingdom entrenched in its past, with no ability to move away from it until the calamity is finally defeated.

[bu1410]

Good afternoon TUMBLR - June 22nd - 2024

“Mr. Plant has owed me a shoe since July 5, 1971.”

Gazoducto Samalayuca - Sasabe. Mexico - Nuevos Casas Grandes - Chihuahua.

Part 4

Trips During my stay in Mexico, I had the opportunity to make several trips to the United States for work reasons. The aim was to investigate the possibility of entering the lucrative pipeline construction market in both the USA and Canada. Given that in Mexico our company worked for around $900 per linear/meter, in the USA the average price for installing a pipeline was around $2,000/linear meter in 2016/19. I always accompanied Mr. Davide Caracciolo who as Country Manager had the burden of finding new orders - the destinations of our trips were Houston, Dallas, Minneapolis and West Virginia from time to time.

HOUSTON Houston is a very pleasant and rich city. Capital of oil and the aerospace industry, it is a multi-ethnic place but at a very high level. Everything is ''very big'' like the life philosophy of Texas and Texans, starting from the enormous airport. The giants of the oil & gas industry have their headquarters in Houston. Hallyburton, EXXON, Standard Oil, Anadarko, FLUOR companies that employ thousands of people around the world are all here. We had just disembarked from the plane and I immediately understood that things were not going too go well. The person we were supposed to meet was not there to welcome us at the airport - Davide called him on his mobile phone, and was told that ''he was sorry but he would be arriving shortly''. ''The shortly'' turned out to be more than an hour, and when I saw the guy my doubts increased greatly. I later understood that the contact we had been provided with was none other than an ''adventurer'' (to use a euphemism) who was looking for foreign fools to scam. Once our equipment would have been imported (in his name, as per local law) he would certainly have managed to make them disappear, or to make them no longer exportable, so as to gain possession of them with a few dollars. In short, we were in an empty trip.

In Houston we would have had formidable support from that great character named Roy O'Donnel. We met him, and he assured us that in the years to come, given the large production of the Permian basin (the enormous Texan oil and gas field) and the continuing undercapacity of transporting oil and gas to the port of Galveston and Mexico , in Texas there would have been a need for a capable contractor like us. Apparently the local pipeline builders were all small companies, sometimes family-run, with just a few excavators, to which the large local companies contracted 7 – 8 km at a time. As Mr. O'Donnel well argued, if our Company had rented a plot of land, brought the equipment it had to Mexico once the Samalayuca-Sasabe project was finished, just by seeing them any Texan company would have contracted long stretches to ourself of the ongoing and planned pipelines. We reported all these considerations and impressions to the our top management but unfortunately nothing came out of it. Apparently the Financial Manager (who doesn't even speak English) was more in command within the Company than the owner himself or the General Manager.

Houston

DALLAS We flew to Dallas, Caracciolo and I, to meet the representative of a large contractor who had contacted us, asking for our availability to collaborate on a project in West Virginia. We arrived at Forth Worth airport and after immigration we immediately went out to look for a taxi because our contact was more than 70 km away. We ran into a taxi driver who I judged to be Ethiopian by his appearance and I was surprised: he spoke Italian!

Did you study with Italian missionaries perhaps? I asked him once we got on his bus. -Noo… he replied – I lived in Milan for many years.

Really?? I'm from Milan!

Yes? Well I got married in the church of Santa Francesca Romana, in Porta Venezia!!

That's really great.....……. In short, I mean someone from Mexico flies to Dallas, get out from the airport and the first - the VERY first available taxi of a line of 300 is driven by who? By someone who got married in Porta Venezia in 1987… if we had chosen another taxi, we would never have known of his existence, and I wouldn't be here writing about it in these notes. We met Jim Bradley in a very nice and beautifully furnished office villa. It felt like we were in an episode of DALLAS, I expected JR and Bobby Ewing to enter any monet the large living room with an adjoining monumental fireplace. Jim was very friendly and professional and we were very impressed with him and his job prospects. The project was located in West Virginia and required great mountain tract expertise, which our Company had repeatedly demonstrated that it possessed. We returned to Mexico enthusiastic about the possibilities that could open up. Our proposals to the Top Management - once again - fell on deaf ears.

MINNEAPOLIS It was late October and we went to Minneapolis. Between the skyscrapers in the city center there was a cold wind that we could be have been in Italian Alps on a bad weather day. We had dinner in a ''Brazilian'' restaurant that certainly couldn't be compared with the Chamas Churrascaria at the Intercontinental hotel in Abu Dhabi.

We stayed at the Hilton Inn & Suites, not bad I would say even if, as usual, very expensive. The next day, with a rental car, we went to Eau Claire, a remote place in Wisconsin. Along the monotonous highway, kilometers of fields without a living soul, cultivated with corn, soya, hay. And every now and then carcasses of moose and deer, killed by vehicles while trying to cross the unfenced highway.

In Eau Claire there was the headquarters of one of the most important pipeline companies in the USA, Precision Pipeline. In the middle of nowhere, a beautiful headquarters, modern offices, all female staff dressed and made up for the upcoming Halloween. The director of the pipeline sector was absent, having requested a week's leave to go deer and bear hunting. We were received by his deputy, a very nice guy, who quickly organized a meeting with about ten people. With the help of videos, their group's activities were presented to us, and the possible collaboration between Precision Pipeline and our Company was proposed. All in a super efficient manner, as per American procedure. We returned to Minneapolis certain that this ''was the right time'' - in the sense that faced with an offer of cooperation from a company like Precision Pipeline, our Big Boss would finally be convinced to undertake an American adventure. With a fly out from Saint Paul airport, we were happy to leave already cold Minnesota for warm Mexico City. A few days after our return, Caracciolo informed me that this time too we had been wrong. Our Headquater's response to the Americans' proposals was the usual generic ''we'll think about it''.

MEXICO CITY Otherwise called Ciudad de Mexico or CDMX or Distrito Federal or simply ''la Capital''. Its inhabitants – perhaps 20 million, or maybe 22 million – are called ''los Chilangos''. One of their most popular mottos says:

''I'm not perfect but I'm Chilango which is the same thing''.

Which says a lot about the character of the inhabitants of CDMX and Mexicans in general. Our Company had a representative office in CDMX located on the 7th floor of a building in one of the best neighborhoods: Colonia Polanco. For work reasons I have been to the Capital many times, unfortunately also during earthquakes (practically impossible to avoid them, they are so frequent). When I arrived there in December 2016, I asked branch driver Edgar Ponche about the Casablanca hotel, the hotel where we had slept in 1984.

It no longer exists – Edgar told me – it collapsed due to the strong earthquake of 1985, when there were more than 10,000 victims and damage amounting to billions. Ciudad de Mexico is a fascinating city: located at 2,400 meters above sea level, which combined with the geographical position, means that the climate is warm/temperate all year round. In winter the temperature rarely drops below 17-18 °C degrees, but Mexican girls dress like their Finnish peers, with great use of jackets and fake UGGs because ''hace un frio que no puede eser'' (it's so cold that nobody can't resist). The traffic is simply infernal, and thank goodness there is a dense metro network that takes millions of people off the streets. There is an almost total lack of surface transport, no trams, and only one electric bus line, despite the surface area of ​​the city being immense. For the rest, Mexicans are tireless walkers: the streets are always full of people walking, unlike for example El Paso, where a pedestrian is always almost certainly a homeless person or a hitchhiker.

Plaza Zocalo

Museo Soumaya.

Chapultepec Castle

Palace of Fine Arts.

Paseo de la Reforma

Theotihuacan

The city has many attractions, the most popular are the Zocalo, the square where the Parliament, the official residence of the President, and the Cathedral of the Assumption of Our Lady of the Virgin Mary are located. Then the famous gardens of Chapultepec, with the castle that belonged to Maximilian of Austria, briefly Emperor of Mexico. The ''Zona Rosa'', the Palace of Fine Arts, Paseo de la Reforma the large artery where the best hotels and skyscrapers are concentrated, with the famous Angel de la Indipendecia. The Casa Azul now transformed into a Frida Kahlo museum, and more recently the Soumaya museum. Avenida Presidente Mazaryk is very beautiful, with luxurious restaurants and show rooms including famous Italian brands. Not far from the city are the floating gardens of Xochimilco, and the archaeological area of ​​Theotihuacan. But above all, Mexico City is a vibrant city of life that never sleeps. One of its great contradictions is being a ''mountain city'' but with air that is unbreathable on some days. Dia de los Muertos The Mexican festival of the dead has Aztec origins and was proclaimed an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2003: the anniversary represents a commemoration for the return of the deceased to earth and is deeply felt and rooted in tradition. The typical depiction of death is La Catrina, represented in the form of a skeleton with a sombrero. This figure was created at the end of the 19th century as a criticism of melancholy, or the attitude of people to deny their origins, the desire to feel foreign before being Mexican. The name La Catrina is due to Diego Rivera, the great Mexican muralist, husband of Frida Kahlo. This representation then took on the meaning of a joke towards death for the feast of the dead. Mexico city offices Our offices in Mexico City were located in one of the best neighborhoods of the city, Colonia Polanco. The choice was made taking two factors into consideration:

A location not too far from the Client's offices, given that in Mexico City crossing the city on a ''normal'' day means losing 2 to 3 hours due to infernal traffic.

Give a ''respectable'' image of the Company and at the same time ensure that the offices are located in a ''safe'' area of ​​the city. The offices were located on the 7th floor of a modern building, which in any case was declared unusable for a short period, following the earthquake of September 2017. The earthquake struck at 1.15pm local time, and all our 12 employees rushed down the stairs in terror, especially the female staff. One of them resigned from the company in the following days, saying that from now on she would only accept jobs on the ground floor. From that day the girls stopped coming to the office in high-heeled shoes: they always wore jogging shoes, to be ready in case of emergency leave from the building.

GRUPO CARSO Our client – ​​Grupo Carso – is one of the largest industrial companies in Mexico. Active in various fields, they possess the largest mobile network, to transport and infrastructure. The owner is Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico, as well as among the top ten richest men in the world. The group's headquarters occupies an entire central neighborhood of Mexico City. The complex includes a luxury shopping center (Plaza Carso) and the Soumaya Museum, a futuristic building that Carlos Slim dedicated to his wife who died prematurely. You can admire - for free - famous paintings, murals by Diego Rivera, precious art collections.

Christmas 2017 – 35 km in 35 days. It was an early afternoon of December, and I was reached by a call from Injenero Munoz, Project Director. By now I had known Munoz for a year, and when he tried to ''act nice'' it meant that ''the scam was just around the corner''. Munoz informed me that the Ciudad Juarez Court had ruled that a 35 km section of the gas pipeline (among other things adjacent to our logistics base) had been declared ''on decision-waiting ''. In other words, the Judge self reserved 35 days to decide on the request to block the works by the owners of the areas where the gas pipeline was supposed to pass. An opportunity not to be missed, Munoz reiterate. ''In this period of time you must ensure that this section of the project is completed, so as to present Mexican Justice with a fait accompli'' ''Good - I replied after taking a long breath and counting to 10 - but do you, Injenero, realize that you are asking us to complete 1 kilometer of pipeline per day''? Of course – Munoz promptly replied – but I know you can do it!! Ah…well…yes…I said…everything is possible…but I want you to know right now that it will cost you a lot of money: we are talking about an incredible acceleration, compared to our normal work program!!''. We'll talk about money later, when you've finished – replied the old and foxy Munoz. Once the conversation with Munoz was over, I called Company Top Management, informing them of the request from the Client, meantime expressing all my doubts that the goal can be achieve. In a video conference with Headquarter, the Owners and the Management expressed their belief that the challenge could be won, and that the opportunity to earn credit and money - a lot of money - with CARSO should absolutely not be missed.

The challenge had been taken, within three days, with an unprecedented logistical effort, heavy equipment, automatic welders and all the necessary equipment had been transported from considerable distances in which they were operating to the theatre of operation: 140 km of dirt roads on which they had been trailers and heavy duty transport trolleys passed through (the trencher alone weighed more than 23 tons). Having gathered men and equipment, we began the stretch of gas pipeline that we would later call: ''35 km in 35 days''. On 5 January 2018, after 35 days of ''epic'' work (1,200 linear meters of rock were also excavated), the section was delivered to the Client, complete with quality documentation. We had won the challenge, now the much harder challenge of getting the right reward from CARSO began.

[jcmarchi]

Tales of Kenzera: Zau Review - Spirit Over Substance - Game Informer

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/tales-of-kenzera-zau-review-spirit-over-substance-game-informer/

Tales of Kenzera: Zau Review - Spirit Over Substance - Game Informer

In Tales of Kenzera: Zau, the debut game from Surgent Studios, the use of the word “Tales” is more literal than it initially seems. To kick off the events of the game, protagonist Zuberi reads a book written by his late father about a place called Kenzera. He uses fiction to cope with his grief, just as the player might do with the plot of the game, and as the studio founder, who lost his father as well, did when creating the story to begin with. While combat and map design in Tales of Kenzera falters at times, this strong, emotional core was what pulled me through to the credits.

Zau is the protagonist of Zuberi’s book, and he’s who the player controls for the vast majority of the roughly eight-hour game. After his father’s passing, he goes to Kalunga, the god of death, to perform a risky exchange: defeating three great spirits to bring his father back to life. Kalunga, who simply appears as an older human man, accompanies Zau throughout his journey, providing wisdom and guidance to level Zau’s often reckless behavior. It is a stellar dynamic, and I enjoyed watching them butt heads as they struggled to deal with the other grieving characters of the game.

Zau battles his way through the world of Kenzera using the Masks of the Sun and Moon, relics gifted to him when his father passed. The Mask of the Moon has more ranged options with ice abilities, while the Mask of the Sun is melee-focused with fire abilities, and both are fun to use. Because you can flip between them at the drop of a hat, combat feels creative, giving the player the opportunity to flip to whichever stance fits them best at that moment. That said, later encounters with large crowds of enemies with regenerating health bars sometimes tested my love of the combat, with late-game combat encounters feeling like a chore purely based on how long they took.  

The game is also rife with platforming challenges that make use of all your abilities gained up until that point in the story, but since you start with a double jump and a mid-air dash, movement is a blast from the start. Many challenges involve instant-kill spikes, which can be irritating, but quick respawn times generally keep me from pulling my hair out. This is not the case in certain challenge sections and some chase sequences in story missions, which require you to make it all the way through with only a handful of checkpoints. They’re not insurmountable, though, and allow the game to test player platforming skills as well as combat skills during boss sequences.

Tales of Kenzera’s main flaw is its map and world designs, which turn a pretty good game into one that’s uninteresting and unintuitive to explore. While most games obscure sections of the map until players explore them, Tales of Kenzera opens up an entire zone as soon as you enter a biome. It’s a minor convenience for navigating through the main plot but a nightmare for figuring out where you have and haven’t been. There’s no way to mark the map or see where you’ve previously visited, save for icons that mark collected items, so in some cases, it’s actually more difficult to backtrack to find secrets.

Even then, areas are pretty linear, thanks to objective markers making sure the player always knows where to go, so most secrets are just a quick little branch into a room to the left or an alternate path to the right. On top of that, most secrets only reward a small chunk of experience points, which is useful but not particularly exciting to discover and doesn’t do much to incentivize further exploration. However, there are also meditation trees that increase your maximum health and platforming challenges to unlock stat-boosting trinkets, so it’s still worth heading down the occasional side path.

However, the most frustrating element here is a specific set of secrets: Spirit Trials. Unlike most hidden elements, these combat challenges require the player to backtrack significantly and open an ability-gated area to proceed. I enjoy secrets, but there are only three Spirit Trials in the whole game, and they are the only way to upgrade your spirit bar and trinket slots, which are vital to Zau’s abilities. It’s a baffling choice to funnel both upgrades into one area and even more puzzling to hide them away like this, especially when their existence is not mentioned until you find one. If the map allowed you to mark certain areas to revisit or had a traditional un-fogging system to see where you haven’t explored, it would be one thing, and if it were the norm for other secrets to require a little more work to find, it would be another. But when the player is neither implicitly nor explicitly incentivized to search for major upgrades, it creates a balance issue.

Despite my gripes with Spirit Trials and the map, I have a lot of respect for Tales of Kenzera: Zau, particularly in how it handles grief and self-reflection – it is one of the most thematically cohesive games I’ve ever played. Every element of gameplay and story is tied back into the dual struggle Zau and Zuberi face in coping with the loss of their respective fathers. Health upgrades come from points of meditation and the processing of emotion. Each character you encounter deals with loss in their own way, which grants perspective to Zau’s situation. Even combat upgrades represent Zau’s path to get closer to his father – if he can’t spend time with the man himself, he’ll spend time with the legacy his father left behind.

Tales of Kenzera: Zau conveys its somber themes with nuance and passion. It’s just a shame the gameplay doesn’t always match those highs, especially in a genre flooded with quality indies, because Zau’s journey – and Zuberi’s parallel journey – are stories I’ll be thinking about for quite some time

[eddiemunsonsmiddlefingers]

15x19 Decoder Ring (Meta)

Aight peeps, here’s my proposition: If the boys go out in a grimdark horrible way next week, it’s not in spite of losing Castiel, it’s because they lost him...and if that’s the case, then Castiel is the single most important character on this show.

I have reasons for saying this! And my reasons start aaaall the way back in season 5, in the episode where Sam and Dean discover the Supernatural books. In plot arch, they realize they are reading about their own lives, word for word. They spend the entire episode trying to work around that writing, only to walk right back into its grip again every. single time. 

Until Castiel shows up.

Two important things happen once Castiel is involved:

They immediately start taking actions that meet the plot beat of Chuck’s book, but do not actually accomplish the goals of the “prophecy” as they then believed it to be. 

Chuck looks at Castiel and says “You aren’t supposed to be here” like he’s genuinely surprised. 

Essentially what happened is Sam and Dean stopped playing the story in a linear A > B > C fashion, and instead shifted to more of a “okay we’re at A, but we’re going to find our own way to point C, and maybe that involves visiting K and R out of order.” I also think the entire WORLD started to shift out of Chuck’s complete control at this point, but he may not have even noticed because he was so hyper focused on them. 

Since the broskis were still hitting the beats of Chuck’s writing (and Dean in particular was still hitting many of the details as well, driven by despair and love and the obedience John drilled into him), even if they weren’t doing exactly what he wanted, he let them go. He found their free will fascinating, which we know because of his monologue at the poor Radio Shed employee (more on that soon). Castiel was an intriguing side note; he was clearly developing feelings for Dean, and how could that be? Just like the Winchesters veering off the path, that was a novelty, something Chuck’s never seen before. It was interesting though, so he let it be. It gave him some good emotional plot hooks, after all, so really it was a win-win for him. 

Chuck kept writing, the stakes got greater, and the boys kept kicking ass...but eventually he started to get annoyed with their refusal to do as they were told. My guess, probably around the time the Darkness occurred, since Amara’s reappearance presented a direct threat to Chuck.

So...he started pushing around the chess pieces and observing patterns. *Why* didn’t the Winchester do what he said? Why were these Winchesters being such a royal pain in his ass? 

He decided to directly fuck with them for the first time, just to see what happened. Chuck used one of his more easily controlled minions (Lucifer- more on that) to kill Castiel, then sits back to watch the chaos. 

In the aftermath we see Dean first grieving (powerful, uncontrollable emotion) and then transform into this very...different...version of Dean. Angry. Irrational. Doing things none of us really believed Dean would do. He became a killer, you might say, rather than the Dean we know. He’s becoming what Chuck wants him to be, but his grief is so great and his armor so tight that Chuck can’t get his fingers back into Dean’s mind...and if he can’t control Dean, then he can’t control Sam.

And then...Jack wakes Castiel up. Dean is transformed from angry killer Dean to the soft, loving Dean we know...but Chuck’s raised the stakes so much and he’s so scared for his family that he goes right along with Chuck’s plan and lets Michael jump his meatsuit. 

Bedlam. 

Through all this, Chuck can’t figure out WHY. Why won’t the Winchesters do what he says? So he pokes and prods and pushes, once again raising the stakes. I don’t think he figured out what was really up until Cas went into Dean’s head and broke him free of Michael’s control. There’s really only one thing that can break an angel’s dream state, after all.

Ah. Dean’s in love. Dean loves this angel and that love is fucking up literally everything Chuck is trying to do. None of his plots are going the way he wants, he himself is in physical danger, and it’s all because Dean Winchester decided to fall in love with this fucking angel who was supposed to be a half season side plot and then move right along. 

So Chuck starts throwing everything he can at Dean and Castiel to separate them. You can see it in the weird arguments they had, their break up scene, Cas choosing to leave and then coming back. You can see it in Dean’s growing anger, and the glimpses of his true personality that occasionally peek through. Chuck can’t directly control either of them, but he’s the one giving the PowerPoint presentation and the slides will turn, whether Dean and Cas want them to or not. 

Nothing. Works. Cas just keeps coming back to Dean’s side. They keep forgiving each other. They keep having each other’s backs. It’s nutty and Chuck is getting frustrated and bored. He’s been around the block with these assholes. He’s obsessed with them, but also hates them. He wants them dead, he wants them to suffer, he wants them to acknowledge that he’s in charge...and then he he just wants to be done with the whole thing (We know this due to Radio Shed scene as well!).

He gets so pissed off he tells them what Castiel is, right to their face. The spanner in the works with the cracked chassis, the reason he can’t actually control them. Then he arranges for Cas and Dean to be in a life or death situation. For once it’s not about the brothers and their tragedy, it’s about getting these two APART. What happens when two people profoundly in love are stuck with an impossible choice? 

For the first time since Castiel met Dean, Cas does what Chuck wants him to do and sacrifices himself to save Dean, but not before delivering a parting shot...emotional armor and a guiding light that Chuck cannot control nor stop. 

in 15x19 we see Dean mourning. Through the entire first half of the episode he’s mourning. So is Sam, so is Jack. Even Michael is there, angry at his father and ready to go. Remember what I said about strong feeling before? Chuck can’t break that.

He needs a distraction...a chink in the armor, an open door.

So he uses his minion again (Howdy Lucifer) to grab Dean by the heart, flood him with hope so his walls go down, then literally open the door to Chuck’s control.

Boom. Back to A > B > C. Michael does a character flipflop because Chuck’s in charge of the script again. Everyone stops mourning Castiel because Chuck couldn’t give a flying FUCK about that asshole angel. He’s tired, he wants to be done, and he wants his dramatic end. 

From that point on, they’re stuck in Chuck’s pre-written script. They defeat him in this super dramatic unexpected way, accompanied by a "gotcha” flashback sequence that belongs in bad whodunnit. Then, in a final fuck you to the Winchesters, Chuck sends them off into the sunset alone-but-together, robbed of everyone they’ve ever loved, and their very memories (the montage) reduced to those moments that CHUCK wanted them to remember. The clever moments, the funny ones, the gotchas. Nothing with real emotion attached. Nothing that might break the spell before they meet their true end (in 15x20)...the grimdark sequence that Becky read and was horrified by. And they do it still believing they have free will, when every step they take is written in a book they don’t know exists. Unless, you know. Cas comes back. ;)

[duskaris]

Oc-tober 2021 rundown

Days Completed: 21 (+3 from last year)

Average word count: 700.43 (+156.19 from last year)

Standard deviation: 227.71 (-42.62 from last year)

Figure 1: Scatterplot comparing the word counts of the last two oc-tobers, with 2020 shown in blue and 2021 in orange. Each have a linear trendline accompanied by their respective R^2 value.

Characters Used:

Blades of Treason:

Aeryn - 5

Sofra - 4

Jay - 4

Lucille - 2

Clarissa - 2

Jack - 2

Madeline - 2

Orsen - 1

Zavi - 1

Mikel - 1

Rowan - 1

Taken to The Stars:

Elizabeth - 2

Eva - 1

Murder Gang:

Marietta - 2

This got a bit long so I'll put my analysis under a break

Notes:

My goals for this year were to complete more prompts than last year as well as to have an average word count of over 800 (poetry is disregarded for this statistic). I did complete the first goal but my word count average fell short. As it was still a drastic improvement from last year I’m still satisfied with that result. The standard deviation is not a statistic I’m throwing much weight into, but interesting to calculate anyways as it highlights how consistent I was with word count, which is to say not very consistent. The R^2 value on the graph partly shows this as well as showing that there was no overall trend of increasing or decreasing wordcount over the month. An R^2 value basically shows how well a trend matches a linear trendline on a scale of 0-1, where 1 is a perfect line. Both values are very low, but especially this year’s. Last year's shows a downward trend with a low R^2 value, but if you remove the last point, which is a few days after the one before it, the R^2 jumps up to 0.4598. That value is much more conclusive of a trend and suggests that I was starting to burnout over so many consecutive days, but taking a break helped me recover. This year I did much better avoiding the burnout feeling and only really stopped because I got busy with school and work.

Before anyone tells me that quality matters over quantity for my writing, I know that. I have several short pieces that I’m extremely proud of as well as some longer ones that I’m not. This doesn’t change the fact that I want to practice writing longer pieces so that I can move onto short stories and maybe even novellas or novel length one day.

You’ll notice that for the characters it adds up to way more than 21, but that’s because I counted everyone who was a main character in that day’s piece, which was usually two of them but occasionally they were more or less. Still, 76% of the days took place within the Blades of Treason world. It is my most recent creation so it makes sense that I would think of it first for most prompts. It also has the most in-depth main plot with several different side plots that also aid in thinking of something to write. Naturally, Miss main character Aeryn Talmon appeared as a major character the most, followed by her lovely wife. Three of their prompts were together (Duel, Sugar, Stitch), Sofra had one without Aeryn (Discovery), and Aeryn had two without Sofra (Glass, Crumble). Jay also got four, partly because I love him and partly because he just fit so many of the prompts.

Taken to the Stars is my oldest story and got three prompts. All three were ones where I saw the prompt and immediately thought of them. As my oldest, it’s not the most coherent story but it holds a fond place in my heart. Despite Eva being the main character, she only got one while her adopted sister got two. This is due to the fact that one of the first prompts was “medicine” and she is my only character in the medical field, meaning she was in the front of my mind when planning the rest.

The murder gang, which I don’t have an actual title for, got two prompts, both of which from Marietta’s perspective, as she is the POV character in the story as a whole. Burn was one that I planned for them, but Spice was a last minute decision after having no other ideas for most of the day, a fact that is reflected in its relatively low word count. Julia’s story, also without a title, didn’t get a single prompt and if I’m being honest, I haven’t worked on it in months either. It’s basically my story that every once in a while I go “oh yeah, that exists” and work on it for about a week before continuing to forget about it.

Overall, I’m very glad to have participated and definitely feel I improved from last year, although I still have plenty of room to grow. My goals will be to complete more prompts as well as have an average word count of over 800.

[nikitasbt]

Taishō Trilogy of Seijun Suzuki

As a salaried director at Nikkatsu, Japanese filmmaker Seijun Suzuki has been making crime movies for decades. He has directed around 40 movies from 1956 to 1967, of which Tokyo Drifter and Born to Kill are considered the most acclaimed. In a later attempt to reignite his career after splitting paths with Nikkatsu and veer off to the new ways of expression and stylistics, Suzuki started working on surrealistic feature film Zigeunerweisen becoming the first part of unformal Taisho Trilogy: Zigeunerweisen, Kagero-za, Yumeji. The three films are not linked with any similarities in the plot but set in the same period of emperor Taisho ruling the nation. It was the time of 1920-1930s. All films resemble hectic dreams and bear unmistakable visual similarities. The films have been meant to create the new stylistics for Suzuki developing his old strife to produce the shots of supreme beauty to strike not less than Godard’s shots used to do. Taisho Trilogy is an example of films lacking the coherence, yet remaining unforgettable with their quixotic and wild visuality.

Zigeunerweisen (ツィゴイネルワイゼン) - 1981

From my point of view, the best way to get a glimpse in the Taisho Trilogy is to watch the last part of it Yumeji. The last film encapsulates all the achievements of the trilogy. Comparing with Yumeji, Zigeunerweisen is almost impossible to comprehend. The film employs riddles in abundance, and the hints given can unlikely help to solve quite a few of them. In a surrealistic way, Suzuki’s tale shows the relations between two former co-workers Nakasago (portrayed by Yoshio Harada) and Aochi (Toshiya Fujita) who developed affairs with the wives of each other (at some point, Nakasago even suggests to exchange the wives). The story is ambiguous and not very coherent as Suzuki doesn’t bother himself to show the things in any sort of logical way or order.

In fact, the film is set in several dimensions, and it never becomes clear whether Nakasago has died or not, and whether Koine and Sono (both played by gorgeous Naoko Otani) are the same women or two different. We don’t really get a clear idea of why Nakasago killed a woman and if he actually killed her or not. The behaviour of a spooky girl also remains mysterious and unclear.  Is she sort of ghost or she has bridged some spiritual connection with the world of death? We never learn it for sure. Moreover, we don’t even know where is the reality or dream or fantasy. Suzuki does his best to confuse the viewers with his surrealistic images and bizarre storytelling.

What we know for sure, is that Zigeunerweisen is the title of a vinyl record that Nakasago and Aochi used to listen. It has some gypsy tunes on it. Somehow, the record is used as the spiritual connection between Nakasago who dies and the outer world. Also, there are some references making to think Suzuki paints some ties with the political situation in Japan in the 1930s. The blind kids might symbolize of Japanese right forces getting insane prior to invading Manchuria (though, it is too obvious for Suzuki to be entirely sure that was an original intention). There is also a connection between the fact that Aochi is a German language professor, the relations of Japan and Germany and the title of record taken from German - Zigeunerweisen. And once again, this is just a guess as it never becomes clear what the author implied.

Suzuki uses Aochi as a sort of symbol of his audience: a confused man is trying to follow the story and understands very little from his friend’s behaviour. The ending is bizarre just like the whole movie, and we are left with no answers, as well as Aochi. However, giving the answers is not something the film has been made for. This is entirely visual work, and it is drastically important to pay attention to the shot, mise-en-scène, camera work and usage of light. Zigeunerweisen is a visually appealing film, and many shots are just like gorgeous paintings we enjoy. The matter of greatest importance for Suzuki was to fully realize and utilize his potential in elaborating the exquisite ways of artistic impressions. Making Zigeunerweisen, he made up his mind for creating a fresh visual language. He comes up with the material which is confusing, but it goes without a doubt Zigeunerweisen can be hardly compared to anything else. Watching Zigeunerweisen, at some point you realize there is probably no way to twig what is real and what is just irony, mockery, dream or fantasy. Nevertheless, the visual style is so solid and brilliant that it starts seeming the only way to accompany the frantic twists of the plot which remain spooky and incognizable just like the vinyl record or tunnel we see several times in Zigeunerweisen.

Kagero-Za (陽炎座) - 1981

The second film of Taisho Trilogy clarifies several points I remained dubious about after watching Zigeunerweisen and Yumeji. This trilogy is an example of substantially visual cinema where the logic and storyline are abandoned, in order to prioritize the importance of the mood and shocking stylistic beauty of the shots. Seijun Suzuki used to say “I make movies which make no sense and no money”, and this is true. Watching Zigeunerweisen, I was struggling to understand where do the twists of plot and expression lead and what is the idea behind it. Kagero-za or Heat-Hazed Theatre makes it transparent there was apparently something Suzuki implied, but it would remain incognizable as there are numerous ways to interpret the tale.

Kagero-Za is another psychological surrealistic tale in this trilogy. The plot is a formality as it never gets too clear. We follow the story of playwright Matsuzaki (portrayed by Yusaku Matsuda) who encounters his different mistresses, one of whom appears to be the wife of rich businessman Tamawaki (Katsuo Nakamura) who wants protagonist dead. Heroes pass away and appear again. In Zigeunerweisen I was still wondering what that supposed to mean, but with Kagero-Za I realized these are the actual fantasy ghosts who might bear symbolic meaning. The protagonists talk in one location, and in the next shot show up somewhere else. They jump from topic to topic, the dialogues are bizarre making both conversations and plot incoherent - though, this is something Suzuki has been trying to achieve.

Kagero-Za resembles a deranged dream or plot of a kabuki play. At some point, we actually see the events might be nothing but the new play of Matsuzaki who is seeking for the new story. We see awkward scenes on the theatre stage, and playwright observes them too. Perhaps, the whole story is like that - just a fantasy of Matsuzaki told in a surrealistic way.

What is Suzuki brilliant in is coming up with the fresh ideas of his shots. Dozens of shots require studying and might be considered art objects. The usage of vivid traditional paintings Suzuki employs is striking and spectacular, making the film’s visuality pretty impressive. Camera work and montage also follow the lead of Suzuki’s bizarre visual code. Again and again, Suzuki creates mise-en-scene of stunning beauty. The scenes and shots are often not linked to each other with any sort of explanation, but they are perfect with no respect to the story. Kagero-Za is not a film of non-linear plot and not a non-plot film either. It is an attempt to reject any sort of dictate created by traditional view on the films and necessity of coherent plot and background. Highly experimental and visually appealing work of Suzuki is meant to make neither sense nor money. But the aesthetics of Suzuki should be acclaimed as something rare and remarkable. This aesthetic will lead him to the third and last film of the trilogy Yumeji which I regard as the best part of Suzuki’s surrealistic Taisho films.

Yumeji (夢二) - 1991

The last film of Taisho trilogy in a very surrealistic tone tells a story of Japanese painter and poet Takahisa Yumeji (1884-1934) encountering several mistresses and his rival artist Gyoshu Inomura who is arguably more talented than Yumeji (portrayed by Kenji Savada). Throughout the account on the screen, we get a glance on the psychological and art struggles of the painter who is seeking the perfection and inspiration for his paintings.

The tantalizing tale is enhanced with numerous surrealistic forms, characters, images and entire scenes. It is also impossible to follow the stream of the tale before we get an idea we bump into the artistic fantasies of Yumeji, and the line between the death-life and reality-fiction is painted by Yumeji himself. The bizarre work of camera moving from the left to the right, and back again and showing the scenes with unusual composition and angles illustrate this far-fetched definition of different dimensions which unite and mix up in Yumeji’s mind. The story contains both surrealistic scenes and detective-like motif, though It is not entirely clear whether Wakiya (played by Yoshio Harada) has been actually murdered or not, and it is unclear if the whole story ever took place in the reality. The endless riddles bridge the gap between Suzuki and Buñuel with Robbe-Grillet.

What is certain is that the film tells about Yumeji’s perception of the art and women which are pretty much related in his life. There is no mood for art without passion Yumeji chases women with. He encounters the most beautiful ladies and seduces them, but he doesn’t love them in a human way. His fetish is about their postures, outfits, behavoiur is utilized for the ideas of paintings, and the women’s beauty for him is nothing but inspiration for art and poetry. He feeds himself on their boundless sexuality and allure like a vampire, and he is so addicted to their beauty that women, in fact, define his art. We see Yumeji is in the relationships with a woman who loves him, but the artistical mindset makes him seduce the other women as potential models or nudies.

Seijun Suzuki shows the gorgeous women and their perfect bodies in abundance to immerse himself and viewers in Yumeji’s fetish (and probably the director’s fetishism as well). The scenes with Tomoyo (played by Tomoko Mariya) and Hikono (Masumi Miyazaki) are charged with the enthralling sexuality the female protagonists radiate. They are frequently shot as the paintings, and this images strike with the boundless beauty Yumeji and the viewers fully immerse into. This is a very sexy and surreal fantasy which resembles Alain Robbe-Grillet’s L'Eden et après in an artistic way and Trans-Europ Express by the manner of storytelling. The usage of aggressive montage and dense colours reminds of the style of La Chinoise by Jean-Luc Godard.

To sum up, Yumeji is a set of fetish fantasies made like a collection of his paintings he could have possibly completed. Every shot is like a painting where mise-en-scene stuns with beauty and bizarre mesmerizing power. The story is hard to follow and riddles might be very confusing, but it can be interpreted in many ways. Yumeji is important and striking as an art object and surrealistic experiment, yet there is probably no way to delve too deep into the film: it is much better to enjoy the sophisticated shots and the beauty of Yumeji’s mistresses portrayed by Tomoko Mariya, Masumi Miyazaki, and Reona Hirota. The last but not the least thing is the usage of music. This is the film Shigeru Umebayashi has written his brilliant and sublime music theme Yumeji for. Later the same theme would find international acclaim after being remarkably used in the film of Wong Kar-wai In the Mood for Love.

[aphelyons]

My Creative Year in Review 2018

stolen from but also requested by inspired by @drstrangewillseeyounow​

Preface: This will be a bit of a mashup of two things; art and writing. But I’ll be clear. This is also a long post, I’m very sorry. Apparently I don’t shut up.

Total number of creations? (Or a rough guess!)

Art - Finished; 221 (not all published) Art - WIPS; 25 Writing - Published; 4 Writing - WIPS; 9 ?

Was there a project that you didn’t get around to?

In terms of starting or finishing? Lol. I didn’t get around to publishing the first chapter of the MU fic, which I desperately still want to before S2 starts. Because I keep writing all the middle bits instead. Nor did I get around to start writing the “winter fic” beyond plot points and a few little scenes.

There’s a looooooooooooooot of art I didn’t get around to either starting properly or finishing. Lol. I have a L’Rell piece I really want to do, as  well as [another] mirror Stamets piece I want to do.

What was the creation you had the most fun making?

Art: Oh that’s hard. A lot of things for a lot of different reasons. I enjoyed the Holiday artworks because they were….really out of my depth and fun. Mostly I loved sending them out on cards to friends.

More recently I had a lot of fun doing the Patroclus and Achilles piece. Loved using golden hues.

Also have a lot of fun with Not Safe for Work-Viewing pieces, but those will never be published here. :D Sorry.

Writing: I had a surprising amount of fun writing the Vampire AU fic [Just a Taste] for Halloween. Which I never expected to write anything vampiric, ever, and also it came together really quickly. Building the world in that short fic was a lot of fun.

Any surprises? (E.g. a character or ship you never thought you’d create for or a project that came out of nowhere?)

Well honestly this whole revival to art and writing came as a surprise, I hadn’t done either in many years. I was also never a Star Trek fan prior to Disco, nor have I ever been a part of a fandom before. This is my first! So that was surprising, also surprising was how massively obsessed I became and how important it became to me. But the best surprise out of all of that is the connections to people I’ve made and the friendships that have come from that. ily. <3 Also not going to lie, pretty surprised that suddenly my art has become mega-fuckin-colourful. Where did this love of neon come from??? Wtf

What was the hardest creation to make?

Writing; MU fic - hands down. I have pages and pages and pages of resources. Not only is it going to be a long story (I endeavour and hope) but also from the amount of which I am pulling from and want to align to canon as as best I can as well. Being a new fan to Trek also... it’s been pretty overwhelming to get these details right. But at the same time, really trying to flesh out a character we never met or saw in the show, and have them interact with the established canon and have that all make sense… That and have the science in it make as much sense as possible, I’ve based a few new things on scientific principles and things that exist and just trying to elevate them to a cosmic scale… and hope I can pull that off too. It’s pretty intimidating. Not going into it, but the way the story weaves and intersects with a few different genres.. I just want to have it make sense in it’s self contained body of work.

Yeah it’s hard. Lol. Biggest thing I’ve ever tried to do. But, I love it, truly. I think about this whole project an inhumane amount of times every day, and I love that. 

It’s also hard because I’d love to be a linear writer, but I am not. At all. I’m constantly writing ahead, well and truly ahead, but then coming back, adding to and editing earlier bits and rewriting and rewriting….rewriting… ugh

The subjects and themes are also a little heavy, and it’s cathartic to write about, sure, but also wanting to do those moments justice and with respect and integrity - because that’s important to me too.

The whole thing is just a lot of fuckin work, lol. But I really love it. Already - and it’s nowhere near done.

Art; Probably the one where Paul is laying down [crying] in the spore chamber. It was my first return to trying to paint semi-realism, and... it didn’t work out. I’m not happy with it anymore, but also proud that I pulled it off. That pose? Hair? HAND? UGH those took me too long to get right. But, overall it certainly taught me a lot to use on future more realism-ish pieces such as the Cosmic/Celestial pics of Hugh and Paul [which I love.]

What inspired you the most this year?

Oh, easy. Discovery. Hugh and Paul, hands down both of those things. But also to the endlessly talented people who I’ve come to know and also enjoy the works of - be it written, art, or otherwise. Creativity inspires creativity. 

What are you most proud of? (A creation, something you learned, etc)

Art: The Cosmic/Celestial pieces. Very proud of those. (So much so I made metal prints of them and they sit on my bookshelf between a salt lamp.) I really love how they came out, and really the original (Cosmic Paul) was kind of an accident, a happy accident if you will.  

Also the piece of Anthony I did for Anthony’s birthday. That was a lot of fun constructing something visually representative of a person.

Any goals/plans/ideas for next year?

Fucking get some headway on my MU fic so I can stop being so annoying by just talking about it, and fucking start publishing it already -  for then it then it would EXIST in the word. LOL. Ugh. That’s the only big plan, that’s all I want to do. Whatever art I will do - I will just find inspiration in the moment to do. No plans, other than the L’Rell piece and a couple other WIPs - maybe.  

Honestly just that and trying to keep improving, both in writing and in drawing. I feel like I’ve improved over this past year, so would love to just continue on that trajectory.

Pick your favourite creations! (Post links and tell us why you love them!)

The Cosmic and Celestial Series I just love how these turned out, especially because it was such a surprise how it turned out originally. But being able portray this cosmic divinity of which I uphold them both to be in my mind was really awesome to pull off. The colours, and dramatic light, this whole thing was so fucking fun. The whole painting with colours as highlights / shadows / dual light source was a huge experiment for me and it taught me a huge amount, so I really love it for many reasons.

The Song of Achilles  I started sketching this while I was listening to the audio book and while I fell in love with these two. Please, again, do go read this book. But the detailing on the spear, the auras and Achilles hair were my favourite bits. Oh and the gold blood. Of course, lol. Loved doing the symbolic imagery 

Anthony Rapp’s Birthday Portrait  Because this man means a whole lot to me, and it was nice really nice for a change of pace to try and depict him and things that are important to him. Also really proud of that shoe, ngl. & And MU Stamets and his Mycelium Sun

Huge experiment in terms of colour and lighting for me, and I love love love how it turned out. Even if it’s a little rough. This one was so much fun, and I also printed this out on metal actually lol. Looks pretty cool.  & First MU Culmets Work Still in my heart, even though it’s a earlier work, because it was the first exploitation of this duo for me, and how they might be together. Also where I came up with the HC for his facial scar, which I always will include in any MU Hugh depiction of mine. But I still really like how their characterisation translates in this one.

Writing

Nomenclature.  

The archaeology AU story I wrote for 30MinuteLoop. Also well, this is the only one that’s safe for viewing that’s published, lol, but I am genuinely really proud of this and seeing it through to completion. 

But also the MU story is a fave, but this is the only published section so far:

MU Snippet (These next couple of questions are directly from @drstrangewillseeyounow​ sorry I’ll be so literal in their structure, lmao)

How you decide on which style to use for individual pieces?

Unless it’s something very specific in mind (like the holiday pieces) I just kind of let it take a life of its own. See what it evolves into. I might have one idea to where I want it to go before I export it to PS, but once in PS it might take a whole new life (prime example if the original Cosmic/Celestial Paul. The original was very flat, and pretty boring lol but really became something else in PS. Actually it was supposed to be originally a visual piece to accompany my Vampire fic - and Vampire Hugh picture. But that changed entirely once I got it into PS.)

(It’s hard to see but there’s a bite mark on the original side.)

I'd also know more about your literal process, as in: what's your hardware set-up, what software do you use?

I have a weird all over the place set up. Lol.

So I do the majority of the work on my iPad, up until a stage where I don’t think I can go any further with it (or need more than 6 layers at my disposal) and then export it to my PC (either work or home) and then work on it further in Photoshop. Of which it then gains infinite amount of layers, lmao. Oh god.

As for the file on the iPad, when I’m working on that I can only have 6 layers. So usually will do sketch/line-work on one (or two, if I have to work a problematic bit but then merge it with the rest) and same with the colour/painting. That’s always on one layer, which I’ve grown to really like working like that. I might do skin on one, then clothes on another, but eventually will merge them.  If it’s a full paint (or even half paint maybe), the colour and line layer will eventually be merged as I erase the lines I no longer need as I go and blend that layer more seamlessly into the painted layer. It just ending up a purely painted file without the original lines. Another layer may be added for more delicate details such as eyelashes and eyebrows, things like that.

Everything I do once exported to Photoshop is just with a mouse, I have a Wacom tablet… But I don’t use it, because I haven’t been bothered calibrating it with my dual monitor setup, and am happy doing most of the work on the iPad anyway as it kinda acts like a Cintiq in that regard. But localised. (Plus I can take it anywhere with me, interstate, overseas, to work, to the park, etc. I love that mobility.) Depending if I need a certain element that’s vector based, I’ll make it in Corel Draw or Illustrator, too. I also have Corel painter....buuuuuuuuut still haven’t used it. That’s a goal for 2019 for sure, lmao. Very occasionally I will physically sketch out the idea (like the holiday pieces) scan, and rework, redraw, line it, or whatever in the iPad then go forth with all of the above processes. 

How long does it usually take you from start to finish?

Art: How long a piece takes really varies lol. Sketches can be between 1 - 4 hours on average, sometimes more. Flat colours will be a couple hours more. Half paints usually 4-8 more hours. Full paints and more realism stuff like the Cosmic/Celestial is total of 18hours+ but those times are just a rough idea, sometimes something just works out a lot quicker. Sometimes longer. 

Writing: FOR FUYCKING EVER. I’m the slowest writer ever.

Do you have art WIPs and what do you think keeps you from finishing them?

I have a lot of art WIPs lol I think just losing drive or inspiration to finish them is what mainly kills them, or me getting frustrated that it isn’t working out like I wanted. Sometimes I just forget they exist.

Probably same goes for writing, too. Lol. Also it could be that I’ll dream up the entire (or mostly) of the story, but then getting it onto the page is hard. I want to work at getting better at that.

Do you do any non-fanart, too?

Sure. Although not often anymore, I’m honestly just inhumanly obsessed with Hugh and Paul.. Even when I start a project that isn’t centric to either or both of them… Often it will kind of morph into them. oops. 

I want to say yes to fic too...but That’s a project I haven’t worked on in fucking years and years, so I doubt that really counts anymore.

//end

Wow I am so sorry that was me just rambling on. Anyway, cool. Hi to anyone who made it this far.   I’ll also parrot the line of: Everyone who created/posted art, fic, gif-sets, vids, cosplay, etc., consider yourself tagged if you’d like to be. I’m curious! (I’m fucking serious, P L E A S E   D O.) 

[hcafarp]

TBOYD - Simple or complex?

That is the question . . . . 

It will be possible to read 'The Benefit of Your Doubt' on different levels which I need to unpick to find my way forward. 

How many levels of engagement does this, or any piece need?

Option One - open engagement - not led by a linear intention

At a purely sensory level, this is an immersive installation that visitors can respond to emotionally. In a darkened room, a sizeable tank-like structure emits a soft light from its open top. Gentle lapping and dripping sounds fill the space. Beyond this, pin-pointed from different directions, can be heard indistinct whisperings in various languages. These drop in and out of the overall sound-scape blending and merging with the sound of the water.  Approaching and looking over the side into the tank, the visitor sees gently moving water at the bottom, which appears to be slowly rising and falling back. 

The immersive environment created is, at the same time, soothingly womb-like yet discomfiting and disconcerting. 

Whispering compels listening. We become quiet and focus on whispering because of profoundly ingrained survival instincts, as talking loudly with predators in the vicinity would be dangerous. Consequently, we devote more mental energy to listening to whispering. However, whispering also connotes intimacy in various ways. It forms part of our first sensory experience as babies and develops further in life as a widely used bonding mechanism, from the bandying of gossip and secrets to the 'sweet nothings' exchanged between lovers, whispering triggers the right hemisphere of the brain, the so-called emotional, intuitive side. It also triggers our Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) - the tingling (paresthesia) and psychophysiological response to rewarding auditory stimuli and the release of serotonin, oxytocin, and other similar stress-reducing substances.

The incomprehensibility of the content is intentional and relevant. Comprehension is not necessary; it is precisely this that creates the intended effect - a sense of dissonance, disassociation and disability, to hear a fellow human speaking but not know what is being said. That these voices are from across the globe is highly significant. That they are whispering is meaningful.

With no information regarding artist intention, no content or context and with little, if any,  sense of meaning gleaned from the whispering, how might the visitor begin to read or understand this piece?

The title, "The Benefit Of Your Doubt" gives an entry point. It is was developed from 'giving the benefit of the doubt', an aphorism used as a concession when a statement or person might be believed as accurate, but veracity cannot be proven. 

Can the piece, therefore, be assumed to be about truth, trust or fake news?

The only other information available would be the accompanying artist statement: 

"We rarely question conventions, received wisdom or examine our unconscious beliefs and biases.

Through my work, I attempt to establish conjecture, creating thoughtscapes with the materials, experiences and titles I present.

I explore existential identity: mine, yours, theirs and ours through conceptual text, video and relational installations." 

In theory, the piece as described above, with its title, and this statement should be enough for cognitive engagement, a search for meaning and interpretation to begin. Observations/interpretations might include:

truth, honesty, trust: an exploration of a post-truth world 

racism - questioning our ability to understand people from different cultures and backgrounds 

environmental: rising sea levels that will displace people in many countries

neo-liberalism - globalisation, the reach of capitalism

birth and rebirth, baptism

issues surrounding LGBTQ

issues surrounding disability, accessibility and inclusion

issues surrounding human trafficking 

. . . to mention but a few.

The installation realised at this aesthetic level only requires recordings in a variety of languages, the content of the whispering not being significant, and these can easily be appropriated from YouTube.

Option One will create an impactful piece that offers visitors extensive opportunities for interpretation with minimal control and direction coming through any conspicuous artist intention. This resonates with my statement - Through my work, I attempt to establish conjecture, creating thoughtscapes with the materials, experiences and titles I present.

Option Two - complex and directed interpretation

In this option, the 'whispering' recordings do have content. The piece being the same in all other respects.

I wrote an abstracted prose/poem as a response to the Post Truth era brought lately under particular scrutiny by the Dominic Cummings fiasco. Initially, the idea for the work arose from the phrase 'the naked truth' and a saying attributed to Democritus, "Of truth, we know nothing, for truth is in a well", which was interpreted in Jean-Léon Gérôme's 1896 painting The Truth Comes Out Of The Well To Shame Mankind. I used as 'plot' the Roman fable of The Truth and Falsehood and wrote a monologue as if spoken by Falsehood. 

The various recorded whispered performances would involve collaboration with participants from around the world, translating from English and reading/whispering my pre-prepared script in their first language in situ in their home countries. 

I sent a draft of this writing to Sarah Jane Crowson however, with no contextual information and no indication of references behind the prose poem. It was eye-opening and fascinating to receive her three readings. 

"I read this as having three key meanings. 

One is a straightforward narrative – the protagonist goes bathing with a lover/partner/sibling and, in the manner of a dark Shakespearean comedy they swap clothes/identities and our protagonist steals the others' identity, abandoning them naked in the bathing place. 

This narrative reading references Shakespeare's comedies, gender-bending, the ideas of clothes as cultural signifiers, reinforces the idea of nakedness as something which is culturally unacceptable, and hints at ideas of dualism in the good/bad twin, which evokes both modernist/classical philosophies and some folk myths (but generally re-told folk myths rather than the aural tradition).

In a second reading, the poet is writing about their psychological state and the piece is a presenting ideas of 'awakening' and 'knowledge' as a construct which causes the narrator to split psychologically (personified by the idea of the protagonist and their twin/lover). The poem explores of ideas of personal growth through the metaphor of an abandonment of an earlier self that is in some ways simple and innocent being left behind by the (potentially sold out to contemporary society and neo-liberal ideas) less virtuous and innocent self. There is a sense in 'looking so fine' that the message in this reading is that appearances can not only be deceiving but also treacherous, a 'sell-out'.

In the third reading the poem works on a meta-level, and is interrogating/critically examining ideas of the contemporary creative process. In this, it plays with the notion of 'authenticity' in creative practice, presenting the idea of the creative piece (including this poem) as a complex simulacrum of reality. 

In this reading, the narrator/s are personifications of different ideas of what makes effective creative practice. This is explored through narrative as the poem discusses ideas of self and representation (through referencing ideas of clothing, nakedness, classical 'virtues' and corruption). 

The piece shows frustration as the artist/creative becomes aware that they are stuck in a Mobius loop of their own invention, as they are dependent on a context with a specific value-system and understanding of cultural capital which requires them to strive for authenticity whilst being equally aware that the construct of the 'authentic' is ambiguous and relativistic – and  what is a personal 'authenticity' would also often be considered uncritical and naïve (naked) within the world's cultural context."

Without distinct contextual support, Sarah's readings bear little resemblance to the 'critical, creative investigation' she later describes the source of my ideas for the piece to be. 

Sarah's critique has brought me to a critical juncture both with this piece and my broader practice. I wrote a little on 'intention' in an early essay: https://hcafarp.tumblr.com/post/612217544979496960/art-acts-intentional-honesty

In the blog, I wrote: "The word 'intention' does indicate thought processes that would occur early on the evolutionary timeline of an artwork. Yet, as is the case for many artists, the primary intention is to make art: what that art speaks of and what it might be about is for others to say." 

Option Two adds a considerable layer of artist intention and would be a pointless undertaking unless this process is disclosed as part of the contextualisation of the work.

As mentioned, I have since supplied her with context, and she replied, "I LOVE the parable/story/myth you're using to underpin this, and doesn't it just go to show how far myth/folktale/narrative has such great legs when it comes to interpreting it in terms of our own contemporary contexts/understandings. Good to see a critical creative investigation of fake news too. Feeds into all kinds of things, including the complex algorithm and uncritical social media."

To realise Option Two, however, would require a discernable English rendition of the whispering to signal that the whisperings in other languages has the same content. It would also require written contextualisation - an explanation of the process.

This, unfortunately, conflicts with the intended effect of the incomprehensible whispering representing hidden truth.

Also, my experience in realising 'Unremebering' (a previous audio/visual piece utilising ASMR) as an art installation was that nobody in the room actually fathomed meaning from the whisperings despite the English language version being included. Feedback suggested they would like to have accessed written text. 

My uncertainty is not about the underpinning - after all, without the research and its various routes offering inspiration, the whole installation would not have evolved.  The question is: will revealing further information unduly influence interpretation, and will this detract from the sensorial and aesthetic impact of the piece? 

If my research and development and subsequent linear intention are made public, will it impinge upon or enhance the agency and freedom of visitors to arrive at their own interpretations?

The whisperings are intended to only be discerned as being in a different language - to hear somebody is speaking but not understand what they say. Does it not then defeat the object of the piece to disclose what they have all said?

When Mark Houghton cast in bronze a love letter from his grandfather to his grandmother that was patinated in off-white to look like the original envelope, he did not disclose background information. He presented the piece, detailed the materials used and offered its title "Testament."  From these three simple elements emerged an intricate and profoundly meaningful artwork. He created a piece that resonated with meaning without any of the above explanation. This information was later disclosed to me, adding poignancy to and empathy with his artistic response but possibly impeded the personal resonance I had previously experienced with the piece - ownership of the work remained with the artist.

I could exhibit Option Two with supplementary information in the form of gallery text or in book form, thus offering an optional level of engagement. Or, I could provide no further details in the gallery but include additional material on my website.

But why? What does this achieve? Is the piece in its pure form not sufficient? The linear intention is available to the visitor, without supplementary material, as one among many other possible interpretations. In her email reply, Sarah asserts, "Good to see a critical, creative investigation of fake news", but is a critical, creative investigation a fundamental, crucial or indispensable component of the piece? The research is still there, underlying and underpinning the installation, but is it integral or ancillary. 

It is my creative choice to include that research as an integral part of the work or separate it out as an interesting adjunct. 

For the purposes of my degree, the critical investigation is desirable. Undeniably, my ego would also be massaged by the recognition that the piece was predicated upon a thoroughly academic approach. The question becomes: does a displayed 'how clever I am' entangle, ambuscade, narrow or detract from the piece and restrict access to independently reached meaningful engagement?  

Does it add value or detract? 

I think it might be useful to explore how the piece ‘plays out’ and how this aligns with my objectives for this artwork and how I hope visitors might come to understand by it. 

it is immersive

it is atmospheric

it is performative

it evokes responses at an emotional level

it perplexes and disconcerts eliciting cognitive engagement

conclusions are reached

Who is my audience at this juncture?  Is this how I would wish them to engage with me? Do I want to narrow down audience to an academic or au fait Fine Art audience? If anything narrowing down the scope for interpretation by offering 'explanation' and further information is counter-intuitive to a Fine Art audience?  

As well as visitors interested in the arts yet having no connection to the college, my audience will predominantly consist of past and present students, tutors and staff, their friends and family, and also include artists and curators from outside institutions. A mixed audience with varying degrees of 'art appreciation'. 

Simple or complex - that is the question?

[red-will]

The Self Is a Fiction: Jenny Xie Interviewed by Mariam Rahmani

The poet on the politics of the gaze, the migratory act of reading, the anxiety of bilingualism, and the universality of shame.

I first met Jenny over a decade ago, when we were both students at Princeton, sweating through a summer of teaching English in China’s Hunan Province. Years later, we met in New York and formed a group with other female friends from college who worked in the humanities, tapping one another’s minds as freely as we sipped each other’s cocktails. Jenny was always reluctant to boast of her then already quickly accumulating successes. Encountering her work for the first time on the stands of my neighborhood bookstore in Brooklyn, I was immediately taken with her writing: the images were stark yet elusive, the lines intimate and yet evocative of so much outside or beyond; the poems seemed so delicately wrought I wondered whether they might shatter right there in my palms. Below, Jenny and I dive into her debut book, Eye Level (Graywolf Press), winner of the 2017 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. “Clarity is just questioning having eaten its fill,” reads the end of her poem “To Be a Good Buddhist is Ensnarement.” Which is to say: before you know it, you’re hungry with more questions.

Mariam Rahmani: I want to start with the title, and the recurring figure of the eye. As much as readers expect metawriting and words about what it means to deal in words, the salient metaphor in this collection seems to be the act of seeing. The “I” in the poems—and I hesitate to collapse that I/eye with you, the author—is an observer. Does that make writing an act of observing?

Jenny Xie: Much of the collection is about linking the “eye” with an “I”, and thinking through the entanglements of gazes and visual encounters with power, selfhood, and presence. The speaker in these poems, especially those from the first section of the book, engages in the act of observation and renders certain aspects of seeing into language, but observing is never a passive absorption of visual stimuli. The eye amplifies and tames; it heightens and erases.

MR Are the poems “about” you, still, today, now that they’re packaged and clean and in this gorgeous book, or do they take on a life of their own when they’re on the page?

JX My initial impulse is to say that the poems aren’t “about” me, but that response plays into the faulty assumption that poems whose primary aim might be self-disclosure or testimony are somehow less aesthetically rigorous or energizing. I don’t buy that, really. At the same time, the “I” in these poems, while they might share autobiographical details with the person that wrote them, aren’t “about” me insofar as the speakers are fashioned, dramatized, contextually bound. I invoke them and write into them to better serve the poems and their modes, registers, and textures. Many of the poems take up self-interrogation, but I’m not interested in getting the plot details exactly right. The self is a fiction.

The poems in the first and third sections of the book are precisely about the provisional nature of selfhood, how it gets generated and regenerated depending on context. When I’m writing, I’m often interested in stripping away the selves that feel artificial—that I can easily inhabit when I’m moving through the world—to turn inward toward the interior flux. In that sense, the poems are often closer to “me” than the “me.” Perhaps that’s a slippery answer, but the question is also slippery, in a good way.

MR You once told me that your writing process involves reading for hours before sitting down to compose. I was struck by the poetry of this image, the romance of coupling with other people’s words before you can produce your own. How do you prevent a sort of unwilled pastiche?

JX I find that when I sit down to compose, my mind needs ample time to loosen and to unlatch from more linear, familiar lines of thinking. One way to get myself to a more wild, elastic mental space is to read before I compose. It’s always not “reading” in the sense of plowing through a book, or surrendering to the absorption of narrative; it’s more like dipping in and out of different texts, as a way to spur disorientation. I get bored when I draw close to something I’ve written or created recently, so infecting myself with other lines (or films, music, artwork) is a way of working toward self-forgetfulness. I don’t necessarily fear other voices, because my own “voice,” if I have one, is constructed and reinforced from a lifetime of reading and listening. I’m most energized when I don’t quite sound like myself, because that’s when I get curious about what or whom I’m inhabiting, and what can be wielded with a different voice or mode of speaking.

MR You move us from twentieth-century Russia to fifteenth-century Japan, from Tsvetaeva to Ikkyū. There’s a lot about geographic travel here, or rather, tourism; how does that interact with the travel of the mind, and reading as a sort of travel?  

JX Reading is migratory, an act of transport, from one life to another, one mind to another. Just like geographic travel, reading involves estrangement that comes with the process of dislocating from a familiar context. I gather energy from this kind of movement, this estranging and unsettling, and I welcome it precisely because it’s conducive to examination, interrogation, reordering. Travel, imaginative or physical, can sharpen perception and force a measuring of distance and difference.

MR But is it travel or tourism? The latter seems more incriminating. I’m thinking, of course, about the rise of modern tourism as a practice of European imperialism, linked so closely to the advent of photography; you also deal in snapshots, in a way, such as in the Phnom Penh diptych, but more frequently to expose their dark underbellies.

JX You’re absolutely right that the latter is more incriminating, though I think most kinds of travel involve negotiating ethical encounters. There’s nothing easy, or easeful, about it. Much of it has to do with the privilege of mobility—of who can enter and leave, who can traverse borders and who can’t, and what is sought out in travel. There’s a lot to think through here, but I would say tourism commodifies difference and encourages a thirst for consuming it from a safe distance. There’s also a good deal of exploitative labor involved, clearly, which is often hidden from view. Taking up residence in a place doesn’t extinguish the possessive tourist drive either. In many cases, being an expat can encourage a false sense of ownership over a place—perhaps partly devised in opposition to the tourist—that can feed into a sense of cultural arrogance.

The Phnom Penh diptych sequence that begins the book doesn’t aim to be polemical, though. I was interested in moral complication rather than moralizing. There, I’m attempting to lay bare some of the tensions inherent in being a foreigner, an expatriate, a tourist, an outsider.

MR Your work really captures the anxiety of bilingualism and how it can leave one feeling estranged from both tongues. Is that how you relate to English and Mandarin?

JX I immigrated to the U.S. from China at age four, and Mandarin was my first language. I spoke it at home, and around family friends, who were exclusively recent Chinese immigrants. I began to learn English when I entered grade school, in classes designated for ESL learners. Similar to many immigrant children, I internalized the hierarchy that placed English first, and felt the accompanying shame of being marked a non-native English speaker. Speaking and writing in English carried with it the anxiety of being betrayed by one’s usage mistakes and lack of fluency; this was no doubt reinforced by the linking of academic success to facility with speech and writing. At the same time that I began learning English, my Mandarin slowed in development, because I wasn’t using it outside of the domestic sphere. To this day, even though I enrolled in a year of intensive Mandarin study in college, my Mandarin is quite stunted. I’ve lost most of the ability to read and write in it, sadly.

You’re right that the poems carry an “estrangement from both tongues,” a sense of not feeling completely settled in either English or Mandarin. At the same time, language is a kind of estrangement in this book. Silence is fertile and full, and language—used conventionally—can feel like a reduction, a narrowing, of what is ample and in flux.

MR The “I” here seems unabashedly feminine, not just in the use of the pronoun “she” in moments of mirroring/seeing but also in the way the gaze itself, observant yet not proprietary, acute yet not cutting (or more precisely, only cutting when directed inward), seems like a feminine gaze—or better, a femininist gaze, as in the opposite of a masculinist vision. That’s not a word, femininist, but I like how it recalls feminist while taking a side step. Are the poems feminist, feminine, maybe even—and now I’m asking you to humor me—femininist?

JX Femininist—yes! I think gender is certainly one category of otherness that infuses the poems in the book, though perhaps not the principal one—at least not consciously so. If the “femininist” gaze is one that is slant and destabilizing, and working against certain kinds of centralizing power, I hope these poems exhibit it. Then again, in “Zuihitzu,” “Visual Orders,” and elsewhere, the speaker occasionally implies the desire to look without being seen, which can be read as a voyeuristic looking that gets coded as “masculine,” though the poems are trying to slip out of that.

MR It can be masculine—but couldn’t one also say that looking without being seen is the plight of many women, even if not their desire?

JX That’s certainly true. I do think a key difference, however, lies in electing not to be seen, of choosing to take refuge from exposure. Really, I’m interested in how many forms of sight can be oppressive. The rapaciousness of vision, which becomes a manner of conquering the visible world and exhausting it.

MR I have been refraining from quoting your lines back to this whole time—they’re breathtaking and they haunt me—but now that the dam’s been broken: “the borderless empire of the interior.” It seems to me that anyone who writes lives there, takes refuge there, in that infinite landless land you call “the empire of the interior.” This is a crazy huge question, but what is the interior? How do we live there, ethically, without abandoning the exterior, or what you call “the outer world”?

JX The dam has been broken from my end, as well. “The infinite landless land”—that’s a good place to start, isn’t it? I’m haunted by that line of yours. In some poems in the book, the interior is equated with the mind, that vast and fluid terrain. I think earlier I referred to it as the internal flux. So much of everyday living involves performance, exposure, and projecting a solidity of self. One way to go about defining the interior is to mark it as the obverse of the public. The interior, cast in that way, is the realm of the private, the inviolable and inalienable. But the concept of interiority is also culturally determined. Poems such as “Rootless,” “Long Nights” and “Borderless” seek to dismantle the false binary of interior/exterior, and of the interior as some sort of gated enclosure. The Buddhist perspective sees the separate self—which oftentimes gets linked to interiority—as illusory. I believe that, too. The mind loves to find ways to draw up barriers that aren’t really there.

MR As someone training in literary scholarship, I always think of the concern with interiority as quintessentially modern. Are these poems modern? Postmodern? And because I’m risking a yawn here, I’ll clarify that this is a political question for me: there’s still so much work to be done in decentering Europe from the plane(s) of modernism, and it strikes me that these poems do some of that work.

JX The poems are definitely invested in states of interiority and kinds of subjectivity, and that inward turn feels, as you say, modern. On the other hand, I hope that the poems don’t feel too narrowly inward, to the point of solipsism. My intention in the book was also to interrogate the stability and authority of the narrating self and to cast an eye on its construction, which would be a postmodern preoccupation. What marks a postmodern poem, though? The evacuation or undermining of a traditional lyric “I”? It’s worth considering who has never had a claim to the authority of a lyric I to begin with. Xiaojing Zhou thinks through this in her book The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian-American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2006), and argues for reconceptualizing the lyric subject as “a site where established notions of the Cartesian I are contested, transformed, and reinvented” by poets of color and writers who inhabit categories of otherness.

MR I was surprised to find the red of shame riddling poems like “Borderless” and “Zazen”. It reminded me of my childhood, and the parts of myself still shaded by that childhood. I shy away from writing about shame because it walks so dangerously close to Orientalism. And yet, for a woman with my upbringing, shame is real. What do you make of all these entanglements?

JX I’m very interested how you speak of shame and its Orientalist leaning—I hadn’t considered that argument, and I want to read about it and sit with it further… For now, I’ll ask: What is shame? Is it the misalignment between who we think ourselves as and what has been exposed of us? Is it how’re we’re being read, and how we read ourselves, against our internal codes of conduct? I recently picked up Gillian White’s excellent Lyric Shame (Harvard University Press, 2014), which underscores, at one point, how shame indicates an awareness of others’ minds, and how we take up residence there. What’s fascinating, too, is the implied shame of expressing shame—perhaps the vulnerability of laying it bare. Certainly shame and vision are intertwined—shame seems to spring from being fixed in another’s gaze or one’s own, and glimpsing a self that chafes against idealized self-evaluation. Being visible, the object in someone’s field of sight, carries with it the risk of scrutiny and reduction. In that sense, so much of existing as a social being can involve shame. Being seen or understood is shameful, precisely because it is so limiting. It feels false to be calcified by another’s presumed understanding. To add another complication, there’s also the shame of being betrayed by need; the shame of being dependent on others who will never know us fully.

MR If I’m understanding you correctly, then, you’d like to gesture toward the universality of shame? Or if not universality, its operativeness in the multiple cultures at hand?

JX Yes, the universality of shame—the shame that comes with being a visible object in the world.

Mariam Rahmani is a writer and student based in Los Angeles. She is currently working on a novel as well as, with the support of a 2018 PEN/Heim Translation Grant, an authorized translation of Mahsa Mohebali’s Don’t Worry (Tehran: 2008) while pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at UCLA. Her essays and reviews have been published in The Rumpus and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

[picturesinlove]

London Film Festival 2017 or: the real world sucks just watch films for 2 weeks

I feel like I’ve spent my entire student loan seeing things at the London Film Festival, which ran over the last few weeks.

Was worth it.

#1: MANIFESTO, directed by Julian Rosefeldt, 90 mins

- Originally a critically acclaimed multi-screen video installation in which Cate Blanchett plays 13 different characters, ranging from a school teacher to a homeless man, performing artist’s manifestos in 13 different scenarios. Part of the financing deal was Rosefeldt had to cut a 90 minute, linear version of the piece for a cinematic setting. Provides some super interesting results.

- Clearly a translation, but an interesting one. Making the viewer watch it beginning to end highlights the flaws in that translation from installation to cinematic setting (can get too much to digest sometimes), but when it works, it *really* works. 

- More than anything, made me think about the cinema as a space- question the realms of it and what we’re putting on a big screen. 

- CATE FUCKING BLANCHETT!!!! i am convinced no one could have pulled this off like she did. She’s running on adrenaline and pure bravery. She makes interesting choices at every twist and turn. A masterclass.

- You HAVE to be fully, super awake and willing to give this your full attention from the start. It’s slow and beautiful and wonderful... but it is slow. 

- Genre hops from scenario to scenario perfectly... from Clio Banard-esque social realism to Rachel Maclean-like cartoonish sci-fi. 

- Some things Julian Rosefeldt and Cate Blanchett said in the talk afterwards that seemed interesting (lots of paraphrasing): - The white cube is a prison... talking to people who already agree with you... Cinema has a bigger audience with more coincidental audience members-  Cate Blanchett fans from the new Thor film mayyyy see this... - Ask ‘would anyone be interested in seeing this?’, NOT ‘will anyone like it?’ - ‘If I could say what everything means, I should stop doing art.’ - ‘Your brain attends to things differently when watched linearly’ - ‘Art’s role isn’t educative- it’s provocative.’

4/5.

Opens November 24th.

#2: BATTLE OF THE SEXES, directed by Jonathan Dayton & Valarie Faris, 121 mins

- True story of 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.

- Rousing good fun. A real crowd pleaser. I saw the Gala screening at the Odeon in Leicester Square... the perfect way to watch- with lots of people, all feeling the Hollywood-ised, over-dramatised, over-sentimental beats together... and super enjoying it. 

- It’s less subtle than MOTHER! (2017) about what it’s saying, but has a shining, naive optimism to it that you just kind of have to smile at.

- Emma Stone and Steve Carrell as King and Riggs hold all the moving pieces together. They add weight to potentially weightless, throw-away moments.

- All supporting performances great too- Sarah Silverman the MVP. Andrea Riseborough continues to be a chameleon, effortlessly embodying everything about who she’s playing, and it doesn’t even look like she’s trying. And hey! it’s super nice to Martha MacIsaac back on screen with Emma Stone! Their first time together on screen since Superbad (2007).

- The romance between Billie Jean King and Riseborough’s character Marilyn Barnett is easily the most engaging aspect of the film. The only time it leaves Hollywood feel-good territory. Something so magical watching them drive the sun-kissed California roads together listening to ‘Rocket Man’.

3.5/5.

Opens November 24th.

#3: OUR TIME WILL COME, directed by Ann Hui, 130 mins

- 1940s Japanese occupied Hong Kong. Fang Lan, a young primary school teacher, gets involved in the resistance movement and rises to become a legendary figure in the fight for freedom.

- STAKES. Really, really gets how to set up stakes for the characters. It’s a film about all the small things, the little fights in a war that will eventually add up to victory. Not assassinating all the leaders of the opposing army, just stealing a map that’s been put in a bin in an enemy outpost, hoping perhaps it helps. It’s a section of a larger painting. EVERYTHING feels dangerous. Every character is in danger at every moment, and is always punished for making the smallest mistake. Gives the sense that the oppressive State is ALWAYS watching. It demands you never become de-sensitised to the violence which leads to that immediate sense of danger.

- Had a restrained cheapness to it which I actually quite liked. Every now and then you get some goofy looking VFXs and some badly dubbed ADR, but the restraint keeps everything feeling grounded and human.

- Runs at it’s own pace/abides by it’s own structure, which may be too slow/anti-climactic for some, but I liked it for the most part. Playing by it’s own rules and truly being what it wanted to be... which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.

- The moments it steps out of the main story and does a docu-drama thing... just why? Came across so half-baked. Similar to the 3 time scales in Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017), there was never really a moment of release, an ‘oh! that’s a really interesting decision to do that!’ moment. Just left me kind of baffled to why?

- Genuine moments of magic that I wouldn’t dream of spoiling. Seriously some of the most creative, inspired scenes I’ve ever seen.

- Some guy (wearing a BFI lanyard??) sitting a few seats away kept repeating phrases from the film outloud in a strange voice? Why would you do this??

3.5/5.

UK release date unknown, probably some time in 2018.

#4: LAST FLAG FLYING, directed by Richard Linklater, 124 mins

- 2003. A Vietnam veteran recruits his two oldest buddies, who he served with, to accompany him on a journey no one should ever have to take.

- Richard Linklater continues to prove he can effortless hop between genres like no one else, but the film is still packed full with ideas he’s played with before.

- Performances are uniformly and predictably excellent. Bryan Cranston’s Sal is like the crazy friend of your parents who’d show up every few years in a beaten up old car and give you a pack of smokes for your birthday. Laurence Fishburne says ‘praise Jesus’ every 2 minutes and it’s amazing. Steve Carrell has a quiet dignity to him that’s really special. 

- Linklater knows exactly what he’s doing with his camera (water is wet), but it kills me to say it felt visually bland like his films never have. 

- Features the best ‘characters uncontrollably laughing’ scene since The Intouchables (2011).

4/5.

Opens 3rd November.

#5: THOROUGHBREDS, directed by Cory Finley, 90 minutes

- Two rich-kids from small town Connecticut hatch a plan together.

- Ugh, just.... what’s the point? It’s not boring, but every frame just had me thinking ‘why is this happening?’ So disappointingly transparent. I could see the director sitting planning the movements and cuts. Painfully ‘first-feature’ like. Should have been a rich, twisted delight, but was just so vapid and empty. 

- Olivia Cooke is one of my favourite rising actresses. Has one of my favourite performances ever as Rachel in Me and Earl and The Dying Girl (2015), and dammit I cry every time I watch her in it. In this... she does a good job with what she’s given. Anya Taylor-Joy is fun too.

- Badly costumed?? So rarely actively think that.

- Music was fun but as empty and ultimately weightless as the rest of the film. Felt like an afterthought to spice things up.

- Anton Yelchin’s character was the only person in the whole film I cared about. Brings a greyness to such a black and white film. What a fucking loss to the world man.

2/5.

Opens 9th March, 2018. 

#6: CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, directed by Luca Guadagnino, 130 minutes

- Somewhere in Northern Italy, Summer 1983, Elio’s life changes.

- Sun-drenched Europe, the smell of warmth and twirling cigarette smoke, deep blue sky- pure, breakfast with a glass of apricot juice and an espresso, the sound of bike spokes spinning lazily. 

I wish I could live with these people.

‘Later.’

4.5/5.

Opens 27th October.

#7: THE SHAPE OF WATER, directed by Guillermo del Toro, 119 minutes

- 1962, Cold War America. A mute cleaner at a government research facility, Elisa, strikes up an unlikely relationship.

- Del Toro just *knows* what he’s doing. It’s all so effortlessly confident. So rich and fulfilled. Such commitment to everything. 

- The first half is fantastical and brilliant. The second.... loses something. Still has moments of genius, but too much plot. Fizzles out in a disappointing way.

- Reminded me in a lot of ways of Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver (2017). Both are clearly projects the directors have wanted to make for a while, both have amazing first acts then don’t quite know what do with themselves. However, Shape has pure heart that carries it through any rough patches. It feels like it’s actually about something, not just an exercise in style for the director.

3.8/5.

Opens 16th February, 2018.

#8: LUCKY, directed by John Carroll Lynch, 88 minutes

- The swan song of Harry Dean Stanton. A 90-year old atheist’s life as he wanders his desert town, drinking, smoking and speaking to old friends.

- Pure magic all the way through. Plays at exactly the speed and tone it wants to play at.

- One of the most engaging ‘but nothing happens!!’ films I’ve ever seen.

- Everyone hits perfectly. David Lynch appears playing a character that has a pet tortoise called President Roosevelt for fuck sake.

- Bleak, but finds immense joy in that bleakness. Whenever I feel like I’m about to face the void- I will remember the smile of Harry Dean Stanton.

- 3.5/5.

Opens January 2018.

#9: BAD GENIUS, directed by Nattawut Poonpiriya, 130 minutes

- Thai Heist-Thriller about students cheating their exams.

- WHAT A FUCKING RIDE!! More stakes in this than most ‘end of the world’ superhero movies.

- The filmmaking is so good it makes you forget plausibility is sometimes being pushed. Amazing set-pieces. Expertly choreographed.

- Whimsical, but painful and genuinely emotional when it needs to be. 

- Every character is so rich and textured in their own way. So fully realised.

- Why do the last 2 minutes of this film exist??

- 2 years time, there will almost certainly be an American remake of this... and it’ll suck so hard. 

- SEE THIS FILM. SEE THIS FILM. SEE THIS FILM. SEE THIS FILM.

4/5.

Opens some time in 2018.

#10: THE FLORIDA PROJECT, directed by Sean Baker, 115 minutes

- In the shadow of Disney World, 6 year-old Moonee and her friends spend the summer playing around the Motels they live in.

- Pastel bright colours. Every person has survived a storm. Explore the wasteland of failed corporate America. Become a child again.

- Baker continues to masterfully blend fiction with reality, wrapping one in the other.

- Doesn’t ask you to like the characters. Doesn’t need to. One of the very best films of the year.

4.5/5.

Opens 10th November.

#11: INGRID GOES WEST, directed by Matt Spicer, 98 minutes

- Ingrid moves to California to become Instagram famous.

- An enjoyable, fun Saturday night film. 

- Elisabeth Olsen as ‘photographer’ Taylor Sloane is note perfect. Could so easily have slept-walked through it, but didn’t. Her relationship with brother Nicky is so, so good. Idea of this Instagram famous rich girl with her crazy, pill-junkie, roid-monkey brother who she knows is terrible but loves him and is sort of as vapid as he is- just knows how to hide it better. And man, he is SO evil. Haven’t hated a character as much as I hated him in a while.

- Plaza holds it together. Her and the film trust you to realise how mentally ill she is without reminding us too much.

- 1st half is superbly played... loses it somewhere in the middle of the 2nd act but picks up again at the end.

- Music was terrible?! Suggested some weird criss-cross in tone of the film.

- I GET IT! THE INTERNET IS BAD!

3.5/5.

Opens 17th November.

#12: You Were Never Really Here, directed by Lynne Ramsey, 85 minutes

- Gulf War veteran Joe is known for the brutality he inflicts on captors of the children he’s rescuing.

- Deeply troubled. Beautiful. Precise. Scatter-brained. Focused. A violin strung too tightly, then played by a madman. How can something so stripped down and raw feel so symphonic and wholesome? I feel like I’ve been repeatedly smashed in the head with a hammer... but enjoyed it.

- Jaoquin Phoenix. Lynne Ramsey. Johnny Greenwood.

- There are things in this that will play on loop in my head for the rest of my life.

4.5/5.

Opens in early 2018.

#13: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, directed by Martin McDonagh, 115 minutes

- A mother takes desperate steps to pressure local law enforcement to find her daughter’s killer.

- Perfectly woven and layered characters. I fucking hate the phrase ‘the character arc’, but if I were teaching a class in it- I’d show this film. 

- A film about relationships, and every relationship between every character or creature or inanimate object is perfect.

- McDonagh loves theatrical sensibilities. Nobody does grand, rich set-pieces quite like him... makes highly stylised situations feel real in the world he sets up.

- I could have watched hours more of these characters interacting.

4/5.

Opens 12th January 2018.

STRAY THOUGHTS:

- Felt spoilt in the audiences I had the pleasure of watching these films with. Always respectful.

- Every time Clare Stewart (head of festival) came on stage to present a film, I just couldn’t help but smile. Bumped into her after a screening and told her my student loan situation. I don’t think she knew what to say.

- DON’T WATCH THE TRAILERS OF ANY OF THESE FILMS. THEY SPOIL SO MANY OF THEM.

- I am consistently shocked by how enamoured I am with celebrities. Some weird conditioning in my brain. Am glad I didn’t queue up to get a picture with anyone. Saying that, this screenshot from a random interview I saw online where I’m juuuust to the left of Emma Stone will live on my wall forever.

ughhhhhh i’m a loser ughhhhh

[escapedreplicant]

2001: A Space Odyssey

Been a while since I blogged. Anyway, after watching 2001: A Space Odyssey I had an urge to do so. It’s a spectacular film with that type of effect. It has also been number two on my list of ten science-fiction films that define the genre. It has done more than just define a genre it has also inspired several film-makers and some of it’s DNA can be felt in films like Under the Skin and Interstellar as well as scenes being given the pop-culture treatment of The Simpsons (Homer’s Blue Danube munching crisps in space scene).

So where do you begin in discussing a film that has had an emphatic impact on more than just science-fiction cinema? Well, the best place to begin is with the emptiness of space. That opening shot of a black expanse, defined by nothing other than the edges of the screen but it’s depth, it could go on for infinity. Before life there was only the void. The beginnings of a score strike up, what seems like background noise at first, becomes a tornado before it tails off and the opening credits appear and that imagery of the Earth, the moon, the sun and space all in alignment, as though a momentous event is occurring. Momentous might be the best word to describe the film. My own, specific, love of 2001: A Space Odyssey comes from the distinct acts that comprise the film beginning with The Dawn of Man.

The shots could be taken from a nature documentary of some type, those beautiful, expansive vistas, the Martian-esque landscape, the sun hanging in the sky or hovering just above a plateau. What this segment makes me think of though, is how man’s nature is cyclical. We are introduced to a tribe of our descendants, they move among four-legged beasts. Then one of their number is killed by a leopard. A food chain has now been established. We have not yet evolved to the stage where this monster can be confronted. This echoes later in the shot of the leopard over a felled zebra. Then there is a confrontation over a resource; the water pool. Two separate groups of apes screeching representing our base tribalism, over a shared resource, and escaping a shared threat. Our ancestors huddle together in the cold, blue night. The leopard can be heard in the distance, we have established that we are without invention at this point.

Then; the monolith. The screaming and screeching voices, that aggressive and troubling score as though voices are communicating through the monolith to us. That split image of the sun and moon above the ridge of the monolith, that reoccuring image of celestial bodies in alignment that is commonplace throughout the film. The apes touch and move around the monolith, it is almost worshipful. Are they paying tribute or merely in awe? Following this encounter there is invention as an ape discovers they can use a bone as a club and proceeds to smash the remaining skull and bones of a creature, all this beautifully intercut between images of felled beasts and meat being shared amongst the tribe. How does this invention end? By the violent taking of a resource by smashing the skull of another ape. War. Superiority has been achieved. Mankind will repeat this process exponentially over the coming centuries.

This segment alone gives me pause but then Kubrick ends this violent flurry and  foreboding message with the most beautiful of transitions as the most primal of inventions is thrown into the air before becoming a drifting spaceship. An expanse of centuries beautifully cut through, connecting our most humble of beginnings with the most aspirational of our futures. There is an elegance and a gentile nature to the floating of the items in space accompanied by the Blue Danube, giving the journey an element of playfulness. There is even a wheel present. What could be considered our first invention, that helped us traverse the world is now sent into space helping us greet new horizons.

The production design across the upcoming scenes is spectacular. From the Panam flight attendant’s grip shoes to the video screens on the back of each seat. Then Kubrick creates an intense and amazing scale as the circular space station and the shuttle spin in tandem to the beautiful movement, like a dance, marrying artistry and machinery. The quality of the production design and the forecasting of future technology goes further as we are met with voice identification, picture phones all among beautifully clean, antiseptic floors. Such is the quality of what has gone before that only now, in the conversation with the Russian scientists, are we given any semblance of narrative.

This scene alone is telling given the film was made during the Cold War, Russians and Americans have respective bases on the moon and an oversight committee of some nature exists with laws enacted to ensure cooperation. Science-fiction often tells us so much about the times we live in, whether in the past or in the future it seems. The zero gravity toilet is a lovely nod to Kubrick’s inclusion of the location within his films, in the future many defining moments will be made in bathrooms. One thing I love is how loosely the narrative hangs over the film, the monolith was “deliberately buried” adding a further element of mystery to the proceedings following the conversation about what has occurred at the moon base. The journey to the monolith itself is accompanied by a haunting and foreboding score. There are some things man was never meant to know, perhaps if we are alone in the universe is one of those things. So we are greeted with another monolith, or the same monolith, the same noise rises up, apes still gather around it, more advanced but no less curious and the Earth hangs in the background before…the shriek. A screeching that gives me chills to this day.

Now, we get to meet HAL.

Jupiter Mission starts with a beautiful and slow shot of the elongated ship moving through space, comprised of carriages almost, like a train on an interstellar journey. My favourite shot of the film has to be the running scene. It is genius. The motion and control of the scene is still as striking to me today as it was when I first saw the film years ago. To me, it is evidence of a genius filmmaker at work, which Kubrick was.

There are countless films and TV programmes that have paid tribute to that menacing red eye and the hollow voice that accompanies it. There is a very common trope in science-fiction cinema of androids, robots or replicants breaking down or becoming self-aware, or finishing humanity’s job by wiping us off the face of the planet but, for me, none are more terrifying than HAL, because he has the most human of traits; a survival instinct. His logic is twisted and terrifying and all too relatable as he handles the flight or fight situation of being disconnected the only way possible, by removing human error from the equation.

The lip reading scene has forever troubled me, as this silent red light is more capable than any of the crew have been able to realise.

INTERMISSION (Just like the film).

The slow turning of the pod when Frank goes out to replace the AE35 unit is chilling, as seconds later he is thrust into Dave’s field of vision, hurtling through space grasping at the oxygen cable on the back of the suit. As Dave rushes out to secure Frank’s body HAL “malfunctions” causing the remaining crew in cryosleep to die. Any person who has difficulty with any technology often cribs the line; “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” At least I know I have on occasion.

HAL is self-aware, and very much in the spirit of self-preservation takes the most direct and most violent course of action available to him. If we create artificial intelligence to mimic human intelligence then this is going to be a logical end point. I would argue that their is a symmetry to the flight or fight instinct in the shots of HAL locking Dave out of the ship and in the scene of Dave risking his life to blow into the airlock to stop HAL. We are then treated to a terrifying rendition of Daisy as HAL is reconfigured and I am convinced this is the reason so many horror movies now insist on having a children’s nursery rhyme sang in a slow voice in their trailers.

We are then returned to the narrative in the form of the message. I love that there is no complex mechanical plot pulling 2001: A Space Odyssey along. This is most evident in The Dawn of Man and in Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite. Many a night have ai lay awake in bed and tried to perceive what Dave was trying to perceive in his journey. Those bright, vivid colours, blurring images, landscapes cycling through bizarre colour patterns, the nature of reality beyond the expanse. I have often thought that this symbolic of Dave being unabl to perceive what the universe is telling him, his all too primitive brain struggling to comprehend existence in its most raw state. This is why it ends with the continual blinking of his eye through the colour patterns until finally a construct has been formed which he can understand. A room. Walls, doors, a bed, chairs. A toilet at the edge of time and space. Then there are the three versions of Dave. Aged within his space suit, eating dinner and drawing his last breath. I have always envisaged this as what our perception of life outside of time to be like, in that we are viewing the versions of ourself in a format in which we understand. To us, time is linear, so it would make sense to see ourselves age to the point we are watching ourselves draw our last breath.

The metaphysical ending as the monolith enters the room and the baby watches over the Earth has no doubt inspired conversations of such nature amongst many. Personally, I could talk about 2001: A Space Odyssey for hours. I consider it to be a seminal text in the genre of science-fiction and one of the greatest films made by a genius filmmaker who was versatile enough to give us films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Doctor Strangelove and Ths Shining. His impact and the film’s should never be understated.

[sweetchcolate]

BotW, story, and open world?

tldr: I understand the appeal/need of putting pieces of lore together on your own and finding out more about this Hyrule, but I feel the game was too light on story elements and character development. 

I think that with such an open world, there were a lot of compromises to be made on story elements: since the player can go anywhere anytime, you can’t have a structured linear story to go along. I’ve seen a few comments (on YouTube) that say that despite the big map, the story was lacking, and it’s exactly because the map is so big that the story can’t be the focus of the game. 

Let’s consider a game like SS: it was heavily plot-driven, funneling the player from point A to point B because your goal is “find Zelda”. Straightforward, and it makes sense in context. There was little freedom outside of the mandatory areas, besides sidequests, because the story couldn’t allow for the player to get side-tracked and lost. Which is why the map seems so big, yet is so small.

But with BotW, since the usual “find dungeon, explore, fight boss” tradition was tossed aside in favor of exploration, it means that the story can’t be as linear as previous titles. You can’t tell us “go to A, then B, then C” to reach the ending… and claim “it’s an open world; you’re free to do whatever” in the same breath. Because you can go and defeat Ganon minutes after booting up the game and since you can reach the ending without having to bother with the plot, story has to take second place.

The memories is actually a neat way of adding little details to the characters, but overall, I find them pretty unsatisfying as an overarching narrative (they’re WAYYY too short. Except for the cutscenes about the fall of Hyrule/Link’s fate/Zelda finally using her powers: those were great in terms of action and length.) After witnessing the memories, I remembered wanting to see more, to develop whatever tension or relationship they had brought under light. Because you can stumble on them in any order, they have to be self-explanatory, but also hammer down the same message as every other memory: Zelda is a scholar, she’s afraid of failure, Mipha is demure, has feelings for Link, Urbosa is the mom friend, Revali is a jerk. There can’t be any kind of development considered it’s all memories and that the people are DEAD. 

Which is why I was disappointed a bit: from the trailers, I thought that Link would have to go to each Divine Beast and defeat them in order to save the Champions. When seeing Zora’s domain, all the talks about Mipha made me super hyped to go to the Divine Beast, finally reunite with her, and hopefully get some information!

Though the game kept dropping hint that she didn’t survive, that no one had seen her in a 100 years, I kept hoping: “Nah, Mipha’s just stuck in Vah Ruta, like Zelda is with Ganon. She has to be okay, right?”

And then you reach the beast, defeat the boss, and there she is: Mipha’s Spirit.

;_;

I think it would have been much more compelling had the Champions been locked in battle for 100 years in their Divine Beasts, just like Zelda with Ganon, instead of plain dead. Had you been able to save them and have them accompany you, the character development problem could have been solved: you’d learn more about them, about Zelda, their reaction to this new Hyrule, but also help Link with his past. You could also have them have special interests, give you tips/advice, point out historical elements (“did you know this place once used to be a piece of the sky” or whatever) to make the world feel alive. And if you don’t want them tagging along, you could drop them off in their respective villages. 

So yeah, wish there were more memories and that they were longer.

Otherwise, I’m a bit sad that the different races you meet don’t really help you further than defeating the Diving Beast: imagine if you had Sidon or Riju or Teba travel with you as the “new” champions. To learn more about them, their races, their worries and their hopes. You meet them once or twice overall, and not for a very long time as that, so I feel they’re quickly forgotten. They’re nothing more than fancy plot-mandated NPCs… 

I think that the fault with the story is that it’s very self-contained: you do something, but it has little overall/long-reaching consequences. Fighting the Yiga feels more like a sidequest then something truly important. 

And so, the story could have been region-tied: you enter a region, and then particular events start happening, building up in intensity. It’s only when you reach a certain village that the region’s plot gets kicked into full gear. So while the game isn’t forcing you to go to place A or B to discover the plot, you still get some semblance of story.

Let’s say I apply that logic to the Yigas: as soon as you wake up in the Shrine of Resurrection, not only do you meet random Yigas, but you hear people complain about them, about how much agressive they’ve become, how they’re started to roam Hyrule in search of an old hero. When you reach the Gerudo desert, the Yigas pop up even more often and in bigger numbers. And then once you defeat them, you could have the NPCs go “oh, neat, haven’t seen a Yiga in a while,” because in the shadows, the Yiga were planning a revenge against Link. And so you’d have to face them twice, thrice, who knows. 

Anything to have the story elements already present have more importance before you reach the plot-point, but also AFTER. 

Eh, this is way too long. I like the open-world concept, but I like plot as well (hence why I like SS so much despite its shortcomings). It’s difficult to balance both though :P 

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

what is the secret of evermore?

Here's the thing: I wrote the first draft of the Evermore book in 2012. It was originally supposed to be about the protagonist's journey to see his sister, who has disappeared, and the reader's accompanying journey back home. I never planned out the entire story, just enough to say, "so at some point, we'll follow this guy who is on a quest that takes him to see his sister, who disappeared a long time ago."

But I had this idea for a book that the story would be structured around. I had a sense of the tone of the story, which is very much a kind of slow-paced, meditative, meditative kind of feeling. So when I started writing the book, the reader's story was actually supposed to be the story I was telling. There were no major plot holes, just this long stream of images and events in this atmosphere that I was trying to create.

And as I'm writing it, I realize that I am enjoying writing this book, because it is just so different from everything I've ever written before. So much of the writing in the past few years has focused on trying to capture a sense of the immediate experience of the moment; in this one, I'm taking more liberties with reality. The book has this very slow-paced style I am trying to evoke; the book doesn't really have the kind of linear progression that my usual books do, the kind of progression where the reader is being propelled from one scene to the next. The book starts off with a character being taken to a very far-off place; it ends with an extended scene where the narrator describes the view the character saw while in that far-off place.

This is a very distinctive style of book, and it is hard to describe, especially if you've read my other books and are familiar with what I'm doing. It's very different, and it's been fun to write, and I love the book. But the book was never supposed to be what my other books were about; it's always been this idea that my characters would have their lives interrupted and diverted by something else, and then they would move on, leaving that "something else" behind.

This novel was never meant to have the kind of dramatic and emotional climax that other books have had. But it has turned out that this novel does have a strong emotional climax of its own, and it really does feel like it's a book that belongs in the same tradition as a lot of my other books, which means that I have to live with this book forever.

I'm happy with that, for the most part. I don't usually expect this kind of structure from people. Sometimes it's cool to see a book that doesn't have the usual progression, that doesn't give a straight narrative of events in a sequence you have to read in order (which I don't like). That was the whole goal with this book. I guess I wanted to make a case for a certain kind of writing, one with this very particular kind of structure, that is a lot more about the character and the way they feel than it is about what happens to them in the world of the book. There are many, many books like Infinite Jest, where all the plot and character come to a climax together, but this one is different in some important ways – especially from Infinite Jest, which is usually very close to my heart. I don't think I've ever had a character whose journey I was more interested in, and I don't think I'll have a character whose journey I'm more interested in ever.

[aurelliocheek]

Welcome to the Jungle: Making of Shadow of the Tomb Raider

In 2013, a videogame icon made its return to the screen. In 2018, at the peak of her career, she took players on an adventure that climaxed in the emotional grand finale of a celebrated trilogy.

Lara Croft is undoubtedly one of the most renowned characters in videogames history, who first took players on her adventures in 1996. A fearless female Indiana Jones, who dual-wielded her way through dangerous caves and ancient tombs and pistol-wipped her enemies into oblivion. Many sequels and movies accompanied the British archaeologist on her way to popcultural immortality, and it was in 2013, when Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montréal brought her back in a more than well-received reboot. In September 2018, Eidos released the third and final sequel of a trilogy that portrayed a young and unexperienced Lara Croft from her early beginnings to the peak of her career.

On the following pages, Eidos Montréal‘s Narrative Designer Jason Dozois, Animation Director Wilson Mui and Audio Director Rob Bridgett take us on a trip to learn more about how the studio approached the trilogy‘s grand finale– enjoy!

The Narrative Heart of Tomb Raider Jason Dozois worked in the games industry for over 17 years, mainly as a Narrative and Level Designer for various projects. In 2010, Dozois joined Eidos Montréal, his previous projects including »Deus Ex: Mankind Divided« and »Tomb Raider«.

»I was the Narrative Director on Shadow of the Tomb Raider where I managed a team of writers and worked closely with all other departments to make sure the story and flow of the game was consistent and what we wanted it to be. That means a lot of discussions with all the different trades – from concept artists, to level artists, lighting, animation, and audio. Narrative has always been my main interest. In the past with smaller teams, the level designers worked on the integration and assembly of the game, so they most directly influenced the story through the integration of gameplay. As teams got bigger over time, more specialization was needed, and when the opportunity appeared to focus solely on narrative, I jumped at it.

Headlessly rushing into things isn’t the smartest thing to do – and Lara has to find out for herself. To defeat her enemy, she has to become one with the jungle.

The Challenge of Storytelling »Narrative Design in a video game is very complex,« Jason explains. »Even in a more linear story like the one we have in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the player still has immense control over the pacing and how fast or slowly they progress through certain levels. So a lot of the work is making sure people understand what they need to understand at any given moment in the story. Through extensive playtesting, we evaluate if we’re on track and make adjustments to narrative elements of the game as we go. We plan out the high level of the story, then we break down each individual level into subsections, and plot those out. The rubber really hits the road when we start building it. We are delivering a video game not a document. So the real measure of something is on screen. And if it doesn’t work on screen we adjust/change/cut to make it work.«

Conception for Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Lara‘s long-lasting battle against her nemesis Trinity started very early on. »At a high level, Lara’s arc was planned from the beginning. The lower level you get the more open it was for us to interpret and deliver the best story and experience we possibly could. The main goal was to complete the origin story in a satisfying way. Now everyone’s vision of what that is, is a little bit different. So my job was to curate all the possibilities and make sure we had the best one. We wanted to really push Lara’s characterization in this game, push the envelop on both sides: light and dark. There are a lot of dark moments in this game but there are many really quiet and intimate moments as well, and I’m very proud of these; the game has a nice pacing and variety. There’s a scene with Lara and Jonah in the jungle where they’re talking about their pasts and you get a nice sense of who they are. They feel like real people.«

Create, Review, Repeat Iterating and adapting are a crucial part of every development process, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider was no exception. »We worked a lot on the main opponent of the story« Jason recalls. »His first iteration was more classic, and since he didn’t have a lot of screen time, this wasn’t connecting with most of us, or our playtest audience. As we improved him and made him more relatable, we created another problem; some people thought he was too sympathetic. So what we did was create a new character: Commander Rourke. HE would be the military lead of Trinity. The ›fist‹ to balance the ›heart‹ of our main opponent, Dr. Dominguez.

One of my favorite sequences of the game is the tailing sequence in ›Day of the Dead‹, near the beginning of the game. In that sequence we expose Trinity (Dr. Dominguez and Commander Rourke) as well as show Lara’s obsessiveness in her pursuit of them. And while the geometry of the level had been locked for a long time, we revised the content of that tailing sequence several times until it was just right. It’s very important to introduce your characters in a memorable way and I’m very happy with the introductions we did in the Day of the Dead level.«

Shortly after Lara‘s first appearance in Tomb Raider, she grew from an innocent adventurer to a killer – even though in self-defense – in almost no time, which partly felt pretty heavy. In »Rise of the Tomb Raider«, players were already used to her having no problem killing and even executing people, and to a certain degree it was ok, as it came with her growing into a way more experienced adventurer who knows how to take care of herself. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Lara even goes a large step further.

»It’s not just about escalation, it’s about momentum. We certainly had a character momentum and evolution coming from the previous two games. And we took that to an extreme in this game, Lara is going too far. She is so competent and capable that she’s potentially a danger to the whole world, not just to herself. And in the game she learns to temper and moderate her actions, becoming more strategic and less reactive in the process.«

Ending up too sympathetic for a villain, the team had to find an emotional counter-weight Dr. Dominguez and eventually created Commander Rourke.

Environment meets Narrative »It’s not a coincidence we chose the jungle,« Jason clarifies. »The story world should be a reflection of the character. The first time you arrive in the jungle, you feel like you’re in a new world. This was done intentionally. The jungle is personified by the jaguar and Lara’s trial with that predator teaches her how to be like it and use the environment as a weapon. So stealth and environmental abilities are at the forefront of this game. They are an expression of Lara herself. The jungle has the power of life and death, as does Lara.

Already well-known to fans of the series are the vast number of collectibles: relics, documents, murals, crypts and more, giving players not only something to do but also serve as a means of telling people more about the story and the region‘s background – but there is more. »One of the new ways of expanding the narrative along with relics, documents, and murals, were the side quests and the hubs. We wanted this game to be a more social experience. Not only about traversal and combat, but actual interaction (non-violent) with people. Each hub had its own theme, all different variations of Tomb Raiding. The first hub was Tomb Raiding as Pillaging. Outsiders are coming to this town, stealing artifacts and the people are suffering. The second hub, Paititi, was Tomb Raiding as Anthropology. We learn about the culture and the people and the main conflict between the rebels and the Cult of Kukulkan. The final hub was Tomb Raiding as Adventure. We wanted to harken back to a more innocent time, a feeling of wonder and excitement of discovery. All these themes are reflected in the side missions present in each hub.«

In Times of Diversity With diversity being an important and evergrowing topic today, more and more developers choose female protagonists for their titles, for example Chloe Frazier and Nadine Ross in Naughty Dog‘s »Uncharted: The Lost Legacy«. And while Lara Croft has always been a true badass, she was also well-known for her sexiness, which may seem like a challenge for writers and designers who want to adequately bring such a character on today‘s screen.

»Lara is an iconic and strong character. She drives the story forward. That’s the role of a protagonist in a story. It’s no more difficult to write a story for a female lead character than a male lead character. Each character has their own unique take on life and we simply need to give them an objective and tough challenges and have them push through those challenges. In our case we had external and internal challenges as well as interpersonal challenges (Lara’s relationship with Jonah) that gave us multiple layers to play with.

I can’t speak for other games, but this is Tomb Raider. Lara is ubiquitous; everyone knows who she is. When working on other games most non-gamers have no idea about the characters or games I work on. But when it comes to Tomb Raider, everyone knows. It’s a license that crossed over in to the popular culture in multiple different ways. The challenge with Lara, like other iconic characters, is to keep her in the present, in the now. These stories are meant to feel timeless, but they’re not set in the past. They are always set in the present. So the main challenge is to keep Lara feeling like she is part of our current time and tastes, which is why adjustments were to make when the origin trilogy was started.

In terms of difficulty, Lara’s final adventure takes her skills to the ultimate test.

Achieving Memorable Greatness Considering the amount of people working on a massive project like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, chances are high that, in hindsight, different members of the team have different personal highlights.

»I’ll pick two things: 1) From purely story and character, I love the fact that Lara’s impatience causes the story to happen. Normally a story starts with an event from the outside; Lara is her own inciting incident. This surprised a lot of people and the guilt she feels over her actions early in the game drive the story forward. And 2) I love the relationship between Lara and Jonah in the game. They are a nicely balanced duo, the range of emotions they both show and the performances that Camilla and Earl gave for those characters, is ultimately my favorite part of the game‘s narrative. If there was another sequel coming up, I’d love to see more of the lighter side of Lara’s personality. We glimpsed it at times in this game, but I’d love to see more« Jason ponders.

A Personal Wishlist Even with an impressive portfolio, one can still dream. »I love the legend of ›Zelda‹ series and RPGs in general, including ›Skyrim‹. I’ve never worked on a massive RPG with an open world, like one of those games, and I would love to be involved with helping to create a world and characters like that.«

Jason Dozois is Narrative Director at Eidos Montréal

The post Welcome to the Jungle: Making of Shadow of the Tomb Raider appeared first on Making Games.

Welcome to the Jungle: Making of Shadow of the Tomb Raider published first on https://leolarsonblog.tumblr.com/

[ciathyzareposts]

Ultizurk II: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

Congratulations! Here’s a near-unreadable screen!

             Ultizurk II: The Shadow Master

United States

Independently developed and published

Released in 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 26 March 2019

Date Finished: 7 April 2019

Total Hours: 16 Difficulty: Moderate (3/5) Final Rating: (to come later) Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

Summary:

One of a long-running series of independent games, Ultizurk II borrows its basic approach and many of its plot elements from Ultima games. Although more complicated than Ultizurk I, the author was still an amateur, which comes through in under-developed character development, combat, and inventory systems. There are some decent puzzle-solving moments, but the game overall is too large and too long for its extremely basic approach to role-playing.

****

Ultizurk II ended up comprising five outdoor maps, nine dungeon maps, and 5 “dream world” maps, all 64 x 64. This is far too big for a game of such limited playability. The maps exist in a mostly linear manner, which makes it a nightmare to go back and forth among the areas as you try to solve the various puzzles. Walking through the dungeons isn’t hard, if you bring enough herbs, but it’s long, particularly with the clunky interface and the need to stop and toss sling stones at monsters every five steps. Towards the end of the game, I just couldn’t take it anymore, and I confess that I used a hex editor to figure out the character’s saved coordinates and manipulate them to get him through the dungeons faster.

            The order of the game’s maps.

          You’ll note that all the areas are, indeed, named after features on Mars, although sometimes misspelled or otherwise a bit mangled. I was authoritatively not on Mars for this game, however, as the residents are always referred to as “Arcturians.”

         In Arcturian, leaders are called “schwazzers.” Got it.

          All of the dungeon maps were swarming with monsters. Most of the outdoor maps were, too, but a couple were monster-free. As promised by the manual, each of the cities outside the starting area had one or two NPCs. They all responded to NAME and JOB and then suggested keywords in their responses. Sometimes, the keywords were a bit unintuitive, such as when the leader of the planet says, “I see you are trying to help us, but alas!,” and the next prompt is not HELP but ALAS. None of them had much to say in general, and the game missed on opportunity to better flesh out the game world with these dialogues. None of them had anything to say about any water crisis, and almost all of the maps had a fountain or two, suggesting no crisis at all.

  The Shadow Master had laid it out last time: my goal was to collect three crystals for each city’s mind machine (five total machines), use the crystals to power the machines, enter the dream worlds, and collect an orb from each. The machines require specific crystals in a specific order; the ones a machine requires are usually found closest to that machine. What you don’t want to do is wait until you have a bunch of crystals and then try to figure out what machine uses which ones and in which order. That takes forever and there’s no way to solve it but trial and error.

           Slotting crystals into a dream machine.

          A lot of the crystals are found lying on the ground within dungeons. The three used by the machine in Olympus Mons are dug up from shrines on that map. A few other crystals require you to solve side-quests. For instance, a caveman named Oog would give me a crystal if I could find his kinsman Zog (another Ultima VI reference) and get him to return. The two cavemen were several maps away, so that was a bit of a pain. Another required me to find some blue glass, have it refined by a glass smith, then have it assembled into a gem by a gem maker. 

          Finding Zog in a dungeon. That might be the worst NPC portrait in history.

          The dream worlds all had their own puzzles. Most of them were navigational, such as one that had a bunch of invisible walls and required me to find my way to a bunch of lit braziers and douse them with a bucket of water. When I was done, the bucket of water turned into an orb in my inventory, but there was no message to accompany this, so I spent an extra hour just wandering this level, wondering what I was missing.

            Dousing braziers on a level full of lamps and invisible walls.

        Another dream world puzzle had the player nonsensically meet Wyatt Earp, who was trying to figure out how to best apportion sacks of feed among his buffalo ranch. It was basically a magic square puzzle–the columns and rows had to add up to 10–except with repeating values for the sacks (1,1,2,3,3,4,5,5,6) and no requirement that the values add up to 10 on the diagonals. There are systems for solving magic squares with nonrepeating values, and you can even do it with algebra, but at the time I couldn’t figure out a formula that would work with this nonstandard version. Eventually, I just solved it through trial and error.

               Helping Wyatt Earp feed buffalo by solving a magic square puzzle does, admittedly, sound like something that would happen in one of my dreams.

             When I had all five orbs, I slogged all the way back to the starting area and placed them in their receptacles in the transportation room. Supposedly, I just had to mentally concentrate on where I wanted to go, and I’d go there. Instead, I got a message that said “Overload! Overload! Overload! Machinery too old!” and the orbs all burst into flame.

             Like trying to run any modern PC game on a one-year-old laptop.

             The Shadow Master had nothing to offer about this turn of events, but he did say that he’d dug up an obscure keyword (HOTEYE) that I should mention to the humblest person I had met. Well, I hadn’t met any clearly humble people, but neither had I met so many people that I couldn’t swing by all of them with message. The intended recipient turned out to be Krindell, an Arcturian in Hellas who I’d previously dismissed as a lunatic because he just went on about flowers and how they teach him of the heart.

Krindell turned out to be the leader of the planet. The HOTEYE keyword led to a discussion of “the lens,” a theoretical construct that would melt a glacier in Elysium Mons, thus “restoring the water balance.” But the lens “needs a master” and only an “enlightened one” can create it. “If you have been virtuous, then legend says that the lens will stare you in the eye.”

               Would it have been that hard to make a lens using actual lens-making equipment?

           There really isn’t a way in this game to demonstrate virtue, which is why it was a good thing that, following the conversation, a lens just magically appeared on the ground next to Krindell. That was a pretty lame plot development. I suspect Dr. Dungeon originally had a more lengthy side quest in mind for acquiring the lens.

I took it to Elysium Mons and placed it in an obvious square. The glacier partly melted, leaving a river flowing through it.

           But did it really happen, or was it just implanted?

          Walking up the river, I encountered a generator at the top. When I tried to “use,” it told me to enter the “activation sequence.” I had no notes for anything like that, so I spent some time going around asking NPCs about it. Krindell still acted as if I hadn’t already gotten the lens, and the Shadow Master was still stuck on HOTEYE. After about an hour of futile wandering, I inspected the game’s code and found that the answer was “1175.” Apparently, it’s found on one of the signs scattered throughout the game, which it turns out you have to “use” to read; “looking” at them just tells you that they’re signs. 

             Any true sci-fi fan would have gone with 1138.

          Entering the code brought about the long endgame. First, a computer display lit up on the generator, an automated mechanism engaged, and I had to re-enter the code. “Intergalactic transmission incoming,” it then said, and the face of an alien popped up.

         Greetings, Earthling. Millions of years ago, our race had already developed space travel. We grew in knowledge and stature. We became as gods. We started with virtues similar to thine own. The planet thou hast seen was an experiment in genetics–the creation of life from inanimate matter. We do this because we respect all life, from the smallest microbe to the largest whale. Our policy is not to intervene once we have created a planet and brought life forth from it. The natural way of things must be allowed its course.

The planet thou hast just visited is but one among thousands like it which we developed countless eons ago. It developed along the usual evolutional pattern, but a problem arose with atmospheric pressure. Mathematical probability estimated life could only be sustained for a further maximum of four hundred years.

Then YOU came. Forgive our bluntness, but we’ve never seen such a primitive being display such compassion. You saved an entire world from certain death. You persevered for months. When the teleporter failed, you turned attention away from yourself and towards the planet’s need. The galaxies themselves sing your praise!

                    That sounds great, but how, functionally, do they do that?

          I felt that was laying it on a little thick, particularly since I didn’t bother to help the planet until it appeared that I was stuck there. Anyway, the aliens somehow transported me off-planet, and I was able to witness a little graphics show by which “the red and brown planet turned blue with water and green with grass again!”

            Someone recently discovered vector graphics, I see.

           Then, somehow I was transported home to the Wizards’ Guild. The Dungeon Master began speaking and announced the end to the “contest . . . between the two top adventurers in the world,” namely the Shadow Master–that’s apparently his actual name–and me. This retcons the end of Ultizurk I a bit, where the Shadow Master kidnapped me and I didn’t voluntarily enter a contest.

The Shadow Master was named the new Guild Master given that he returned first. But the Shadow Master got up and made a speech in which he recounted my adventures, said that I had somehow “created matter out of pure mind power!,” and praised my selfless rescue of the Arcturians. At his recommendation the Council unanimously made me the Guild Master, and the Shadow Master went off to take over the Thieves’ Guild, where he “forgot all about his new-found humbleness.” 

             The Shadow Master falls on his sword.

           This conclusion slightly undermines one of my complaints, that the game, despite its subtitle, isn’t really about the Shadow Master. But only slightly.

We’ll let it all sink in while I score the game:

2 points for the game world. None of it makes much sense, and it depends too heavily on recycled plot elements from the Ultima series, particularly Martian Dreams.

1 point for character creation and development. There’s no creation, and development is a matter of getting extra maximum hit points at weird intervals. I seemed to hit the level cap (Level 7) awfully early in the game.

3 points for NPC interaction. No game that adopts a keyword dialogue system is entirely bad, but there aren’t very many NPCs, and the interaction lacks the complexity of the Ultima titles. The bland Arcturians almost made me think fondly of the NPC in Ultizurk I who called me “granmassa” and wanted a potion of healing for her “po’ lil chile.”

             The Shadow Master’s characterization was, I admit, a bit unexpected.

              2 points for encounters and foes. It gets that for the occasionally-good puzzle. The various enemies roaming around the map are just icons with nothing of interest about them.

1 point for magic and combat. There’s no magic system (odd given that the character is a wizard), and the combat system consists of selecting “attack” and specifying the foe.

2 points for equipment. It gets both those points for the somewhat-interesting herb system. I never found any weapons other than the starting club and sling. There’s no armor or usable items. This is another area in which Ultizurk I was better.

         Loot areas like this one in Syrtis Major Planum don’t offer anything but sling stones and food.

           0 points for no economy.

2 points for a main quest with no choices or alternate endings.

2 points for graphics, sound, and interface. There are times that the graphics hold up, and some of the commands work well, but as a while the interface is clunky, the screen makes poor use of its real estate, and the sounds are harsh and offensive to the ears.

             Even with the inventory window up, the game wastes a lot of screen space.

            2 points for gameplay, mostly for a balanced level of difficulty. None of the other things that I look for–nonlinearity, replayability, and a proper length for its content–are present in the game.

             That gives us a final score of 17, a bit lower than I ranked Ultizurk I. But Robert Deutsch is growing as a developer, and I find myself looking forward to Ultizurk III (1993; a two-part game) which, judging by screenshots, at least fixes the screen composition problem. We’ll also have The Great Ultizurkian Underland (1993), Wraith (1995) and Madman (1996) to enjoy. Although I’ve rated Ultizurk II a bit miserably, when you read comments by Dr. Dungeon like this one in an RPG Codex thread, you can’t help but root for the guy. If loving RPG development is wrong, he just doesn’t want to be right.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/ultizurk-ii-won-with-summary-and-rating/

[terryblount]

Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition – Review

The Tales of, or just Tales, series has always occupied something of a weird blind spot in the résumés of even the most hardened JRPG fans in the West, and I am no exception. Indeed, these games have faithfully preserved so many of the most recognisable motifs of this genre through release after release. Yet, somehow, they have slipped under my radar time and time again.

When the definitive edition for Tales of Vesperia was announced, it felt like fate reaching out its hand. While the game initially launched during the glory days of the Xbox 360 and the PS3, Namco Bandai has now made their 2008 classic fully compatible with current-gen platforms. They also sweetened the deal by adding extra goodies that were originally exclusive to the Japanese release.  Suddenly I could no longer ignore the signs that my moment had finally come to dive into this beloved series.

The world of Terca Lumireis is overrun with monsters, and each city is protected by a barrier generated from a blastia.

After spending what felt like a 59-hour holiday in the mystical world of Terca Lumireis, the adventures I had with Yuri and his band of misfits have left me with fond memories. There were certainly more than a few opportunities where I couldn’t help but sigh with frustration. However, a potent combination of confident storytelling, some unique mechanics and characters that I could actually care about made me question why it took so long for me to try out a Tales game.

Heads and Tales

Tales of Vesperia is truly a master class in how to retain a player’s focus on the main story line. Much like Dragon Quest XI, which I reviewed a couple of months ago, the plot in Tales of Vesperia is what acts as the key driving force behind the gameplay since everything seems to feed really naturally into the overall adventure. Completing every objective always felt like I was adding more pieces to the puzzle of a bigger picture.

This is Yuri, and there is an old guy at his local pub who keeps mistaking him for a girl…

Given that this game could easily take around fifty hours or so to complete, the story is understandably something of a slow burner, which could potentially be a hard sell to some players. Rest assured though, it is written very well, and several exciting twists turns in the narrative will undoubtedly feel more than rewarding to players that are willing to stick with the game’s more placid narrative pacing.

The actual plot is centered on Yuri Lowell – a dishonoured knight from the imperial legion in the capital of Zaphias. While lounging in his bedroom window like only an anime teenager can, his downtown neighbourhood was abruptly flooded with water. Seems some lowlife pinched the ‘aqua blastia’ which is a magical device needed to regulate and control the water supply to the slums. He wakes up his pipe-smoking dog, Repede, and the duo set off to where the culprit might be hiding.

Seriously, his dog smokes a pipe, and how this poor pooch somehow succumbed to a tobacco addiction still leaves me sleepless with questions at night. In any case, retrieving a magic stone from a petty thief should be a cakewalk for an ex-knight right? Wrong. What is any JRPG without some unwitting hero stumbling into a major calamity?

The Imperial City of Zaphias, and this is the ‘impoverished’ part of town. Anime’s can be so idealistic…

Somewhere during his efforts to capture the thief, poor Yuri ends up in the slammer. However, no prison can hold him, and it is during his escape that he meets a noblewoman, named Estelle, who shares his passion for running from the authorities (and bizarrely coloured hair). She urgently needs to find a mutual friend of Yuri’s named Flynn, who happens to be located in the same direction as the thief’s getaway. The duo, along with Repede, therefore decide to make an impromptu little road trip together into the wilderness beyond the city.

From here, the little fellowship travels from one location to the next only to find themselves constantly one step behind both Flynn and the blastia thief. It’s not all bad since every location reveals more to Yuri and Estelle about a deeply entrenched conspiracy surrounding both the stolen blastia, and the iron fist of the Zaphias Empire. Needless to say, they soon find themselves unavoidably drawn into a much bigger mission in which the very fate of Terca Lumireis might be at stake.

Estelle trying her best to give a high five.

As per usual, the friends that help them throughout their travels ultimately end up joining their little clique until the group is big enough to form their own guild. They decide to name their guild ‘Brave Vesperia,’ and first to join is Karol, a young boy exiled from another guild and thus eager to prove himself as a fighter. A feisty blastia scientist, Rita, joins the group shortly after since she sees their journey as an opportunity to learn more about the blastia.

Flynn also joins once the gang finally catches up to him, along with three other characters named Raven, Judith and Patty. I cannot disclose much about the these characters without giving away some crucial story moments, but it is worth noting that the writers did a superb job of keeping me uncertain with regards to their true identities and intentions. It certainly set the stage for some rather interesting surprises later on.

The devil is in de-tales

If I had to summarize Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition, I would say that it plays like entering your own anime epic. Many aspects of the game, from its narrative mechanisms to its combat style, impart a distinct cinematic and theatrical feeling to the player. As such, the game is generally a mix of pretty standard JRPG content, but with a distinct visual edge which has always given the series its unique identity within the genre.

The most obvious implementation of its anime pedigree lies in the game’s visuals. Tales of Vesperia has been rendered in a colour-popping, cel-shaded style which, even ten years later, looks great. A few shockingly bad in-game cut scenes have unfortunately survived the transition to the current generation, but they are few and far between thankfully. Besides, you are bound to forget about them entirely when you see how well the game’s graphics complement the fully animated cut scenes (also equally gorgeous).

Yuri fighting his buddy Flynn, but I won’t spoil why

The visuals are accompanied by an arousing and diverse soundtrack that is always in sync with what’s on screen. Combat scenarios generally received thumping rock beats, while exploration was augmented by classic orchestral symphonies, but the cherry on top is the opening song. It is called ‘Ring a Bell’ by Bonnie Pink and trust me, it will be firmly stuck in your head by the time the game is done. Go give it a listen.

True Commitment to Story-telling

As I mentioned, Tales of Vesperia shows its commitment to being a cinematic-driven adventure in how the game takes a more linear narrative approach. Whether it involved infiltrating a mansion of a corrupt official, or helping a town repair the blastia that upholds a protective barrier against monsters, every objective represented a key albeit sequential component in how the story plays itself out.

This effectively means that the game offers very little side content outside of the missions related to the main story, and I can imagine fans of fuller and more ‘looter-centric JRPGs’ might be left wanting here. For me, on the other hand, it was refreshing to play through a role-playing game that placed its story so front and center. Besides, if you ever get tired of blastia and the cast prattling on, there are recipes to create, battle strategies to refine, and ample opportunities to fight monsters for some extra XP on the side.

Apparently this is a series known for its beautiful and lush graphics.

Speaking of prattling on, Tales of Vesperia has got one of the chattiest casts I have ever encountered in a game. It is not exactly a problem (unless this kind of thing irks you) since the dialogue and interactions between characters have been written and localized rather well. The lengthy conversations between Yuri and the gang is in fact one of the most crucial ways in which the game conveys their personalities to the player, as well as colouring in the lore and history of Terca Lumireis.

The interactions between Karol and Rita were particularly a highlight of the game since they were really funny. Karol constantly pipes up with something stupid to say when the adults are talking only to be silenced by Rita with a firm head jab. It represents the kind of slapstick comedy I used to love while I was watching the Bleach anime series.

And here we have the resident mage Rita. This is one of the few scenes she is  not assaulting/teasing/whacking/chasing Karol.

Of course, additional but entirely optional interactions between characters are presented to players via the ‘skits’ that have become a fan favourite in this series. These are essentially delightful little intermissions in which the different characters have a brief tête-à-tête with one another.

Classic example of the skit

The skits could involve one character sharing their knowledge on a certain area or just throwing some good old fashioned shade at one of the others. They serve only to endear the characters to the player and are totally skippable, however I laughed my way through nearly all of them since they exhibit the same quality of writing as the rest of the game. It is yet another aspect of this game that demonstrates that classic Tales dedication to making its cast memorable and relatable.

The Linear Motion Battle System

The combat is where things get a little different, and, as any Tales veteran will be happy to tell you, it is here where the series makes its sharpest departure from the rest of the genre. Whereas all the heavy hitters from the JRPG founding fathers opted for the classic turn-based gameplay during battles, Tales games have since their SNES days had a more active system that looks like a permutation from a hack ‘n slash game.

In the case of Tales of Vesperia, it means the player must attack, guard and use magic against the enemy in real time, usually with the help of three squad mates. The battles are not random, and like many modern games of this kind, players can circumvent (read: run away!) from enemies that you would prefer not to engage.

A typical scenario would involve you seeing an enemy either in close quarters or in the over world map. Once the enemy has been engaged in combat, the game then moves everyone into an arena of sorts, with the camera adopting a side-long perspective not unlike a fighting game. The player then locks onto any chosen enemy, and proceeds to pummel them with a mixture of light melee attacks, as well as more powerful, magic-fueled assaults called ‘artes.’

Your rating is based on how much damage you avoided, combo hits, damage given, etc.

There are even rudimentary combos to be chained from connecting your character’s light and heavy attacks, and the higher Yuri (and the others) level(s) up, the more artes and finishing moves become available to him. Several short cuts have also been added to the D-pad which allowed me to change the overall strategy of my party on the fly, and you can really get into the nitty-gritty of tailoring your own unique strategy. By the time the game places you toe-to-toe with the boss enemies, changing between strategies is utterly indispensable.

For example, Rita is primarily a mage class with magical attacks while Estelle is a powerful healer. During normal grinding and lesser enemy encounters, they can certainly hold their own right next to you with sword and shield. However, during boss fights I tailored a preset where both characters kept their distance while focusing on the party’s health once their own HP dropped below 75%. Once I got the hang of all the systems and subsystems at work in the combat mechanics, the action-packed fighting became a delightfully intellectual affair much like a menu or turn-based system.

Alas, even once I began to feel sorry for the Pokemon-esque monsters for the swiftness at which I was mowing them down, I couldn’t get over how clumsy the system felt at times. If Yuri was not specifically locked onto the enemy closest to him, he often missed with his sword which left him striking stupidly at thin air in the middle of the battle arena. Making matters worse is that the controls are not the most responsive either meaning that combos are more a question of luck rather than skill.

Lastly, I also found most boss fights to be somewhat unfairly difficult in comparison with the rest of the game play. This is a matter easily solved by simply switching the combat difficulty to ‘Easy’ in the in-game settings (which I did a lot). Still, it feels like the developers could have done a little more to prepare the player for the jarring contrast in difficulty that so many of the boss encounters represent.

The 3D over world map. You can even camp out in the open for one night.

These are not exactly deal-breakers in the grand scheme of the combat system. Yet, it is disappointing to know that with a little tweaking and refinement, the already decent and unique trademark of the series could have elevated a great game to a nearly perfect status.

To be or not to be…

Tales of Vesperia is like the paradox of JRPGs in that it hosts so many familiar elements of the genre, yet it clearly shapes its own identity through its stylistic choices. Whereas other JRPGs feel like the seasoned old business magnates in their crisp suits, this game feels like the new, hip kid on the block wearing urban fashion.

Some more senseless violence! The ring on the left shows the edge of the combat arena.

This is not the first JRPG to be so consistently driven by its story, nor is it unique in its presentation. What I feel is special in Tales of Vesperia is how gracefully it pulls all of these elements together. This game will never allow you to become too preoccupied with one particular aspect of the overall experience on offer. Instead,  it is a well-rounded adventure which demands to be consumed in big, greedy chunks at once.

If you have been playing turned-based JRPGs since the days you were still using a potty, and you feel no immediate rush to venture too far out of this landscape, you might have a hard time warming up to this one. However, if you believe variety is the spice of life, and you are willing to test the barriers of what this genre can do, look no further. This game is in no rush to overwhelm you with complexity which makes it a compelling choice for old hands and newcomers alike.

  Supports up to 4K resolution

Cel-shaded beauty

Engaging story

Relaxing gameplay approach

Strong characters

Excellent score

Brilliant localisation

Several cut scene animations

Combat controls

No option to quick save

Difficulty spike with bosses

          Playtime: 57 hours total. For the single player campaign

Computer Specs: Windows 10 64-bit computer using Nvidia GTX 1070, i5 4690K CPU, 16GB RAM – Played using an Xbox One Controller

Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition – Review published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/