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smokeybrandreviews · 1 year

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I Am (not so) Atomic

Last year, i was blessed with a brand new anime obsession: The Eminence in Shadow. It’s a wildly derivative take on the Isekai genre but i can’t help but love this show, man. It slides right into the same vein as Tensura and Overlord, specifically the latter, and considering those two shows have climbed into the upper echelons of my all-time list, Shadow was basically tailored made for me. Truthfully, i had been on the Cid Kageno bandwagon for some time. I remember picking up this manga years ago and falling in love with it by the fourth chapter bu i was the anime that sealed my adoration. This thing was fantastic. The action was kinetic, the animation fluid, and the character work executed perfectly. I was a bit bummed when the show ended. I wanted more Shadow content and i wanted it now! So color me surprised when i found out that there is a gacha game based on the franchise. A gacha game that is canon to the narrative which covered the seven year time skip and reveals the origins of Shadow Garden, itself. Shut up and take my money!

The Eminence in Shadow: Master of Garden is a gacha game akin to something like Bleach: Brave Souls. Or, rather, it feels a lot like that. It’s kind of an autoplay scenario. You set your party before each match and just press play. Battles are on kind of an ATB system where your characters act according to a set algorithm. They periodically perform special moves, combos that buff your party, and executed cinematic super moves once a bar fills up. In that respect, it’s not so much a game than it is a form of tower defense. I mean, i have vague memories of Valkyrie Profile and Resonance of Fate playing similar to this but it’s been years since I've touched one of those games so i might just be imagining it. Still, the actual gamely leaves a lot to be desired, because of course it would, it’s a gacha game, bu Master of Garden makes up for that with slick, 3D, animations and pretty solid models. I was surprised by how polished the varying designs of the main characters. More than that, it’s the customization which really gets you.

he actual gameplay is forgettable to say he leas but the prep for those auto-battles? That is where he fun lies. There is some real depth in terms of building your team here and i am here for all of that. First, there is an elemental system in place. Red, blue, green, etc. Red beats green, blue beats red, if you’ve played an RPG,ever, you get it. Each character gets assigned a color so here’s that. They also have certain jobs or classes, Tank and Healer being the most prominent. If you don’t have a tank or healer in your party, you’re gonna f*cking lose. Beyond that, you can level up each pf your characters through battles where you gain experience, or items you collect after battles. You can also equip your characters with generic weapons and armor which is tied to a ranking system that further increases your strength. You can also equip Magic Gear, which further enhancing your strength, each of which, themselves, can be modify and leveled up. It’s pretty deep for what effectively is a money pit, waifu simulator, which brings me to the biggest bummer about his entire game: he gacha.

Master of Garden has one of the most unforgiving gacha systems i have ever experienced in a mobile game to date. It is rough out here, yo! Obviously, the goal is to roll as many SSR level characters as possible and that seems impossible. I’ve hit these banners several times with the ten times roll and i popped one SSR. One. And it was a f*cking tank. Those cats attack for sh*t. Both of SSRs are tanks, one of which is just a progress reward. But you can get a guaranteed SSR if you pay for it and they make that abundantly clear. They literally have special rolls for paid Gems, only. This is an every day thing. It took Fate/Grand Order, the most predatory f*cking gacha out there, years before they installed something like that. Master of Garden? Day one. Seriously, i can roll a guaranteed SSR for twenty-eight hundred paid Gems, which is basically fifty dollars because the thirty dollar option gives you twenty-four hundred. It’s f*cking insane. And the Pity System is pathetic. You have to collect, like, shards or something until you get enough to buy the character instead of just, you know, giving it to you after so many rolls. In doing so, you need o spend more of your Gems, which leads to a higher chance of you buying more gems, just to pop he Pity. It’s disgusting.

Overall, i can’t recommend this “game”. It appeals to the Virgo in me with all of he customization but i can’t, in good conscious, tell you to play knowing how unforgiving that gacha is. That sh*t sucks because the narrative during the time skip is pretty f*cking solid. It’s well acted and you get a ton of proper character moments that were missing in the show. I’m sure a Wikia somewhere has compiled all f those beats but experiencing it as it should be, on your [hone or PC, with the detailed graphics and proper voice acting, is an entirely different experience. If you’re a fan, give it a shot, i guess? I mean, i did, but it’ wildly disappointing, especially when you get that progress wall because it’ll come fast. I’ve been playing this thing for three days and I'm already at an impasse, mostly because anything under an S rank is bunk once you progress to the third chapter of the main campaign. Guess where I'm at now? Fun times, that. At least i got a Delta. She’s my favorite and just as adorable in this game as she is in the show.

#The Eminence in Shadow: Master of Garden #The Eminence in Shadow #Kage no Jitsuryokusha ni Naritakute!

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smokeybrand · 1 year

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I Am (not so) Atomic

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pridewhatpride · 3 years

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"rival"

There you are. You. Asking for a GX Rivalshipping drabble with 'Rival' as a keyword. Here you go. I hope you're happy ;; The length is around 2k words.

Special thanks to @deadkura for proofreading, but I note that any and all mistakes are on me. They were just... my poor lab rat. Apologies, my friend.

That aside, there are no warnings that need to be given, this is light-hearted in tone. Nobody dies and nobody gets hurt, aside from Shou who happens to be there at some point and just succumbs to the need to get on with some semblance of a plot.

... It's on Ao3 because why not. Here.

The story is below the cut! Enjoy (or don't)!

____ ____ ____

Manjoume could vaguely remember the first time he’d watched the Battle City recordings. He couldn’t remember when it had been exactly, but he did know he’d been at a classmate’s house with a bunch of other kids. He had a faint memory of being pressed up against other children, all of them shouting and cheering along as the duel between Seto Kaiba and Yugi Mutou came to a roaring end.

… It had been noisy. And he’d found himself mildly annoyed. Not that the duel didn’t have him on the edge of his seat- quite the opposite. He was completely mesmerised by the unforgiving tornado of grace that was Seto Kaiba, most of all. Perhaps that was why he’d found the others to be so bothersome in that specific instance. It seemed very rude to him that they would take him out of the experience with their screams. Was that fun? Was it supposed to be fun? Was he simply out of the loop? Should he have been screaming, too?

The thing he could recollect with a surprising amount of clarity was some kid who’d grabbed his arm to get him off the couch. To this day, he still had no clue what his name was.

“Jun! Come on, I want to play Yugi! You can be Kaiba!”

He remembered muttering something about the suggestion being extremely stupid. The kid wasn’t Yugi Mutou and neither of them possessed any Duel Monsters cards. What was the point of just replicating what they had just watched on screen? They could just… rewatch the scene. But the kid had seemed to be very set on the idea and when Manjoume looked around to see expectant looks on the others’ faces, he ended up giving in. He remembered thinking something along the lines of: ‘Why me?’ And even in retrospect, it made very little sense. He’d never played with this specific kid before. He was a friend of a friend- or a friend of someone he thought was a friend at the time.

“Why do I have to do this?” He had ended up asking, not hiding any sign of his annoyance. “Because you’re like Kaiba!” “I am?” “Yeah! You always say mean things like him! And Taro says you’re like… super rich.”

The rest was a bit of a blur, but he remembered being the ‘Kaiba’ of the group, for as long as it lasted. Which wasn’t a very long time, admittedly. But it had been the one and only ‘friend group’ he’d found himself being a part of, up until he’d entered the dueling circuits, when people started sucking up to him either because of his early successes or just to see what could be squeezed out of the youngest of the Manjoume brothers.

Reminiscing about things like that was… weird, to say the least. He wondered why he’d been that stuck up, even as a kid. He just couldn’t figure out what exactly had made him believe that acting like he was above everyone else could get him anywhere at all. Of course he was aware of the futility of the act, now that he’d grown up and a few years had passed, but it turned out that knowing something on a rational level does not, in fact, equal being able to put it into practise.

… He knew why he was doing what he was doing, anyways. It had stopped being meanness for the sake of being mean when he knew he could get away with it and had stepped into habit territory. And he hadn’t been allowed to go to Duel Academy so that he could make friends who shared the same hobby. He had imagined that 3 years could go by in the blink of an eye if he got involved as little as possible. All that mattered was winning duels, right? And the last thing he needed in order to do that was to start caring about his opponent’s feelings, really.

The thing he hadn’t really considered was that, maybe, his winning streak wouldn’t last forever. He should have known that the outcome of a duel did not depend entirely on how driven one was. It was still fucking annoying to have to see everyone’s surprised- no, incredulous faces upon seeing him finally defeated. Finally, yes. Clearly people had been waiting for nothing more than to see him brought to his knees. It turned out they had firmly believed he had no actual merits outside of his family connections. They had their long-awaited confirmation. He’d lost a single fucking duel. Obviously he was nothing but a blowhard.

Well, good. Whatever. He couldn’t have cared less.

What did infuriate him, however, were the words that the idiot who’d defeated him had exclaimed, entirely unaware of the fact that he’d just completely crushed everything Manjoume had tried to build for himself.

“That was a fun duel! We have to do this again some time!”

He hadn’t cared to stay behind to listen to anything else the other had to say. The guy clearly hardly had a clue where he was or what he was studying to become. Who had allowed that moron to smile like that while trampling his pride? How the fuck had Manjoume let himself be defeated by someone like that?

May the fucker go to hell. Him and his dumb red uniform. Everyone in the Academy. They could fucking die for all he cared. And Manjoume would have probably laughed at the sight.

He really thought he would have. And yet.

As he was going over his deck, sitting with his back against a tree, doing his best to avoid anyone and everyone, he heard footsteps approaching, accompanied by two voices he felt he knew.

“Aniki, I still can’t believe you beat that guy- he’s an Obelisk Blue- and the top ranking first year at that!” … Is this- “He is? Well, that checks out, he was pretty tough.” That’s- Yuki Judai. No doubt about it. “But you beat him.” … Because that needed to be pointed out, how insightful. “Doesn’t everyone lose at least once?” No. “Not against Osiris Red students!” Exactly. “… Why does that even matter in the first place?” It just fucking does, asshole. “Because! A top student isn’t supposed to lose against just anyone, Aniki! I don’t think he took that well.” … Who the fuck would. “Why, though. He didn’t duel poorly or anything. We were pretty evenly matched, there shouldn’t be shame in that.” “Doesn’t that just make it worse?” “… Does it?”

He’d known they were about to pass him, but didn’t bother getting up or making it look like he hadn’t heard anything. He’d clearly been right about this Yuki guy. A complete idiot who clearly understood nothing of what it meant to be a duelist. He glared at the two as they walked by.

… Ah, so the other was Marufuji. A failure younger brother, much like him. How ironic. The boy looked absolutely devastated to see him, too. What, wasn’t expecting the woods to have ears, eyes and a blue uniform?

He furrowed his eyebrows as Yuki abandoned his carefree walking posture, disentangling his fingers from behind his nape and letting his arms drop to his sides. And then proceeded to point straight at him, as if he’d just seen a mythological creature prancing about. Tch.

“It’s Manju!”

… Was that supposed to be a joke? Why was his first thought that that would make for an awful pet name?

After a second of silence, he decided there would be no harm in responding as he usually would to his name being tossed around improperly. “It’s Man-jou-me,” he corrected, making it a point to hold a hand up to count the three syllables as he spelled them out. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not actually food.”

Marufuji’s hands shot up to cover his face, at least he had the decency to be embarrassed for his friend. … But Yuki just laughed. “What! My name isn’t so forgettable that you’d just mistake it for dessert, asshole!” And laughed harder. “I-“ he paused to catch his breath. Manjoume looked on, entirely unimpressed. Hopefully. “Look- look, I’m not the best with names, I didn’t-“ a loud exhale. “I didn’t mean to make fun of you, I swear.” “… Sure you didn’t.” He tried to keep his voice as hostile as he could. But he… couldn’t fully bring himself to shut the guy down. He supposed his laughter was just contagious.

“Glad that’s settled!” He turned around to face a barely still present Marufuji. “See, Shou? The guy isn’t so bad!” Ah. Right. It had almost slipped his mind. “Aniki- please, I get it, there is no need-!”

“I’ll be winning the next one, anyways,” he said as he got up. And that, apparently, was enough to get both boys to gape uselessly. For half a second. Because before anything else could be said, Yuki shot him a thumbs up and a wide smile. “I’m counting on it, Manjoume!” He couldn’t stop himself from smirking back.

It didn’t take long for rumours to spread about a supposed rivalry between himself and Yuki Judai. It turned out that most off the students of the Academy had very little to do aside from gossiping about such things, which was honestly just a disappointment. Perhaps that was why Judai ended up growing on him, despite everything. While he wasn’t necessarily serious or studious by any means, he was… passionate. He meant it when he said that he was looking to have fun and, to an extent, it was admirable. Enjoy the game no matter the outcome. Easier said than done. But in a sense it was… pleasant to get along with and play against someone who was so different from him.

On one specific evening, they had ended up staying out, discussing strategies and dispensing sarcastic advice- or at least that was what Manjoume was doing. Judai actually seemed quite intent on asking how he’d built his deck and why he’d chosen certain card combos rather than others. They had had a match a few hours prior and Manjoume had surprised him with some new faces. Manjoume Jun was a lot of things and predictable wasn’t one of them. And if the way Judai’s face lit up whenever he pulled a surprise play was anything to go by… it was clearly a trait he appreciated immensely, which it was something that made him swell up with pride. To the point where, when switching out cards, he would often find himself thinking about what Judai’s reaction would look like upon the big reveal of his new strategy.

“It’s always my pleasure to be your lab rat, Manjoume.” The response came in the form of a light shove. “Oh shut up, I like testing out things and, clearly, so do you.” Judai’s laugh rang out, light and unintrusive. “You’re right about that, at least.”

They spent some minutes silently studying eachother’s decks. Manjoume had been about to comment on the card ratio, before Judai blurted out something that made him forget all about it. “We’re kind of like Yugi and Kaiba.” And then a necessary addition, judging by the urgency in his voice. “If they had been actual friends, that is.” … Huh. One of his eyebrows shot up. “Don’t tell me it’s because you win most of the times and I’m a stuck up asshole who also happens to be rich.” Judai laughed, as he always did. And it was only fair that after being shoved earlier he’d playfully punch Manjoume’s shoulder. “That could be one way to look at it, I guess.”

A small pause followed. And the increase in intensity of the sound of shuffling cards suggested that Judai was… nervous. “What I meant to say is that we’re rivals. Like them.” Majoume scoffed, without any actual bite, his eyes set on a Polymerisation copy. “That isn’t specific to them. Isn’t it just… normal? To have someone you want to defeat, I mean?” “Hah, so you admit I’m the role model you’re striving to overcome!” “I didn’t say anything of the sort, dumbass.” “… Well, for me… playing with you keeps the game fun.”

Manjoume actually looked away from the Elemental Heroes he’s been adamantly staring at. He turned to face Judai, who seemed to have been looking his way for some time.

He would do that a lot. Make a joke, get a snarky reply and immediately say something serious afterwards. What an idiot.

Fun he said, huh? “Not that it isn’t fun in and of itself, but it’s different, I guess. I find that I actually do want to win, when I’m up against you.” Judai’s hand moved to play with his bangs. “I didn’t think I’d ever think twice about a lost duel, but I… kind of do, now.”

“Oh yeah, sorry- Welcome to the magical world of normal people who don’t necessarily win every single time.” “You speak like I’m not the only one who’s beaten you.” “So do you, asshat.” Judai’s expression morphed back into a smile. “It’s refreshing to have a genuine challenge. If you were to quit I would probably lose my interest in playing, too.”

Ah. That part of the Yugi-Kaiba rivalry. He felt like he started to understand.

“Keep dreaming, Judai. I’m not quitting anytime soon. I vowed to never let you off the hook.”

He thought of what he could or should say next. A part of him suggested: ‘You make it fun for me, too.’ That wasn’t in his style, however.

“But I have to agree. I’d get really bored if winning were to become too easy. You’ll die before I allow you to quit, Judai.”

#ygo #yugioh #ygo gx #yugioh gx #gx rivalshipping #manjoume jun #jun manjoume #chazz princeton #yuki judai #judai yuki #jaden yuki #ulri's abysmal fics #@ deadkura if you'd rather i untag you i will

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sz-amare · 4 years

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7. My Top 15 Anime List

I have watched a lot of anime in the past four years, but one thing that gives me great enjoyment is ranking my top anime. Here I will rank my top 15 favorite anime, along with some honorable mentions that couldn’t make it. However, I won’t be going too in-depth on the analyses; I just want to give you a general idea of why the particular anime is where it is on my list. In general, I rank my anime depending on a combination of factors: 1) how brilliant I find the anime to be written, 2) if the themes resonate with me, 3) if it is categorized in my favorite genres, and 4) my general enjoyment level. Anyway, to the list.

Number 15

One Punch Man

When I first watched One Punch Man, it seemed nothing more than a mindless comedy anime. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed it and laughed a lot, but I found it to be forgettable. But one day, I heard that the genre of One Punch Man was seinen, which made no sense to me. It had no dark and mature themes, and as I mentioned, it was nothing more than a senseless comedy. But then one day, on a whim, I watched One Punch Man again. And I REALLY enjoyed it. I still laughed a lot, but something felt different to me this time. I actually felt like I had a deep connection with each of the characters. The story seemed to be more structured and enjoyable this time, and finally, I could actually see the themes that One Punch Man was trying to explore. It made sudden sense to me that One Punch Man is indeed a seinen and that it had a lot more to it than on the surface. Of course, the difference in experience is because of my new understanding of anime and the experience I gained.

Number 14

Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple

Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple is probably one of the most unknown, underappreciated, and underrated anime on this list. Someone recommended it to me, and I had never heard of it, so I assumed it was a mediocre anime. But when I watched it, I had so much fun which I hadn’t felt in many months. It is a training shōnen anime where the main character tries to learn martial arts. That is all I want to say for now because I don’t want to spoil anything, so go watch it. I highly recommend it.

Number 13

A Place Further than the Universe

I don’t see many people talking much about A Place Further than the Universe. But, I must say, it is absolutely phenomenal. It is, hands down, the most inspiring anime in existence. The basic premise is a high school girl wanting to do something significant in her high school life. I won’t say anymore because, again, I don’t want to spoil this anime, and I recommend you check it out if you need inspiration in your life. Let me just say that it is now an aspiring goal of mine to visit Antarctica.

Number 12

Plastic Memories

I made a whole analysis on the previous post so go check it out. But for a quick recap, the life lesson I learned from Plastic Memories has permanently changed my behavior for the better. I found it to be the saddest anime I have ever watched.

Number 11

Steins; Gate

Once again, I have already made an analysis on Steins; Gate, but this time I only covered the first episode. I also ranked Steins; Gate a 10/10 so that must mean that the rest of this list must contain masterpieces. But to be honest, that is not really the case. You see, to me, even if I consider something a masterpiece, the enjoyment factor plays the most significant role in ranking high on my list. For example, I found Death Note to be brilliant, but I really struggled to enjoy it and therefore, it is not ranked that highly. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed Steins; Gate, but I just enjoyed the rest of these anime way more. Anyway, if you want to see why I loved Steins; Gate so much and why I find it so brilliant, check out blog post 4.

Number 10

Berserk (Manga)

Almost everything I found In Berserk is brilliant (except its adaptations, that’s gas station toilet). Guts is a 10/10 protagonist, Griffith is a 10/10 antagonist, the cast is a 10/10, the story is a 10/10, AND THE ART!!! Holy shit!!! I can actually picture an entire museum dedicated to each panel of Berserk.

Again, the only reason this anime is not any higher is simply because I enjoyed the others on this list so much more. However, I am yet to review any analyses on it so there is a possibility that it will bump-up several places higher when I truly understand the brilliance behind it. Great read though!

Number 9

Haikyuu

I LOVE Haikyuu. Each season gets progressively better and better. It has a lot of controversy around it because of its fan base and because it’s a sports anime. But to be honest, I find Haikyuu to be a better shōnen than My Hero Academia, Black Clover, Jujutsu Kaisen, Demon Slayer, and most other modern shōnen anime. It has its amazing moments, its cast is amazing, the character development is amazing, the themes are amazing, and the antagonists are amazing. I am not bluffing when I say that the antagonists in a Volleyball anime are better than the antagonists in many shōnen anime (I’m going to develop haters before I can even develop fans). I plan on making an essay on what most shōnen strive for yet fail to achieve, and Haikyuu somehow delivers.

Number 8

Oregairu

Best romance. Hands down. Oregairu, or SNAFU, or My Teen Rom-Com is Not What I Expected (yes, so many titles) is a masterpiece in its own right. If you are a guy and you watched Oregairu, don’t act like you didn’t imitate Hachiman a couple times. He is a beautiful protagonist, which most of us guys relate to. His inner monologues result in us treating them as gospel. The sub-text is confusing as fuck, but end up making sense in all sorts of ways once decoded. Yukino is best girl, but man I love Yuigahama almost just as much. The general enjoyment I got out of Oregairu is so far through the roof that I once forced myself to stop watching it so that I could savor the show a little more. It is a little difficult to get into at first, but you will most likely end up enjoying it.

Number 7

Re Zero

This is the most recent addition to the list. I often don’t add anything new to my list; I just switch the places between some of them. But ever since season 2, Re Zero jumped significantly in rank. It is the best anime of 2020 (including sequels), and I enjoyed each episode to the max. I was considering adding Re Zero to my top 10 since the first half of the second season finished, but I was a bit hesitant because I am easily affected by recency bias. But my love for Re Zero would just not die down: my love for it grows after each episode airs. It is the only anime on this list that I watched weekly other than One Piece. I actually prefer watching a series I love weekly rather than binging it all, except for One Piece, pacing is constipation (slow and painful). Other than the vast enjoyment I got out of Re Zero, the main reason it made it to this list is because of the light novel comparisons I watch. Aninews is my favorite source. He compares the episode to the light novels, mentioning what was left out and further describing the emotions and thoughts of the characters. He tends to release the “Cut Content” videos a week after the episode airs, but the content and quality are incomparable. I found the videos to be so amazing I am basically just as excited for the weekly videos as the Re Zero episodes themselves. If you love Re Zero, the Cut Content series is a must watch.

The fantastic details and emotions the light novels are able to portray are stunning. I decided to read the light novels recently, but the only issue is that I am very short on time. But for each novel I complete, I will release a post on it.

Number 6

Mob Psycho

Although I said I found Haikyuu to be better than most modern shōnen, Mob Psycho is hands down the king. Its quality far surpasses all modern shōnen and a lot of older generation shōnen too. Funny thing is, I believe Mob Psycho’s primary genre is slice of life, not shōnen. I also believe it to be the best take on an overpowered protagonist. One of my favorite things is that Mob, who is the strongest esper we have seen, seems to be so weak. That is exactly how he should be portrayed; he is still a child with mental challenges that he is constantly trying to overcome. The themes that Mob Psycho explores are some of my favorites. The animation is a bit weird at first, but after watching it, you suddenly realize how brilliant it is.

(Honorable Mentions)

Attack on Titan

I am going to get a lot of hate for not including this in my top 5, let alone my top 15. Attack on Titan is still releasing episodes, so that opinion may change soon but let me be clear about one thing: Attack on Titan is a masterpiece. It is absolute greatness. The hype and enjoyment I get out of Attack on Titan are out of this world. But, a) the enjoyment feels a bit short-lived for me personally. It is a fantastic week after airing, but I tend to forget about it the next. b) Attack on Titan is simply not my type of show. Again, I do love Attack on Titan. Again, it is a masterpiece. And again, it may bump up a bit after a few episodes release, but as of now, Attack on Titan isn’t in my top 15.

(Honorable Mentions)

No Game No Life

Similar to One Punch Man, I thought No Game No Life was an anime for senseless fun and enjoyment. But then I watched the movie. The movie is canon to the light novels, but it is irrelevant to the plot and only contributes to the understanding of the world. However, since I watched that movie, I felt the world of No Game No Life to be more realistic. Of course, a world where games resolve all sorts of conflicts like war is ridiculous. But after watching the movie, that ridiculousness somehow turned to reality. The world of No Game No Life became fascinating to me, and what seemed like dumb games began to turn into political machinations.

(Honorable Mention)

Magi & Yona of the Dawn

All I have to say about these two anime is that they seemed to be very fascinating premises and concepts, but the anime sadly stops for both. I am considering reading the manga for both of them sometime soon, so this list may change once I do.

Number 5

Hunter x Hunter

If you like shōnen, I don’t see why you would hate Hiatus x Hai—I mean Hunter x Hunter. The only thing it slightly lacks is a strong main cast, which many people like anyway. Otherwise, absolute perfection. They have most of the best villains in all of anime: Hisoka, Chrollo, Meruem… How can you not love Meruem? And the way he parallels with Gon but in the opposite direction: just perfection. The arcs are hard to rank because they are all perfection in their own right. The best power system in anime is nothing short but perfection. If it weren’t for the Hiatus, it would be ranked fourth. I doubt it would scratch my top three.

Number 4

Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood

I know I kept saying perfection when talking about Hunter x Hunter, but I actually believe that Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood is the perfect series (Note: I am not saying that no one can love it and that it has to be your #1; obviously there are preferences. I’m merely saying that it perfectly crafts what it is trying to portray). The only two arguments you can bring is that the beginning is weak. But if you watch the 03 version, there are no issues whatsoever, in my eyes. Keep in mind, when I say it is the best, I mean from a narrative standpoint. Yes, the animation isn’t the greatest, and the gags are kind of bad, but from a general narrative standpoint, it is the best writing I have ever seen. The plot was brilliant and well-crafted. The world is beautifully bound by their power system: alchemy. The philosophical discussions and themes it explores always have you thinking. The characters are very likable and are all top tier characters. The mysteries keep you in a cycle of confusion and excitement. Since I love science and chemistry, alchemy was so fascinating to me. This show is definitely well-deserving of the number one rank in My Anime List.

Number 3

Kill la Kill

After listing a lot of the best anime/manga with the best stories and narratives, I can see why someone would be upset that I brought up Kill la Kill. This one is certainly the odd one out. However, remember me mentioning that the enjoyment factor is the biggest decision maker in my list placement? Kill la Kill gave me the most enjoyment out of all the anime on this list, even more significant than the obvious #1. I didn’t find anything to be all that brilliant in Kill la Kill, and I can completely understand if someone hated this particular show. But there was something about Kill la Kill that made me feel nostalgic in a weird way. It also gave me one of the weirdest yet most immense feeling of satisfaction I have ever felt. I love Kill la Kill.

Number 2

Konosuba

Okay yeah, this one is also the odd one out, but it is a little more acceptable. I find Konosuba to be the best comedy anime of all time. Not necessarily because it is the funniest anime (I think it is the funniest but comedy is subjective), but instead because, unlike most comedies, like Nichijo, the characters in Konosuba are absolutely brilliant. Kazuma is one of my favorite characters of all time, Megumi is best girl, but I still love both Darkness and Aqua. Their interactions are absolutely entertaining on both a comedic scale and a general enjoyment scale. Their assholeish-type relationship reflects my relationship with my friends (we are complete assholes to each other, but we also love one another).

Not only that but from the comedy focused anime that I have watched, the plot in this one is actually delightful. The Konosuba movie is my favorite movie of all time, right after A Silent Voice.

Number 1

One Piece

If you read a couple of my previous posts or recognized my profile picture, you probably knew that One Piece is my favorite anime of all time. My love for One Piece is so extensive that I would rather forget all my experiences with anime than forget my experience with One Piece. One Piece inspired me and changed my life. Not in the typical way where I learned a life lesson from the story like Plastic Memories, but simply because I found the writing to be so brilliant. So it was more that Eiichiro Oda, the author of One Piece, inspired me. The characters are the best I have ever seen, the villains are well crafted, the world-building is literally the best in all of fiction, the build-up is fascinating, the questions from the mysteries somehow keep piling over, the symbolism fleshes out aspects of the anime even more, the backstories make characters more relatable and understandable, the general dynamic flow of the world feels like reality, the themes it explores are great learning experiences, the originality never ends, the hype moments keep you energetic for more, the foreshadowing is so phenomenal to the extent where it shouldn’t exist, and the general planning of the story makes it obvious how amazing of an author Eiichiro Oda is.

This series has been airing weekly for nearly 22 years now, the manga for 25. How in the world is Oda able to create this monster of a story, planning certain elements a decade or two in advance? This is brilliance. This is beauty in writing. And I want nothing more than to create a masterpiece of my own.

Final Notes

Emotional, I know. I believe my list here is a bit diverse in terms of genre: shōnen, seinen, romance, comedy, sports, slice-of-life, and mystery. I think it’s a great thing to widen your horizons a bit by exploring various types of genres. Anyway, there are many anime I haven’t watched that could easily replace and dethrone some of the anime on this list. I plan on watching and reading Hajime no Ippo, Gintama, Vagabond, Oyasumi Pun Pun, I”s, etc. I heard these anime/manga are considered the best for their respective genres by many people, and I will probably finish reading and watching these anime/manga in about six months. So I will make a top 15 anime list once again around that time.

If you have any questions or you want to discuss something, feel free to ask in the “Ask Me Anything” tab on my Tumblr page.

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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How Final Destination Went From Real-Life Premonition to Horror Phenomenon

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The year 2000 was a scary one for horror films and not always in a good way.

While American Psycho and The Cell offered up visually striking nihilistic thrills to genre fans, the majority of horror movies released at the dawn of the new millennium were at best forgettable and, at worst, lamentable – yes, we’re looking at you, Leprechaun in the Hood.

This was the year of duff sequels like Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, Urban Legends: Final Cut and, though it is painful to admit, Scream 3. Horror fans were screaming out for something different, something exciting. They found it with Final Destination.

Discarding the stalk-and-slash thrills that had enjoyed a revival in the years following the release of Scream, Final Destination centered on a group of high schoolers who end up avoiding a fatal plane crash thanks to a premonition, only to discover there is no escaping death’s plan as one by one they are offed in a variety of brilliantly inventive “accidents”.

Released in March of that year, Final Destination was a sleeper hit with word-of-mouth helping the film to clean up at the box office, earning $112 million off a $23 million budget with more than half of that coming internationally.

To date, it has spawned four sequels as well as a variety of novelisations and comic book spin-offs while a franchise reboot is also on the horizon.

Movies

The Final Destination Movies, Ranked

By Sarah Dobbs

Jeffrey Reddick has worked on several films during his career to date but he’s probably best known as the creator of Final Destination. It’s something he has come to terms with.

“It’s probably going to end up on my gravestone, it’s such an ironic title,” he tells Den of Geek.

“Sometimes I’ll be out and I will hear someone say ‘you just had a Final Destination moment’ and it will make me smile. The whole thing just took on a life of its own.”

Nightmarish Origins

A screenwriter and director, Reddick recalls how his neighbors in rural Jackson, Kentucky, would laugh when his six-year-old self would tell them about his plans to work in the movie business.

An avid writer and reader of Greek and Roman mythology, he recalls spending his formative years watching horror movies with his friends. His mother was only too happy to indulge his burgeoning interest too, knowing it kept him out of trouble elsewhere.

Reddick’s life began to change after he saw A Nightmare on Elm Street.

“That film cemented my love of horror. I was this 14-year-old hillbilly from Kentucky but I decided I was going to write a prequel. I went home, banged it out on my typewriter and sent it to Bob Shaye.”

The legendary head of New Line Cinema initially dismissed Reddick’s draft out of hand, returning it with a note explaining the studio did not “accept unsolicited material.”

Undaunted, Reddick sent the script back with a note telling him “Look mister, I spent three dollars on your movie and I think you could take five minutes on my story.”

Shaye was impressed and struck up a bond with the youngster that saw him sending everything from scripts to posters to Reddick during his teenage years.

When Reddick moved to New York to study acting, age 19, he was offered an internship with New Line, which would become a full-time role despite acting being his “main passion.”

“Diversity in casting was not a thing at that time,” he recalls.

“My agent was like ‘I don’t know what to do with you as an actor. We can’t put you up for gangsters or pimps and you don’t rap and you don’t play basketball.”

“So I figured, screw it, I will just write stuff and put myself in it.”

Reddick was present at New Line during their company’s early 90s creative heyday and credits the experience with helping him get Final Destination off the ground.

“I learned a lot about how to get a movie made. I knew that to make a movie that connected with an audience you had to tap into something that was universal. Death is the ultimate fear.”

As luck would have it, the idea actually came to Reddick while on a flight back to Kentucky.

“I read about a woman who was on vacation and her mother told her not to take the flight she was planning to take home as she had a bad feeling about it. The woman changed it and the plane she was supposed to be on crashed.”

At that point however the idea wasn’t Final Destination. It wasn’t a film either. It was an episode of The X Files.

The Truth Is Out There

“I was trying to get a TV agent at the time and they recommended I write a spec script for something already on the air. I was a huge fan of The X Files and thought about a scene where somebody has a premonition and gets off the plane and then it crashes and used that as the plot.”

“It was going to be Scully’s brother Charles who had the premonition. He gets off the plane with a few other people but they start dying and Charles blacks out every time there is a murder so people suspect he is doing it.

I Still Want to Believe: Revisiting The X-Files Pilot

By Chris Longo

“The twist at the end was that the sheriff who had been investigating alongside Mulder and Scully the whole time had actually been shot and flatlined at the same time as the plane crash. Death brought him back to kill off all the survivors, including Charles.”

It would have made for a great episode except it was never submitted to The X Files. Reddick showed his spec script to some friends at New Line who were so impressed, they told him to develop it into a treatment for a feature, which was eventually purchased by the studio.

Producers Craig Perry and Warren Zide were brought onboard to develop the story and set about tweaking his idea.

“Originally the cast of survivors were adults because I wanted to explore more adult themes but Scream had come out and teenagers were hot again so New Line got me to change it”

In a twist of fate, two established writers from The X Files, James Wong and Glen Morgan, were brought onboard to rejig Reddick’s script.

“My version was definitely darker and more like A Nightmare on Elm Street,” he says.

“In my script, death would torment the kids about some kind of past sin they felt guilty about. They would then die in these accidents that ended up looking like suicides.”

For example, Todd’s death saw him chased into the family garage by an unseen specter where he accidentally ended up rigged in a noose triggered when his dad opens the automatic garage door.

Death is all around us

Ultimately that death scene and several others were ultimately scrapped in favour of what would prove to be the franchise’s calling card.

Reddick credits Wong and Morgan with coming up with the idea of having the film’s key death scenes kicked off by a Rube Goldberg machine-like chain-reaction that would see everyday things colliding to create a lethal scenario. It was nothing short of a masterstroke.

“It created this notion that death is all around us,” Reddick says.

“Death would use everyday things around us. It made it more universal and allowed us to set the deaths in places where people go all the time. The payoff would be fun but it was the build-up that had you on the edge of your seat.”

There was one major sticking point for the studio though: the presence of death, or rather the lack of.

“I fought really hard to make sure we never showed death because for me, if you didn’t show it, it could be something someone, no matter their belief system, could project onto our villain. That was a tough sell for the studio. They would be like ‘this doesn’t make any sense, you can’t see it and you can’t fight it’ but that’s the point, it’s death.”

“Luckily both James Wong and Glen Morgan were very insistent we never show it and tie it in to a specific belief system.”

Reddick credits the move with helping Final Destination become “an international phenomenon”.

“It struck a chord with people around the world. It broke out beyond the horror audience.”

Casting dreams

When it came to casting, Reddick had a clear idea of who he wanted in the lead roles, even if the studio’s opinion differed drastically.

“I had a wish list with Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst as my two leads but New Line was like ‘well…’”

He might not have got his first pick but Final Destination boasted an impressive cast of up-and-comers who had already made waves among teen audiences.

Devon Sawa had starred in Idle Hands, while Ali Larter was known for Varsity Blues and Kerr Smith was a regular on Dawson’s Creek. There was even room for Seann William Scott, fresh from his breakout turn in American Pie who was drafted in on the recommendation of producer Craig Perry, who told Reddick “you’ve got to get this kid, he’s going to be huge.”

Even so, Reddick was left a little unhappy.

“One of the conversations we had early on was like ‘Just remember this is set in New York, which is one of the most diverse cities in the world so let’s make sure we have some diversity in the cast’ and they were like ‘oh we will’ and then there wasn’t anyone who wasn’t white in it.”

New Line chief Bob Shaye did find a way to make amends on some level at least, casting Candyman horror icon Tony Todd in a cameo role as a mysteriously foreboding mortician.

“He called me up and said they had got Tony Todd and I flipped out. He is an icon. Such a talented, serious actor.”

As well as co-write the film, Wong took on directorial duties while each of the film’s death sequences would require careful planning, his first aim was to have the film start with a bang by creating as terrifyingly realistic a plane crash as possible.

“We want to do for planes and air travel what Jaws did for sharks and swimming,” he declared in one interview.

Yet the film would later garner criticism for its eerie similarities to the explosion and crash of TWA Flight 800 off East Moriches, Long Island, New York in 1996 where 16 students and five adults died.

“There was some criticism that the movie was written to exploit this real-life crash,” Reddick recalls.

“I even realised later they used footage from one real-life crash which I wasn’t particularly happy about.”

Indeed, much of the news footage shown in the film actually came from the 1996 crash.

That didn’t stop the film becoming a major hit and spawning a sequel within three years.

Final Destination meets Game of Thrones

Reddick returned to write the treatment for Final Destination 2, determined to move the franchise away from its teen Scream origins.

“We had tapped into that zeitgeist and didn’t have to do that again. I wanted to expand the universe and subvert it, so I had it open by following a bunch of teens who are then killed off.”

Once again, divine intervention led to divine inspiration for the opening set piece.

“Originally, I was going to have it open with some kids going to spring break and they stop off at this hotel and there is a fire but the producers were not sure. Writers always say you should go out and live life – life informs you and a lot of inspiration comes out when I go out for a walk.

“I was driving back to Kentucky to see my family and I got stuck behind a log truck and the idea just came to me. I pulled off the highway and called Craig and was flipping out with this idea for a log truck on a freeway.”

The resulting freeway pile-up that leads to multiple deaths is one Reddick ranks as his “favourite scene in the entire franchise.”

“The second film is my favourite. I wanted to create a sequel that didn’t feel like a remake of the first. It went in a more fun direction – but it’s still scary.”

That first sequel also represented the last of which Reddick was formally involved in, though he remained very much in the loop as the Godfather of the franchise, revealing that producers had been “looking at scripts before Covid hit.”

He also revealed that, at one point, things looked to be heading in an altogether different and thoroughly fascinating direction.

“There was talk about setting a Final Destination back in Medieval times. Like Game of Thrones in Final Destination. Craig Perry worked with a writer and they talked about the idea and put a teaser trailer together [which has leaked online].

“I would go and see that movie in a heartbeat but the studio said that the reason Final Destination was so popular was that element of deaths in normal, everyday situations.”

Future Destinations

Reddick hasn’t given up on a return to the franchise though, hinting at a “unique” idea he has for a new film that is simply too good to reveal yet.

In the meantime, he has been busy writing and directing Don’t Look Back, a film that shares some surface similarities with Final Destination and is painfully relevant to society today.

“It’s a mystery thriller about a group of people who witness someone getting fatally assaulted in a park and don’t help the person and somebody films them and puts it online. The public turns on the witnesses and someone or something is coming after them.”

Eager to make more horror films and celebrate diversity in his work, Reddick remains immensely proud of Final Destination and the impact it has had on audiences.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

“It’s cool. To have one movie that is going to be talked about after you die is a life goal. If that’s what I leave behind as a legacy that’s enough – but I still want more.”

Don’t Look Back is available on DVD & Digital from 14th June

The post How Final Destination Went From Real-Life Premonition to Horror Phenomenon appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3oUb1UD

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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mrsgaryrennell · 4 years

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hiii! 6, 8, 15, 18, 23, 25, 26, and 28 for both chloe and dicky! (sorry if these are too many lol) 💕

Oohh hii sis 💛💛💛miss you a bunch but thanks for asking 👀which btw don’t worry about putting to many lmao 🤡

Just beware of my lengthy essay 💀 alright so Dicky and Chloe

6. What were they like at school? Did they enjoy it? Did they finish? What level of higher education did they reach? What subjects did they enjoy? Which did they hate?

Dicky: This man was a problem as a child lol And no nothing tragic about his backstory, he’s just a chaotic mess 😂He was never a bully or anything, it’s just that he was really intimidating and really mean if ever approached lol but if he liked you enough, he’ll definitely be a chill guy to hang around with haha he’s not antisocial either. He hated school lol Dicky just never paid much attention and there were even times when he would skip class because he simply wasn’t interested 💀So you could say that he didn’t like the majority of the school material. Nonetheless, he did finish secondary school lol

Now, there were a few subjects he did enjoy or in his language were “alright” lol He didn’t mind staying for math class since it’s something he picked up pretty easily on lol I can see the teacher all 😯the first time because they didn’t expect Dicky to be so amazing at it and he’s very nonchalant about it, too lol I feel like math is something he’s naturally really skilled with but he doesn’t really see that in him haha And another school activity he enjoyed was a debate class lol he didn’t like learning laws and all but he really liked sitting across from someone and winning the debate every time 😂 mechanic boi has great argumentative skills 😌

Chloe: She was a very bright child in school. People were always impressed because of her talent and wit. And kids loved partnering up with her for school projects because she was great at leading the team to create great outcomes. Although, I can’t say that she was too popular in school nor did she make too many friends because they just thought she was a little weird for their taste lol Chloe tells herself that she didn’t mind being alone since she likes her alone time but she’s always been self conscious of being the oddball of the group 😭

While in primary and secondary school, she didn’t mind any of the classes like science, math, literature, etc. She did find charm in each subject but her most favorite subject in school was and still is history lol She’s fascinated by historical figures that committed stupid decisions 😂and she actually enjoys to sit down and watch history documentaries of anything really. Other than history, cello girl also found her love for music and performing arts 💛Music has always been kind of like her escape to peace

Lastly, she did go to uni and attended Juilliard School in New York for her musical career 🎶 Chloe has always enjoyed music and arts ever since she was a child so expanding her knowledge in this and making it into her professional career has become a huge highlight to her life 😌Of course, she came as one of the top of her class for her creativity, talent, and uniqueness!

8. Did they have pets as a child? Do they have pets as an adult? Do they like animals?

Dicky: So he didn’t have any pets while growing up nor does he have any right now. Jason doesn’t mind animals but they seem to not like him lmao So he rather stay away from nature 😂

Chloe: She didn’t have any pets when growing up either! She honestly had a lot going on during her childhood and asking for a pet was probably the least thing in her mind. And this could be a little be spoilery lol but it’s okay! Chloe does currently have a beautiful little boy named Frédéric, or Fred for short lol but named him after one of her favorite composers Frédéric Chopin!

15. Are they good at cooking? Do they enjoy it? What do others think of their cooking?

Dicky: We all know how much this grumpy man loves his food lol so he does know how to cook! I want to think that he does enjoy cooking since he knows he’s about to devour all of that within seconds lmao so he likes the anticipation. At this point in the story, I’m not sure anyone has tried Dicky’s cooking actually 🤔I guess we’ll see what others think of Dicky’s food later in the chapters 👀

Chloe: She is great at cooking, she loves it! She views it like a form of art so there’s a lot to appreciate for the uniformed ingredients for her 😌In fact, Chloe loves to cook in her spare time and learn more about it from other cultures. Cello girl also has a fascination for food so all the love and care she puts into the meal, it really comes from the heart 💛 So far, the people that she’s fed in the Villa has been the Chatham boys, Gary and Dicky, and they definitely approve of it haha

18. What’s their favourite genre of: books, music, tv shows, films, video games and anything else?

Dicky: I don’t think he really reads lol but he loves going over magazines with old fashioned and retro vehicles. He likes to learn about the evolution of cars, that nerd 😂With music, I think he has a liking for alternative rock, mellow rock, maybe a little of metal lol Although, Dicky did listen to some cringey emo music when a teenager but he doesn’t like to talk about that lmao He’s not into any TV shows but likes to watch Fast & Furious movies to trash on it but lowkey likes admiring the sports cars lmao And lastly on video games, he like horror types 💀He has a collection of horror video games and likes to sit down in the dark and play them lol

Chloe: Well, Chloe likes her history lol so she will gladly sit down to read about WWII or something like that 😂 And aw man lol music! This girl appreciates all types of music, but good music. Even though she’s really elegant and a classical musician (which still adores the classics ofc), she really appreciates the modern music like pop, hip hop, indie music, rock, you name it! So Chloe listens to anything and everything and her I’m sure her spotify is random af haha She’s not really into TV shows either but as far as films, she’s a huge nerd: Star Wars! She first fell in love with John Williams’ movie scores and came across the Star Wars one and was infatuated 😌She found out about the trilogy when she was a little older and loves to marathon the movies 💛And no video games lol she’s not really into that haha

23. Do they have a good memory? Short term or long term? Are they good with names? Or faces?

Dicky: This guy will only have a good memory if he cares lol So if he has any interest in anyone, he will remember names and faces but if he doesn’t care, then you’re out of luck 💀 you’ll be pretty forgettable to Jason lmao Overall, I think he does have a great memory if it’s regarding his job ofc and with the people he cares about and that’s about it haha

Chloe: She has a great memory! Because of her career and learning all those musical sheets by heart, Chloe gained a photographic memory 😌It will only take a couple of chats with someone for her thoroughly remember your name and face.

25. What do they find funny? Do they have a good sense of humour? Are they funny themselves?

Dicky: He has dark humor okay 💀he enjoys to mess with people for his own amusement. And he because dark humor is part of his personality, Jason doesn’t realize that he will say something dark and it’ll seem like a joke so people find it funny lol Overall, he is a funny guy but his humor isn’t for everyone 😂

Chloe: Cello girl is a sucker for bad puns lol And when anyone delivers a bad pun and no one laughs, that’s what she finds funniest lmao Her humor is the dry type, very “The Office” type lol I don’t think she’s aware of the US show but when she finds out, it will become one of her favorites lmao Chloe is also unintentionally funny, too. She’ll say or do something weird or random and it’s very humorous for others

26. How do they act when they’re happy? Do they sing? Dance? Hum? Or do they hide their emotions?

Dicky: Oooh Dicky, Dicky, Dicky lol this man always has a poker face hah But, you can still determine what his gestures are when he’s happy 😌Dicky may not be a very expressive man but he has a lot of micro expressions and mannerism. It’s really hard to spot it but if you’re an observant person, you’ll be able to determine when mechanic boi is in a good mood! Dicky’s eyes are a major give away lol his eyes will have a little bit of a shine and the outer corner of his eyes will squint a bit. Because he doesn’t wanna show too much of his smile, if he catches himself cracking a smile, he’ll run his hand down his face lmao that dork 💛

Chloe: The humming! She will instinctively start humming a song whenever she’s in a good mood. Like Dicky, Chloe has expressive eyes. She may not say she’s in a happy mood but just looking into her eyes, you’ll be able to tell that there’s something different to the shade and brightness. She doesn’t necessarily hide her emotions when she’s happy since she already has a calm and composed nature but her tone of voice is more friendlier than usual if she’s in a great mood, too. Another way to determine if she’s in a good mood is hearing her giggle a little more often than usual lol but more sore just little short giggles!

28. What is their biggest fear? What in general scares them? How do they act when they’re scared?

Dicky: lmaoo Jason would act like he’s a tough guy and say nothing scares him 😂 But he does have his moments where his voice will mildly crack after gasping if there’s ever a jumpscare lol

Getting a little real and serious about fright tho lol Dicky is afraid of failing able to protect the people he loves. That’s why Dicky is so protective of Gary since he knows Gary has body issues so he tries his best to be as supportive as he can for his friend. Another thing Dicky is scared of is losing a near and dear friendship. Again, he’s not one to make a lot of close friends, so if he ever screwed up and notices that they’re getting distant, this is something Dicky gets anxious about.

Chloe: She isn’t that type of girl that gets all scared of anything or everything lol she actually finds those type of girls a little annoying 💀She does have a fear for the ocean lol Chloe loves going to the beach, soaking in the sun and even taking a little bit of a swim but the thought of sailing scares her lol A way someone could tell that she’s scared is if her hands unevenly tremble and this is also a mannerism she has if she’s worried about something, too.

Now, a more serious fear she also has is trusting the wrong person. Chloe is a loyal person and can be devoted to them but if she’s always afraid of investing all of her energy into someone that doesn’t reciprocate the same devotion. This is why it’s really hard for her to let anyone in so easily and though she’s still a super friendly and polite girl, it’ll take a lot for someone to make her open up about her life, dreams, aspirations, etc.

Damn that was long and I apologize girl 🤡 but I hope you enjoyed it 💛 appreciate you asking about these dorks haha and if anyone is still interested in asking, here’s the link to the questions. I got another one to answer and I hope I get to it either tonight or tomorrow!

#love island game #litg #blue and hazel #litg Mc #litg OCs #litg dicky #this was fun and some of them were a bit spoilery but I tried to keep it as subtle as I could lol

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mk-wizard · 4 years

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Top 10 Things Robots In Disguise Did Wrong IMO

Hello, fans.

I really hate knocking a series because I hate trash talking, so I won’t do it, but rather, I will some criticism on Robots in Disguise aka RID. I had a lot of high standards for this show especially considering it was supposed to be a sequel to Prime. There are many things about it that didn’t sit well with me, but there ten things I feel really stood out that really hurt the show the most. Note that Strongarm is not one of those things. Not liking Strongarm is a matter of taste it is not the make or break aspect of an entire series. Despite what many people think, one character you don’t like doesn’t ruin an entire series.

1- It didn’t feel like a genuine sequel to Prime. - I understand that in RID, some time has passed after the end of Prime so things around going to be different. However, the only thing from Prime that was brought over to RID was Bumblebee himself and I felt he did not have a lot in common with his Prime counterpart. RID felt like a completely new show or rather like the sequel of another series. The old cast is never brought up or shown, old alliances seemed to have been forgotten and whatever happened to the Predacons? When making a sequel TV series, it should follow a certain level continuity with the series it is following kind of like how Beast Machines followed Beast Wars so smoothly.

2- Fixit’s performance as the first handicapped Autobot was rather insensitive towards the viewers. - I don’t mind Fixit being handicapped or being the comic relief, but I do find it kind of insensitive especially in today’s day and age for Fixit to be comic relief because he’s handicapped. He was portrayed as weak, an invalid and at times, incompetent which he clearly isn’t. In fact, he has an arsenal and can hold his own, but even after this was found out, he was put back into his “weakling” role. This is not a good look for Transformers. A lot of people watching the show wound up handicapped because of an accident like Fixit did or have handicaps similar to his, and I don’t think it’s very nice to give off the message that people like them are “broken” and this makes them clowns we should laugh at. This is backwards writing at its worst and shame on Hasbro for that.

3- Forgettable human characters. - In Prime, Jack, Miko, Raf, agent Fowler and even Jack’s mom had very strong personalities that made an impact in the show. They were actually helpful to the Autobots and could even be forces to be reckoned with. You could never say the humans of Prime were weak or just played humans in distress. They would rescue the Autobots just as often if not more so than the Autobots rescued them. In RID, Denny and Russel were not as impressive. If anything, Russel felt like a copy of Jack at times, but in a much weaker way. He lacked Jack’s maturity and character development. At times, I also wondered why Bumblebee never just tried to make contact with Agent Fowler at least upon returning to Earth (more on this later).

4- The quality felt like a step down from Prime. - I understand RID was supposed to appeal to a younger audience, but when you’re following an act like Prime, you should put your best foot forward even when presenting to kids. After all, Rescue Bots was also made for kids, but it took place in the same universe as Prime and never compromised its quality. RID felt very silly in its humour, the majority of the episodes felt like the old fashioned and outdated “monster of the day” formula, the plot felt made up as it went along and the characters were rather one dimensional.

5- It should have brought back a large majority of the Prime cast as regular characters. - I understand that even a sequel series is going to have a few new characters. Beast Machines did, but what it didn’t do was scrap 99.9% of the old cast for a new one. It didn’t fix what wasn’t broken and kept the characters who worked best for the series. Like I mentioned before, why didn’t Bumblebee ever try to contact the old human gang especially agent Fowler? Didn’t they keep in touch? And didn’t Ratchet stay on Earth at the end of Prime because he wanted keep Earth safe from any remaining Decepticons? And what happened to the Decepticons who were already on Earth? RID is supposed to be a sequel to Prime not a parallel. It should have brought back most of the old gang especially for its setting.

6- It had tons of plot holes. - As well as forgetting its own cast, RID forgot a lot of pivotal plot elements left behind by Prime that it should have worked with. The most obvious being the Predacons considering most of the enemies in RID had animal motifs. Also, if Bumblebee was so important on Cybertron, his absence would have been felt on Cybertron. People would have gone looking for him. And as mentioned before, there were already a lot of Decepticons still on Earth. It wasn’t necessary to bring in these new animal themed Decepticons.

7- Optimus stole Bumblebee’s spotlight. - RID was supposed to be the series where Bumblebee was supposed to shine, be the hero and leader, and possibly become a Prime. He kind of did those things, but the way Optimus was brought back overshadowed him a lot and that’s no good. Rescue Bots showed a good way to bring in Optimus as a guest or secondary character without overshadowing the heroes of the story. In Rescue Bots, Optimus is assisting, but stepping out of the way for the most part. In RID, as soon as Optimus came back, he completely got in Bumblebee’s way and even made him look bad. This just seems like muddled storytelling to me. Maybe it would have been better if Optimus hadn’t been brought back at all.

8- The enemies were rather lackluster. - Prime gave us tons of enemies that shocked us, had grit and were not afraid to be truly bad like Megatron the conqueror, Starscream the snake and of course, Unicron himself who truly did live up to his chaos bringing persona. And even Predaking was the stuff of nightmares yet at the same time, has this majestic aura hence his name. The enemies of RID felt like a bunch of thugs, they were mostly monsters of the day and even Megatronus felt like a step down in villain quality. He didn’t make me feel anything really and while I know the series wanted to be child friendly, I think it tried too hard. Megatronus just felt like a lesser version of Unicron and many of the villains felt like lesser versions of their Prime counterparts. And this is bad. Even when they explained their motives, I didn’t feel like they delivered that impression that they were all that bad. Just more like they were trying to play the role of being bad like actors in a show. Pardon the harsh criticism, but that’s how I felt.

9- The ideas it presented had been done before. - I hate saying this, but everything I saw in RID had been done before in other Transformers series. None of the ideas felt that fresh at all especially not the setting of Autobots being marooned on Earth and then needing to fight the Decepticons marooned there with them. Like, come on! Even the idea of reviving Optimus had been done before. I think the plot of RID would have benefited more and would have had more of an opportunity to be original if it had literally picked up where Prime had left off with rebuilding Cybertron or tying up loose ends left by Prime.

10- Bumblebee’s performance felt like a step down after Prime. - In Prime, Bumblebee went from being a Scout to a full blown Megatron slayer. He was a badass who didn’t take trash from anyone and he knew what to do without needing to say it. And as soon as he did have a voice, he showed a lot of promise as a leader in every way possible. However, in RID, he seems to have regressed in both leadership skills and in maturity. He’s goofy in all the wrong ways, he is overly concerned with catchphrases and he can’t keep his team together. As mentioned before, RID Bumblebee did not give me the impression that he was the same Bumblebee from Prime. He felt like a different guy.

To anyone who is a fan RID, I don’t mean to offend you. I just had to get this off of my chest. Usually, I don’t care for a sequel following its legacy, but RID felt like a huge drop in standards to the point where it didn’t even look like a sequel anymore.

To anyone who agrees with me, what are your thoughts and what reasons can you think of that caused RID to not live up to Prime’s legacy?

#transformers #transformers fandom #transformers prime #transformers robots in disguise #robots in disguise #prime #tfp #arcee #bulkhead #ratchet #transformers rid #rid #bumblebee #autobots

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beevean · 2 years

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Your thoughts on Zero 4? :P

So it’s safe to say that I can rank the Zero games like this: Z1 < Z4 < Z2 ≤ Z3.

Z4 was basically the X5 of the Zero series... in more ways than one, actually. No, seriously, there are a lot of funny similarities between the two if you think about it :o but more importantly: Z4 has some odd mechanics that apparently make it more divisive.

Most of these mechanics are streamlined compared to the previous games. No more elves/disks to find, you have to raise one elf almost like a Chao; no more grinding; the hub world is much smaller and condensed; all 8 bosses are selectable from the start like in the Classic and X series; no more Elemental Chips, the only elemental attacks are the EX Skills; only 3 weapons right from the start, and btw the Z Knuckle is pretty fun to use and there are some interesting puzzles with it, like stealing a light and using it to repel the Scrap Elves. The novelty, the weather system, is fairly easy to manage, and it’s just a matter of guessing which weather would benefit you and which the boss: it also massively simplifies the process of gaining EX Skills, because now you just need to play a level in the “wrong” weather, reducing the ranking system once again to bragging rights.

... and then there’s the parts mechanic that can compete with X5 in sheer obtusity lol. I had to use a guide, especially to get my beloved Double Jump and Kuuenzan <3 but yeah, at this point I’d rather find disks in the levels, it’s not like sometimes you have to grind a while until enemies decide to be merciful and spawn parts 🙄 I think you can have an easy time even if you just level up Croire the elf... but even that requires a boring amount of grinding for the higher levels :V

The levels also felt shorter for some reason, maybe because of the lack of collectibles. The gimmicks are a bit hit or miss: for example, Heat Genblem’s level was very reminescent of Mattrex’, which I didn’t particularly love, while Sol Titanian’s was more interesting, as avoiding being burned by the sun pushed you to climb fast. I found Popla Cockapetri’s level rather forgettable, while Tech Kraken’s “reach the bottom of this wrap-around made in 140 seconds” section was really cool and it’s a shame you don’t get to play it again. Mino Magnus’ level wins for the originality of its magnetism gimmick - you’d think the Megaman series would play more with the limits of being a robot!

The game looks as pretty as Z3 with some beautiful parallax use, while the soundtrack... eh? I think it’s rather uneven in quality, some tracks are less memorable (Sleeping Beast, Blackheart Beat, Nothing Beats) while others are just bangers (Esperanto, Queen of Hurt, Crash IV, Straight Ahead, Cyberspace). The Zero series has always favored “edgy” rock, but Z4 has probably the least amount of variation which makes most tracks blend together, but on their own they’re good! Special shout out to the Japanese version of Next New World for including full singing voice.

I left the plot for last because b o y. We’re not in the Resistance Base anymore, Zero, Ciel and three other operators have gone freelancers. We actually see humans for the first time! And ngl I felt their mistrust and resentment towards Zero. Usually the concept of humans being racists towards androids is used as a poorly thought parallelism with real life (coughcoughdetroitbecomehumancough), but here it’s a natural and even understandable consequence (from their limited POV) of the events of the X and Zero series.

And then halfway through the morally grey anti villain destroys Neo Arcadia to take down Weil! Twenty million people dead! And Weil wasn’t even one of them! Yay!

Sidenote, while the humans were sort of there (even Neige’s personality doesn’t go much beyond “intrepid reporter”), Craft was an interesting character, always bordering between being noble, being pragmatic, and being a coward. Also quite a tank in battles!

also rip guardians, apparently uncerimoniously killed when omega went boom

The atmosphere of the very last level is stellar. Hearing this track droning on as you see the planet in the background, knowing that it’s at stake... I’ve felt a punch in the gut comparable to the first time I entered the Omega Territory in Metroid 2. Weird comparison, I know, but no other Megaman game went for this “you’re going to die” approach.

I was tense throughout the entire level. The bosses took out a lot of energy from me and I was terrified of reaching Weil with anything less than full energy and full Sub Tanks. And I was right: this piece of shit is tough.

And then the second phase starts, and as Zero declares that he’s not a hero, he just fights for the people he believes in, and for them he’s willing to give his life, Falling Down plays, which is competing with Chaos Angel in my head for the title of Best Masterpiece On The GBA. Seriously, fuck me, I’ve listened to it quite a few times before, but hearing it in context (plus the apprehension at the thought of facing the boss) made my throat tighten. Very few moments in videogames could elict such a physical reaction from me.

And finally, after a short but grueling battle, Zero dies, for real.

I might be a little emotional.

Oh, and before you ask, Chikao Otsuka is the GOAT. “Ware wa akuma da!” indeed :P

Personally I can see why the game is so divisive, but I still can’t put it below Z1. It still benefits from many of the improvements of Z2 and Z3 and it was overall an enjoyable experience! I just think the finale overshadows everything else and the parts system needed to be reworked.

I don’t know if I’ll replay it anytime soon... Maybe I will, but I will skip the end because it got me :(

#megaman #megaman zero 4

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bespectacled-panda · 4 years

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after seeing dumpywoof’s post I was inspired to do a tier list of my own!!! and boy howdy do I have some hot takes of the century it turns out,,,

the seasons are more or less organized in descending order within the same row as well (e.g. MC 4 > MC 5). also, shamefully copying dumpywoof & putting a detailed & overly verbose explanation for each season:

S Tier

Terraria 3: For me, absolutely nothing compares to Terraria 3. No other season combines such perfect participant dynamics with such heart-wrenching drama—not to mention the existence of Team New Kids who make me cry on a daily basis, or the incredible fake twist ending. It would be a sin to put this season anywhere but alone at the very top. Also props for being the only (1 of 2) post-show that actually includes all of the cast.

A Tier

Minecraft 4: This is the best season for shenanigans alone, hands-down. It’s largely just the participants shooting the shit together, especially in the latter half of the season when it gets down to just the four of them. & I have a huge soft spot for men being wholesomely foolish together I suppose, so here it goes fhdhfhd.

Minecraft 5: To be honest, I have not seen this season since it released, which is a crime, I know, I’m sorry :orb: But I remember it being very very good, & I cannot imagine my taste will have changed that dramatically in just a few years, so. in truth, this one might be actually better than MC 4, but as I have not seen it in many years I can’t say that for certain. Either way, though, it’s definitely one of the best seasons out there.

MineZ 1: To me, MineZ 1 is the reverse of MC 4: low on shenanigans & high on drama. It’s pre-Todd era, but the editing in this one is honestly Todd-level, I would say. It’s so incredibly tense, especially the scene with McJones & PBG trying to escape the caves, and I feel like the sheer stress of it all brought out a new side of a lot of the participants, most notably Dean—who sounded genuinely agonized at times. A very very quality season all around, IMO.

Terraria 2: This season probably objectively deserves to be B tier, but I am it giving A tier for personal bias. I just,,, love the dynamics okay. Jeff & McJones especially made for a killer duo. It was a rare instance of McJones being the funny man himself rather than being the straight man to someone else’s funny man; he was super uncharacteristically goofy & almost borderline flirtatious at times, it really made for some good moments fhdhfjd. Plus then you got McJones solo commentary at the end which I greatly enjoyed. Just,, a very enjoyable season, very mid-HC era, very light & easy to watch, all that good stuff.

Diablo II: Man,,,,this absolutely 100% does not deserve A tier, I know, I’m sorry, but I just can’t bring myself to put it lower. I have A tier love for it :orb: Admittedly, the game is horrendously ugly and confusing to watch, but the shenanigans + the cast dynamics win me over in the end. Paul especially was great in this, & I hope he makes a return someday. Loving fathers Paul & Jirard with their sorceress son McJones making their way through the end-game just cannot be beaten. (Anti-shoutouts to Ross though, I don’t know anything about him, I am sure he is a lovely man, but GOD. WHY DID HE KEEP RUNNING OFF ON HIS OWN & GETTING LOST BUT THEN FORCEFULLY REFUSING HELP,,, ROSS YOU ARE THE WORST DHDHFJDJD)

B Tier

Minecraft 7: Boy,,, this is going to be a controversial take fhhfjdjf. I just don’t know how to explain it, but something about MC7 felt,,,, Very off. I don’t know what it was, just something about the season seemed very,,, almost like you could tell things were falling apart behind the scenes, & they were trying to pull it back together but weren’t quite succeeding. It’s not a bad season in any regards, of course, I just,, don’t enjoy it nearly as much as a lot of others,, it’s missing that crucial spark of life in my opinion,, also Dean leaving to go to work was kind of strange,, I get it, it’s probably difficult to work around his real-life job,, but it felt strange,, he got like temporary immunity. Nothing like that had ever happened before I don’t think. And also they never even explained why Dean wasn’t there for like three episodes fjdjfjhd,,

Minecraft 3: God I feel like I just keep digging myself into a deeper & deeper hole here fhsjfjd,,, but man, I did like MC3 to be honest. It wasn’t the best season, it kind of went nowhere, but I liked the cast & there was a lot of good funnymoments. Smooth & Shane were very good guests who I feel like really rounded out the season, & Jontron did not come off as terribly overbearing as I believe that he has in other seasons. Overall, pretty decent, I’d say.

C Tier

Minecraft 2: MC 2 & MC 3 are very similar, but I think MC 2 is slightly worse, both in terms of entertainment & cast. NCS & Kyrak did not hit like Smooth & Shane did,,, and I feel like just everything that happened in this one was fairly forgettable. I was torn as to whether this should be a B or a C, but I put it here in the end just to drive home that I really don’t like it as much as MC 3, I don’t believe.

Minecraft 6: Oh lord, this is a nuclear take fhdjfjd. Again, this isn’t a bad season at all, it has its good moments, especially Chad & Dodger, they are angels & I love them & want them back. But boy,,, just. Many things went wrong here. None of the twists panned out like,, at all, which I know isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault, the concept of this twist & of twists in general is very good. But it fell so flat here, especially with the revival. There was,, no debate at all about what to do. They hyped it up like they had this big decision to make, but then nobody made any effort to dramatize it at all. It was basically just Dean deciding by himself and everyone just sitting back & letting him. For the record, I have no qualms with the fact that Dodger was revived, I fully agree that she deserved it over McJones, but it was not played well at all IMO,,, I do have to admit, though, with a fair amount of sheepishness, that the thing that most sullies this season for me is McJones’s death. Just,,, his horrible, so so avoidable, insanely early death, coupled with his retirement shortly thereafter & him becoming so jaded with hc that he expressed borderline hostility & hatred towards it just,,, hurts. I kinda don’t wanna see the events of MC 6 now knowing the aftermath. I understand fully that this particular point is not something most people care about to say the least dhfhdjd, but,,, in all honesty, I really don’t have any desire to rewatch this one, as objectively good as it might be. It was a win but it felt like a loss, if that makes sense. Also the post-show lacked all three people I actually wanted to hear from fhdjfjd neither the two people who could’ve been revived nor the actual person who did the reviving were there to share their insight & perspectives on it :pensive:

D Tier

Starbound: man,,, starbound. This is a very mixed bag for me. On one hand, I disagree with people who say that it was boring or that nothing happened, I found it very tense, Todd’s editing had me on edge throughout every episode. But on the other hand,,, man. Very few memorable moments, what even happened in this one,, also I feel like the game mechanics/plot weren’t explained very well, I feel like I remember being vaguely confused all the time as to what was happening. Probably will not ever rewatch either.

Have Not Seen

DayZ: I will not ever be watching this season both because I do not know anything about DayZ & because from what I’ve heard it was an absolute disaster, I’m just not interested in getting involved in that fhdhfjdk

Terraria 1: There’s not really a reason I haven’t watched this one. Just,, I haven’t made my way down to the earliest seasons yet. Although as mentioned before, I have seen a few clips of this season, & Jontron seems to be pretty obnoxious in this one, so I don’t how much I’ll enjoy the parts with him in it, but I definitely do want to watch it someday.

Minecraft 1: The same as Terraria 1, I just happen to not have seen this one by chance. But unlike T1, I am much more looking forward to actually watching it, it seems really good, I want to experience that legendary very first season at last dhdhfjd

MineZ 2: Man,,, many things about the behind-the-scenes of this season make me sort of uncomfortable honestly. Just,,, the visceral second-hand shame & embarrassment of someone in the hc fandom being so rude & bothersome to the cast,, somehow it makes me feel personally responsible even though I didn’t do anything fhdjfj,,, Also,, once again continuing with the trend of me being saddened by McJones expressing dislike for seasons fhdjfjd,, I do recall him saying, regarding this season, something like “I think it would’ve been better if we just never did this,” which,,, ow. That doesn’t make me particularly enthused to watch it fhdjfjd. I probably will end up watching this season someday to be honest, but I’m not looking forward to feeling the cast’s frustration & unhappiness with the situation,, (EDIT: I want to be clear that there is no actual drama surrounding minez 2!!! it is a perfectly fine season, there is nothing wrong with it, it just happens that I personally am bothered by the fact that there was a lot of like,,, frustration coming from the participants regarding the player who was stalking them. this in no way means that minez 2 is an objectively bad or problematic season!! if minez 2 is your favorite season I completely respect you, there is nothing wrong with that!! there is a lot to like about the season as a whole!!! I just personally care too much about mcjones having a bad time in seasons bc it’s what ultimately led to his retirement, & that makes me sad fjdhfjdjd. but it has come to my attention that my wording made it sound like there was drama about minez 2, which there never actually was, I am very very sorry for my unintentional yet poor choice of words.)

#私がポストしたもの #about time I have a 'my own posts' tag #I hardly make them but they do exist from time to time #also god. good lord this is so long.#get me talking about pbg hc & I just won't ever stop fhdhfhdh #shoutouts to anyone who actually reads this #also again. this is by no means my opinions on objective season quality. fhshfjdj #this is just my opinions on how much I personally like & would rewatch each season

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clonerightsagenda · 4 years

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Way back in 2016 once I knew how TLC was going to end, I wrote a... send-off of sorts. Like anything else postgame, this is compliant rather than canon to that ‘verse, but I thought I might as well share in the spirit of posting a lot of ancient stuff out of my Dropbox recently.

A new universe out of seed B2 finally blossoms, and Skaia gets to work. The imbalance has been removed; the proper order of things has been restored. Now the business of repairing the multiverse can begin. There are lotuses to be planted, temples to be founded, and wheels to be set in motion. Something is different – a few of the terminals are disconnected; the texture of the new world doesn’t compile the same – but the agents will take care of that. Skaia plays the long game.

It gives them a few years to settle in. Victors don’t like to be reminded of the game too soon. Some get upset, even if the game is what has raised them to their exalted state. Most are too tired or lost to object, but they had to be fighters to get this far. Better to let them grow comfortable now that the war is won. But the seeds of the next game need to be planted, so after a decade it sends the first temple meteor through.

The Witch appears in a shimmer of green fire and waggles her finger at it like it’s a naughty animal. Then she snaps her fingers, and the meteor shrinks to the size of a pebble, which she catches and squeezes in her fist. Without the temple, a whole game session that could have been fizzles and dies, taking its Veil and Reckoning with it, and the meteor itself vanishes in a puff of displaced probability.

This is not how things are supposed to go.

Sometimes heroes are uncomfortable with their universe’s inevitable future, especially if they are closely involved in the welfare of new races. The rare winners to have offspring of their own tend to be even more militant. Sentimentality can be useful in small doses. Skaia can afford to wait. It gives them a century, long enough to become familiar with death, decay, the passing of time, long enough to appreciate the need for measures to shed a dying universe and birth a new one. Then it sends a temple lotus, and they let it blossom. That’s better.

When the temple is fully grown, the Time heroes and the Page visit it, running through the halls, admiring the carvings, and calling to each other. They even leave small objects scattered around it – offerings?

Then the Maid grins wickedly, punches a button, and the temple goes up in smoke.

Next time, the Prince unsheathes a comically large katana and chops through the entire meteor, sending the two halves spiraling harmlessly into space. Skaia does not even attempt to interfere. It can’t help but let a good callback happen. His hand gesture afterward is uncalled for though.

Most players do not last long. Even those that claim godhood turn on each other or make poor choices, dissolving into nothing but scraps of legend and memory. That is best – fewer variables, no one with the power to challenge the greater good. The only ones who evade death are those who do nothing. It is part of the plan. Skaia has never encountered this before. Most heroes are too shellshocked or grateful to object, or they’re inflated in self-importance, believing the new world is their due. They don’t grasp eternity. The eventual restart of the cycle doesn’t bother them. They don’t have to play again.

But these players have taken offense. They block its attempts to seed their world, and it cannot send them carefully curated dreams on Prospit anymore to guide them in the way it wants.

Skaia has no voice, and the game guides who remain have refused to heed its commands, but it has ways of being heard. It contacts the Seer of Light. She of all people can understand thinking toward the future.

“We were charged with protecting the universe,” she says. “We’re doing our jobs.”

Can’t she sense the death throes of every genesis frog they prevent? Isn’t her vision full of the opportunities falling away? The Lord of Time no longer forces them down any one path, so broken loops wither and die, but the pain remains. There are rules, Skaia says.

The Seer’s voice turns deadly. “This is not a game.” Then she summons a cloud of void (since when do proper Light players do that?) and cuts the connection.

If Skaia could feel, it would have started to get annoyed.

The next time a meteor passes through a defense portal, Skaia knows the players cannot interfere. One does appear, but she does nothing but watch as the meteor crashes into the planet that was born in a universe long since gone.

You cannot prevent this. Skaia has not had to interact with anyone on this level in a long time. Its thoughts are rusty, long worn into established patterns. If you do, your timeline is forfeit. This loop is already done. The game must be played.

“I know,” says the player. There is something unsettling about her. “I played it.”

She wears the garb of a Muse, rarest of Classes. She hails from a session that is yet to be, but one that has already shaped her. Time is not Skaia’s domain, but this at least is simple. Then you understand, Skaia says. Are you finished with these pointless acts of defiance?

“Haven’t you noticed?” she asks, and her voice is unsettling too. “We let you have this one. But nowhere else. Nothing else. It ends here, with this session, this loop. You’re finished.”

Creation has no end.

“Of course it doesn’t. But you don’t own it all.” She spreads her arms. “Can’t you feel it? All around us?”

Worlds are dying that were never born. Worlds you prevented. Are you proud?

“We’ve helped worlds to become, too. There’s a new system. A new game. Our rules.” She frowns. “You really can’t sense them, can you? You’re as blind as he was. What was left of him, anyway, just like you’re what’s left of her.”

…

She squints, like she’s trying to look at Skaia, although of course there’s nothing to see. Skaia is everywhere and part of everything. It is used to this. Still, she should direct her attention elsewhere. “I suppose you’re not exactly her. It’s a situation more like the alpha timeline and how it was a reflection of his will. I wondered if she left a splinter of herself, like Dirk used to. Something inspired. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to grow up all alone. I know why you see them all as chess pieces. I had to learn. You never could. I wish we could teach you, but I don’t think there’s much left.” She leans forward. “Can I teach you?”

There is nothing to learn.

“I thought I should try,” she says. “Everyone deserves a chance.” She regards the planet of her birth in silence for a while and then turns away. “Goodbye,” she says. “Calliope.”

At the end of things, Skaia is there to bear witness. It does not feel sadness or satisfaction, just a knowledge of what is. All other routes have been blocked off. Its only path is through this session, a session that feeds back on others and spawns no new worlds. The chain of universes is broken.

There are victors there to watch too, although not as many as there were. Skaia does not understand this. It does not see heroism in arms spread wide, cannot grasp the dignity in being ready to be finished. It is used to sacrificing pawns when need be, but these things are beyond it.

The Heir is one of those that remain. “I don’t have a terminal,” he says, “but I don’t think I need one anymore. Your name is Calliope. You are.”

Your name is not Calliope. You are not a you. You are an it, a force, a process that cannot be questioned or challenged or changed. Aren’t you?

Then what is this you, that thinks these things?

There are memories faded and warped like files copied over one too many times. They bubble up: the years of loneliness, the crystal cave, etching visions on the clouds and sending them into people’s dreams so they’ll make what ought to happen true. All in the service of what must be, marshaling countless children torn from the ashes of dead worlds to serve your will. Expendable. Forgettable.

What have you done?

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Remembering is hard sometimes. But it’s worth it in the end.” Then he blinks away.

The Maid goes last. She watches the universe tearing itself to shreds, blank white nothingness poking through. There are few places left to be, so when she turns she is looking at you. You? Is there anything to see?

“Well,” she says, “this is it. It’s been fun. Are you ready to go yet?”

It’s hard to find words. You are an echo of someone who died a long time ago, nothing but her voice cast into the void. But a named thing is a real thing. It can choose. G… “Go?”

“To whatever’s next. I’ve shown a lot of people the way, but I’ve never gone myself. But everyone else is there, so we’d better go.” She holds out her hand, and Skaia (Calliope?) (you?) wish you could take it. In some sort of metaphysical way (and everything is metaphysical here, at the end of all sessions, as creation swallows its own tail) you do. She smiles. “You’ll see. It’ll be an adventure.”

#kat writes fic #tlcverse #and now to get ready for work

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takaraphoenix · 4 years

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Buffy: Season 1

I’m finally getting around to that Buffy the Vampire Slayer rewatch. And I considered posting about it, but then I decided a seasonal summary would be more fun, especially since the seasons - the individual episodes - tend to blend together because I always watch all of it. So, I’ve decided to make round-up posts after every season!

1. Favorite character of this season?

Buffy. The first season so perfectly sets her up as a complex character – so often, female leads get shoehorned into one box, one archetype. They also either get to be a Tough Girl, or a Girly Girl. But Buffy is so... perfectly both. She is a total badass but she is also a giggly girl talking about boys and hoping about school dances and cheerleading. Yet at the same time, she also has these... very, very human vulnerabilities. Her fear of abandonment when it comes to her father, her fear in the finale about her death. Yet she remains standing strong and true to her ideals and her duties.

She is an amazing character all on her own, but especially groundbreaking as a female lead character – and she will always be that, because even right now, twenty something years later, Hollywood is still struggling with writing fully fleshed out female leads without just shoehorning them into The Lover, The Badass or The Mother role like they can't have more complexity.

2. Outstanding minor character (positive or negative)?

Jesse. Look, yes, he is only in the first two episodes but I am still not over this. Him, Willow and Xan were friends, were a trio, prior to Buffy coming to this school. They must have been friends for years and just... for these normal 16 year olds who never really encountered Hellmouth-ish things before to lose one of their best and longest friends? There is an impact there that sadly doesn't stick. Like, he's just dead, no one talks about him or mourns him again even though this would have been a cutting event for Xander and Willow. And then there is the potential of an alternate reality where he would have absolutely become a Scooby had he survived. I don't know, I think about this a lot.

3. Favorite character dynamic?

Willow and Buffy. I love the way their friendship stands out, even among the Scoobies – though naturally I love the whole Scooby dynamic. But just, from the first episode on when Buffy had the chance to join the Popular Mean Girls and saw the way Cordelia treated Willow, she chose to instead spend time with Willow and from thereon out, their dynamic just grew closer and cooler.

The shy nerd and the cool cheerleader (well, only for one episode but you know what I mean – the pretty blonde who had the potential to be a Cool Girl). It's especially outstanding because in her interactions with Willow, Buffy truly gets to be the teenage girl. The girly kind of teenage girl who giggles and talks about boys and gets to be carefree, even just for a few moments.

4. Favorite canon romantic ship?

Angel and Buffy. David and Sarah have such great chemistry, the way they play off each other, how they put the longing into their performance, just how tragic this set-up is for them, the weird mystery to it all. Best Romeo and Juliet, really.

5. Least favorite canon romantic ship?

Angel and Buffy.

Look, I know that tumblr only deals in black and white, in “pure, healthy ship that can be loved” and “unhealthy, problematic ship that needs to be condemned”, but personally I like nuances and I like applying some critical thinking even to the things I love.

So I can absolutely love the way this is played out, the actors' chemistry, the tragic of it all and still also acknowledge just how creepy and frankly uncomfortable it is that this 240 year old dude has the hots for a sixteen year old kid.

6. Favorite episode?

The finale, “Prophecy Girl”. It is such a good pay-off of the season and it is also so... painful. When Buffy realizes she's going to die, when she decides to go despite knowing her fate. Giles' act of defiance, his first time clearly stepping out of his role as the Watcher as he decides to go and face the Master himself to avoid Buffy's death. How Angel and Xander, of all people, team up to go and help Buffy out. It also marks Cordelia's first proper participation with the Scoobies, as unwilling as it may be (I can't quite count the whole 'invisible girl trying to kill Cordy' as Cordelia actually joining them). A lot of good stuff and good pain.

But also shout-out to episode 9 “The Puppet Show” - I like the creep-factor of this episode, the set up for the twist, the certain low-key pain linked with Syd. Also I am very afraid of creepy dolls so the whole thing is even more of a creepy episode for me.

7. Least favorite episode?

I don't like episode 4 “Teacher's Pet” because it's really gross overall – I mean, it's a giant insect posing as a teacher to perv on students so they'll fertilize her eggs. So many levels of eeew.

But episode 5 “Never Kill a Boy on the First Date” is incredibly bland and forgettable, like... really forgettable, as much as I appreciate the 'Buffy attempts to Regular Date' angle. So kind of a tie.

8. Favorite Monster Of The Week?

Fear, from episode 10 “Nightmares”, if that counts. Because it's not a demon, or vampire, or monster. It's... well, fear itself. It also presented such a fascinating insight into Buffy as a character, to show her fears, but to also show Giles' fear of failing her, of having her die on him. I love how with all the monsters and things she has to face, her biggest fear is that her dad doesn't love her. It's so surprisingly deep – surprising in the sense that we get to see that Buffy is a complex character, not just the girly cheerleader-type girl, not just The Chosen One, but rather that she is very much also just... a girl, with family issues, with very real and human fears.

9. Least favorite Monster Of The Week?

Mh, it depends, because for the most part I don't find the Monsters of the Week overly memorable this season. “The Puppet Show” has a very weak and forgettable actual villain, however he only takes a backseat because the other plot stands more in the forefront and the focus is deliberately elsewhere and that is what makes me like the episode so much.

10. Rate the overarching villain!

The Master always seemed to me like a... not very fleshed out villain. Vaguely archetypical ancient evil demonic overlord. But that's kind of just... it. Why is he so important? What really makes him so special? And he very much is the Thanos of the Buffyverse – just sitting on his throne, waiting, occasionally standing up. He's a good enough opening act for the show, I'll give you that – because he checks the boxes. And, admittedly, the main focus is on establishing the Scoobies and their dynamics and their individual personalities, so it checks out.

Bonus: Other thoughts?

As above mentioned, I find the whole centuries old being lusting after a sixteen year old really questionable and this season went hard for it – because it's not just the main romantic plotline of the season, it's episode 4 “Teacher's Pet” with the praying mantis who poses as a teacher and seduces her students, it's episode 8 “I Robot, You Jane” with the ancient demon catfishing Willow, it's episode 9 “The Puppet Show” with the adult-turned-puppet who is perving on Buffy and any other girl he can lay his eyes on.

Having it only be the main romantic plotline would be one thing, but if you have that and additionally three out of thirteen episodes that have a focus on the theme, then it becomes... questionable, in my opinion.

In other news, I absolutely love Cordelia and I love that even season one already gave a tiny bit of insight into her being more than just the shallow bully she pretended to be.

I also love the unorthodox/modern interpretations of things – the demon who got scanned into the internet, the prophecy about Buffy's death that was then just kind of canceled out by the existence of CPR to revive her, the 'techno paganism', the white bus as stand-in for Death's pale horse.

It also establishes the Scoobies really well already, both as individual characters and in their dynamics among themselves. I will always love the Found Family trope of this show. Always.

So, yeah, overall slightly weak individually speaking, but a rather good overall start for the show!

#Buffy the Vampire Slayer #Phoe Watching Buffy

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gfesgersgersg · 4 years

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My Thoughts About Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals

I recently revisited a game from my childhood: Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals. I never finished this game when I was younger, because I found it too scary to progress. As strange as it seems, this game’s first hour started my interest in science fiction, and I still enjoy the genre in books and games today, despite never finishing the game.

I played up to what I’d call the start of the end of the first act of the game, getting up to the Corona vortex on the planet Genshi. This is probably a super biased article, as I think about this game a lot. It reviewed poorly with critics and I think this was probably justified. It is also worth mentioning that I did not play the first Spectrobes game.

If you intend on playing this game, spoilers are ahead. The short version is that I enjoy the characters, but the last parts of the game are far weaker than the start. The gameplay is largely uninteresting, and the game isn’t really something I would recommend anyone play.

The Good

The music in this game is fantastic. The game always has some music playing, no matter what’s going on. Among my favourites are the character-specific tracks that play during dialogue, and the track that plays when you solve a puzzle. The music goes a long way toward selling the game’s environments, too. The music on the populated planets in the Nanairo system largely sounds upbeat, and reflects the planet you are on. This contrasts with the music on the planets that are “beyond the portals”, which sound quite alien. The music on Hyoga is calm and slow, fitting with a cold, lifeless planet. The music on Fons is calm but more sombre, and is very foreboding, fitting with the point in the story it is encountered. The music on Darkmos and Nox both fit with the artificial themes of these planets and are opposites somewhat to Fons and Hyoga.

Some good tracks would be: Ready For Action!, Hyoga, Darkmos and Fons.

The environments in this game are pretty impressive for the Nintendo DS. A lot of the backgrounds are 2D, which shows, especially in the city on Nessa, and on Fons. However, they look great in my opinion. Most impressive are the safe areas, such as Kollin and Colony. These environments really sell the Nanairo system as a real place.

The characters in this game are excellently written. By no means is the story a masterpiece, but the game’s characters entirely carry its story. Rallen and Jeena make a great duo, with entertaining banter. They reference each others’ quirks and joke around with each other. The supporting characters are good too. Commander Grant is very serious but clearly likes Rallen and Jeena. Cyrus and Webster are characters Rallen has history with, making for some funny moments and a nice “redemption” for Webster. Hank and Professor Kate are nice, and again, their friendship feels realistic in the sense that they act like they have known each other for a long time. While they’re not particularly deep, the High Krawl are good villains. They’re imposing throughout the story, and the mystery of their campaign against the Towers of Nanairo is intriguing. Maja is the main villain throughout, and she seems equally aloof and desperate in her attempts to get Rallen to side with her. Strictly from a characterisation perspective, she provides a good view into the internal conflicts between the High Krawl. Jado is a (probably intentionally) forgettable character in the early parts of the game.

The Bad

The excavation system is an interesting take on obtaining collectable monsters. This game’s status as a Pokemon clone is a largely inconsequential part of the experience to me. In Spectrobes, I didn’t feel any attachment to my spectrobes by the end of the game, simply using them as tools to get to the end. Partially, this could be because of Rallen not being a blank slate character. They’re more his spectrobes than mine. There is also the issue of the monsters themselves not really being unique. They’re nice designs, and unique to the game for sure, but my spectrobes ended up all looking the same. They’re not that unique from each other mechanically either, with the only differentiations being the typing and the evolution status. The child spectrobes are a good feature, however. Child spectrobes take on the role of searching for fossils, and don’t just sit in your storage waiting to be evolved.

The game’s characters are good, as discussed earlier, but its broader plot isn’t. It revolves around creatures known as Krawl, which feed by eating entire star systems. They’ve done this many times and are now focusing their efforts on the Nanairo system. This is OK, not particularly deep, but I see no issue with this. Beyond the Portals introduces new characters, High Krawl, who are capable of communicating with the humans living in Nanairo. Maja, at least, sees Rallen as an equal by the end of her involvement in the story, but continues to gloat about the inevitable complete genocide of Rallen’s home star system. The others are a bit more aloof, positioning themselves above the humans living in Nanairo. This is all a little far-fetched, but still OK. The High Krawl are seeking to destroy structures on each planet just called Towers. This allows them to open a new portal each time, into another star system. From these portals, Krawl will emerge from their current home on planets they have already consumed.

The first of the High Krawl to appear in the story is Jado, who is shown as being aloof but hapless. When defeated, he simply appears to die. This is a ruse on his part, and he is actually one of the most important characters to the story. Problem is, he barely appears. On Malik, at the very end of the game, he reveals that he has been hiding inside your patrol cruiser for the entire game. This is a bit of a head-scratcher. At this point, you fight him again and he admits defeat. Thus, he appears twice, but seems to warrant more of a presence. Next up is Gelberus, on Nessa. He is pretty inconsequential. He destroys the tower, opens the first portal, and you defeat him on Hyoga. After this is when Maja becomes the antagonist in earnest. She appears after both Jado and Gelberus’ defeats, gloating about how these events make her more powerful. She introduces the concept of Dark Spectrobes, and is first fought in an unbeatable fight on Daichi. After this, you go on a wild goose chase through Fons and Darkmos before beating her on Nox. Maja is more powerful than Rallen, but wants or needs his power for something. Beyond destroying or ruling the universe, this is not specified. Still, it is a good enough reason for her to not just kill Rallen. After Maja is defeated, Rallen and Jeena recover the Dynalium, which is a weapon that can penetrate a planetary shield of some kind. After some fetch quests to make a large Dynalium, an assault is carried out on Malik, where Krux resides. Krux reveals that he is a Spectrobe Master like Rallen, but uses the Krawl for their numbers. The implications of this aren’t discussed in-game. Rallen defeats Krux in hand-to-hand combat and the game ends. None of this plot is particularly interesting at any point. The best part is Maja’s story arc, which seems to build up to a twist that doesn’t happen. The High Krawl are treacherous toward one another in a way that isn’t really used for anything interesting. Internal conflicts within the High Krawl could be a good way to introduce some uneasy alliances between the NPP and certain High Krawl. I don’t expect the plot of this game to be filled with complex intrigue, but its perfectly good characters have wasted potential.

The game has some nasty difficulty spikes around Fons, halfway through the game. It’s mentioned that Rallen should evolve his spectrobes after Fons is cleared, but the Krawl on the planet are much higher level than yours at this point. Up to this point, the game is balanced well, providing good balance with no need to grind. The battling in general leaves a lot to be desired. The type matchups are obvious and shallow, and the systems leave little room for strategising. The real time battling system seems cool at first, but ends up being a matter of running up to an opponent and mashing the A button. The camera in this mode is awful and frequently leaves you facing nothing at all. As such, battling in this game feels like a chore needed to progress, rather than a fun challenge.

The level design isn’t fantastic either. While many environments are visually impressive, they’re often too big, with very little in them. There isn’t anything to find other than randomly dispersed fossils and minerals. Especially later in the game, the constant backtracking through these big, empty areas feels like an attempt to pad for time. This is exemplified by the final planet, Malik. You’re asked to traverse the exact same room around 10, maybe more, times by going through the portal that is spinning to the left in each. This is not fun to play. A lot of the game’s tasks feel like busy work rather than actual gameplay. This should not be an issue. The game has more than enough content to justify itself, without this bad filler. My other issue with the levels is that the Krawl respawn continuously. This creates a feeling that you’re not actually helping these planets. At least, the populated Nanairo planets should be clear of Krawl if you remove them.

Conclusion

To conclude, Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals is not a particularly good game. It is a mediocre Pokemon clone in gameplay terms, and in plot terms has wasted potential. The game has excellent characters and music and a well realised world. It falls short probably due to attempting to ride the Pokemon train, rather than trying to be more unique. The game’s plot doesn’t really fit an RPG formula at all. This game is just one of many obscure Nintendo DS games, and I don’t even really like it, but it will hold a place in my heart forever. I suppose something to draw from this could be that no matter how mediocre a piece of media, it can still have an impact on someone, somewhere.

#spectrobes #nintendo #nintendo ds #review #video game

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dumb-american · 4 years

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The Rebuild of Final Fantasy VII: Your Expectations Will (Not) Be Met

I apologize for the stupid title and I promise I’m going to talk about the Final Fantasy VII Remake, but I have to get this out of the way first. Sometime in the mid 2000s, acclaimed artist and director Hideaki Anno announced that he was going to remake his beloved anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion the way it should have been the first time, free from technical and budgetary restraints. Evangelion had a notoriously strange ending when the original anime aired, consisting of character talking over still images, abstract art, and simple animations. It was highly polarizing and controversial. Anno, for his part, received death threats and the headquarters of the studio that produced the anime was vandalized. Soon after the initial uproar Anno would direct The End of Evangelion, a retelling of the final two episodes of the anime, and that seemed to mostly satisfy the fanbase. Looking back now, The End of Evangelion wasn’t “fixing” something that was “broken,” no, it was a premonition: a vision of things to come. Why remake the ending when you can just remake the whole damn thing?

The mid 2000s also saw the birth of the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII: a sub-series of projects expanding the universe and world of the video game that had “quite possibly the greatest game ever made” proudly printed on the back of its CD case. The Compilation consisted of three games, all on different platforms, and a film. First was Advent Children, a sequel to Final Fantasy VII, where three dudes that look like discarded Sephiroth concept art all have anime fights with our beloved protagonists, culminating in a ridiculous gravity defying sword fight between Cloud and Sephiroth. Before Crisis and Crisis Core are prequels that expand the story of the Turks and Zack Fair, respectively. Then there’s Dirge of Cerberus, an action shooter staring secret party member and former Turk Vincent. Were these projects good? I’d say they were largely forgettable. Crisis Core stood out as the obvious best of the bunch and I think may be worth revisiting.

As a business model, the practice pioneered by the Compilation would continue on and eventually brings us FFXIII (and sequels), FF Versus XIII (which would later become FFXV), and FF Agito XIII (which would later become FF Type-0). If that’s all incredibly confusing to you, I’m sorry, I promise I will begin talking about the Final Fantasy VII Remake soon. Suffice it to say, both Final Fantasy VII and Neon Genesis Evangelion have a certain gravity. They punch above their weight. They are both regarded as absolute classics, flaws and all. And yet, in both cases, the people responsible for their creation decided that their first at bat wasn’t good enough and it was time to recreate them as they were meant to be all along. I think this way of thinking about art is flawed, limitations are as much a part of the creative process as vision and intent. Yet, we find ourselves in a world with a remake of Final Fantasy VII, so I guess we should talk about it.

From this point forward, there’s going to be major spoilers for every Final Fantasy VII related media. So, be warned.

So, is the Final Fantasy VII Remake any good? To me, that’s the least interesting question, but we can get into it. FFVIIR is audacious, that’s for sure. Where Anno condenses and remixes a 26 episode anime series into four feature length films, the FFVIIR team expands an around 5 hour prologue chapter into a 30+ hour entire game. Naturally, there will be some growing pains. The worst example of this is the sewers. The game forces you to slog through an awful sewer level twice, fighting the same boss each time. This expanded sewer level is based on a part of the original game that was only two screens and was never revisited.

Besides the walk from point A to point B, watch a cutscene, fight a boss, repeat that you’d expect from a JRPG, there’s also three chapters where the player can explore and do sidequests. The sidequests are mostly filler, but a select few do accomplish the goal of fleshing out some of the minor characters. You spend way more time with the Avalanche crew, for example. Out of them, only Jesse has something approaching a complete personality or character arc that matters. The main playable cast is practically unchanged which was a bit surprising to me. I figured Square-Enix would tone down Barret’s characterization as Mr. T with a gun for an arm, but they decided, maybe correctly, that Barret is an immutable part of the Final Fantasy VII experience. Also, it’s practically unforgivable that Red XIII was not playable in the remake considering how much time you spend with him. I don’t understand that decision in the slightest.

The game’s general systems and mechanics, materia, combat, weapon upgrades, etc. are all engaging and fun and not much else really needs to be said about it. I found it to be great blend of action/strategy. Materia really was the peak of JPRG creativity in the original FFVII and its recreation here is just as good. The novelty of seeing weird monsters like the Hell House and the “Swordipede” (called the Corvette in the original) make appearances as full on boss fights with mechanics is just weaponized nostalgia. In general, the remake has far more hits than misses, but those misses, like the sewers and some of the tedious sidequests, are big misses. It is a flawed game, but a good one. If I were to pick a favorite part of the game, I’d have to pick updated Train Graveyard section which takes lore from the original game and creates a mini-storyline out of it.

If that was all, however, then honestly writing about Final Fantasy VII Remake wouldn’t be worth my time or yours. The game’s ambition goes way further than just reimagining Midgar as a living, real city. There’s a joke in the JRPG community about the genre that goes something like this: at the start of the game, you kill rats in the sewer and by the end you’re killing God. Well, when all is said and done, the Final Fantasy VII Remake essentially does just that. Narratively, the entire final act of the game is a gigantic mess, but if you know anything about me then you know I’d much rather a work of fiction blast off into orbit and get a little wild than be safe and boring.

In the original games, the Lifestream is a physical substance that contains spirits and memories of every living being. Hence, when a person dies, they “return to the planet”. It flows beneath the surface of the planet like blood flows in a living person’s veins and can gather to heal “wounds” in the planet. In the original game, the antagonist, Sephiroth, seeks to deeply wound the planet with Meteor and then collect all the “spirit energy” the planet musters to heal the wound. The remake builds on this concept by introducing shadowy, hooded beings called Whispers. The Whispers are a physical manifestation of the concept of destiny and they can be found when someone seeks to change their fate, correcting course to the pre-destined outcome. Whispers appear at multiple points throughout the game’s storyline both impeding and aiding the party. The ending focuses heavily on them and the idea that fate and destiny can be changed. We receive visions throughout the game which some will recognize as major story beats and images from the original game. After dealing with Shinra and rescuing Aerith, the game immediately switches over to this battle against destiny and fate that you’re either going to love or hate. The transition is abrupt and jarring. While Cloud has shown flashes of supernatural physical abilities throughout the game, suddenly he has gone full Advent Children mode and is flying around cleaving 15 ton sections of steel in half with his sword. The party previously took on giant mutated monsters, elite soldiers, and horrific science experiments, but now the gloves are off and they’re squaring up against an impossibly huge manifestation of the Planet’s will. Keep in mind, in the narrative of the original FFVII, the Midgar section was rougly 10%, if that, of the game’s full storyline. This is, frankly, insane, but I’d be lying if I didn’t love it.

The Final Fantasy VII Remake, with its goofy JRPG concluding chapter, is forcing the player to participate in the original game’s un-making. We see premonitions of an orb of materia falling to the ground, we see an older Red XIII gallop across the plains, we see a SOLDIER with black hair and Cloud’s Buster Sword make his final stand, we see Cloud waist deep in water holding something or someone. We all know what these images represent, they’ve been part of imaginations for decades. But the Final Fantasy VII Remake allows us (or forces us, depending on perspective, I guess) to kill fate, kill God, and set aside all we thought we knew about how the game would play out post-Midgar. The most obvious effect of our actions is the reveal that Zack survived his final stand against Shinra and instead of leaving Cloud his sword and legacy, helped him get to Midgar safely. I have my doubts and my worries about the future of this series. I’m not sure when the next part of the game will be released or what form it will come in, but I can’t believe I’m as excited as I am to see it.

Of course, part of me wishes they’d just left well enough alone. Remakes are generally complete wastes of time and effort. Not all, but most. Maybe I’m, to borrow a term from pro wrestling lingo, a complete mark here and I just love JRPGs and Final Fantasy VII so much that I’ll countenance close to anything bearing its name. I’ve tried my best to be as critical and fair as possible to the game and I hope that if you’re on the fence and reading this I’ve maybe helped you decide if it’s for you or not. I think the Final Fantasy VII Remake is worth your time if you’re looking for a good, meaty JRPG. It’s not perfect and it’s final act is insane, but that just makes me love it more.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like for Zack, Cloud, and Aerith to face Sephiroth in the Planet’s core? I know 15 year old me did. And he may get his wish.

#final fantasy #ffvii #ffvii remake #review #jrpg

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blubberquark · 4 years

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Why Puzzle Platformers?

Why are there so many puzzle platformers? Was everybody simply copying Braid, hoping for the same level of success? And more importantly, now that Braid has been out for over a decade, why are people still making them?

If you make games, you already know why there are so many puzzle platformers, but I haven’t found a comprehensive answer to this question anywhere I can conveniently link to.

There are different ways to read that question:

Why are people adding puzzles to platformer games?

Why are there so many commercial indie puzzle platformers?

Why weren’t the same puzzles presented in an abstract, more puzzle-focused way?

Why are people adding puzzles to platformer games?

When it comes to jam games or small shareware projects, we should first ask “Why platformers, puzzle or not?” Part of the answer is probably “because platformers are easy to make with GameMaker“. Another part of the answer is “Because in a platformer, the player character interacts with the level, items, and NPCs, but these do not, for the most part, interact with each other, which makes a platformer comparably easy to implement (compared to an RTS game) and design (compared to RPG games), and platformers don’t need many extradiegetic UI elements.“

But beyond that, when you can add other mechanics to games, why puzzles?

The two obvious candidates to add to games are combat/stealth, and puzzles.

You can could also add multiple-choice dialogue, inventory, RPG elements (quests, skill points, classes), or procedural generation to any sidescrolling game, but none of these cannot carry a game on their own when you tack them on to a platformer. If the dialogue is actually substantial enough to carry a game on its own, the 2D platforming may stick out as “tacked-on” instead.

Strategy or economy (building, trading, tactics and management) are better served by a mouse-based UI. Dialogue-heavy or text-based games usually don’t have platforming sections, but platformer games can have some dialogue. In both cases, the pacing and movement of a platformer undercuts these game mechanics, and a different UI would be a better fit.

You can give your platformer a theme like horror, romance, science fiction, or medieval fantasy.

Puzzles are something you can add into a platformer game, either in between difficult platforming sections, or in combination with them. You can even alternate between stealth/combat and puzzles. Puzzles can be easy or difficult, and you can use them to break up levels or slow down the pace of an action platformer, or centre your whole game around them.

It takes some skill to design a puzzle mechanic that stands on its own, but it’s much easier to design an simple and easy one-off puzzle that you can throw into a platformer level. Easy puzzles are easy to balance: They have a binary win condition and an intended solution, but often no explicit failure state.

If adding another mechanic to a platformer makes it a puzzle platformer, is Speer a puzzle platformer? Is Super Meat Boy a puzzle platformer because you sometimes have to push buttons and the levels are self-contained? Is Outer Bounds a puzzle platformer? It’s not a bright line, but many action games that are lumped with “puzzle platformers” are still about jumping and running, but with a move set that isn’t 100% copied from Mario Bros.

If the main appeal of a game lies in the platforming, then as long as it’s solvable and doesn’t get in the way, it’s a good puzzle. Puzzles in platforming games can present their own platforming challenges, and rely on a slightly different kind of platforming execution skill, instead of puzzle-solving as a core aesthetic and source of difficulty. Players can be forced to traverse the same terrain back and forth along different paths. This can squeeze more gameplay out of fewer designed levels. Combined with traditional platforming obstacles like enemies to avoid, spike pits, moving platforms, one-way platforms, this can lead to more varied and difficult platforming challenges. Instead of getting in the way or breaking up the platforming bits, puzzle mechanics can go hand-in-hand with the platforming, without presenting a challenge in terms of puzzle solving, but only in terms of executing the solution.

Why are there so many commercial indie puzzle platformers?

For commercial games, the answer is more complicated. Maybe the premise of the question is not even true. Trine, Fez, Limbo, and And Yet It Moves all can in one way or another be described as “puzzle platformers”, but no two of them are in the same genre. If you cast a wider net, you get games like Mushroom 11, Owlboy, The Cave, Starseed Pilgrim, and Gunpoint.

Like “Action Adventure”, the phrase “puzzle platformer” has become a catch-all term for sidescroller games that aren’t punishingly difficult.

Of course, many commercial long-form games are classical puzzle platformers. Braid, Vessel, Closure, The Swapper, and Snapshot. These games are about puzzles, not about platforming.

Many smaller games like WarpSwap, ElecHead, Ministry of Synthesis, or LegBreaker are just exploring one puzzle mechanic to exhaustion in a series of one-room puzzles. Larger or long-form games often expand their repertoire of mechanics to create puzzles based on different mechanics held together by common themes or a story, or they focus more on platforming.

Why weren’t the same puzzles presented in an abstract, more puzzle-focused way?

Simple Controls and User Interface

If you see a puzzle platformer, you don’t need to figure out the controls or UI first, you can just pick up the controller and start running around. In their simplest form, the controls for a puzzle platformer are four directional buttons plus one for jumping and one for interacting the with puzzle mechanic, but more complex controls schemes are common.

The controls make writing a puzzle platformer for a game jam much easier than a mouse-driven puzzle game: You just need to check six keyboard buttons. If you are making a big commercial title, ease of implementation in terms of programming is not really a factor: After a day or two at most you’ll have implemented whatever mouse picking, widgets and UI elements you need. What’s much more time consuming is figuring out where to put the buttons so they don’t obscure the scene, or how to communicate which objects are clickable. Getting user interfaces right requires playtesting and iteration. A puzzle platformer might only need a context-based prompt that says “press X to interact“ or “walk into a boulder to push it“.

Game Feel, Embodiment and Characterisation

Another benefit of puzzle platformers over abstract puzzle presentation is game feel. The player controls the player character, and feels like a the player character existing inside the space of the level, increasing immersion compared to the feeling of a person sitting at a computer thinking about a crossword puzzle.

Many big-name 2D puzzle platformers like Braid and Snapshot have a rather zoomed-in view that focuses the level player character and the immediate surroundings, instead of showing the whole level. This allows the game to present important characters, items or places in great detail, and lets the camera pan to frame the most important parts of a scene. Animated movement in a two-dimensional space can give weight and character to the player character, and connect the gameplay to a story. NPCs can live inside a level, next to their home, their things, and their friends.

Imagine the same thing in a tower defence, or a racing game: You’re walking around in a level, and suddenly you meet an NPC, you’re having a conversation, and then you go on your merry way. Characters and environmental storytelling are not unique to platformers, but it’s more difficult to pull off in a game without a player character existing in the world with the NPCs. Puzzle platformers keep all options open.

Of course, this is not the only way to connect characterisation and puzzle gameplay, and it can be done in abstract games. Just in the most recent Ludum Dare, I played the game Interstellar Connection, a puzzle game with a rather abstract, disembodied presentation, in which the characterisation was delivered through dialogue. (I should briefly remark on two aspects of Interstellar Connection here, even though it has very little to do with the rest of this post. First, the game is at its heart a bunch of mazes that can be solved by backtracking. Every puzzle is equivalent to a maze graph, but the presentation makes use of a quirk of human cognition to prevent you from seeing the solution the way you would see the solution in a small maze. Second, I don’t think this mechanic can support a long-form game. If it weren’t for Ludum Dare, this would have been a forgettable minigame, not the main meat of the game, motivated and contextualised by the plot.)

Characters living inside a world could also be achieved with isometric graphics, first- or third-person 3D, or in a text-based game, but they don’t work well in self-contained or grid-based puzzle levels. We’ll get back to other aspects of more open level design later.

Puzzle Design

In a puzzle platformer, you have a player character, and you can have different kinds of obstacles, like pits filled with spikes, ledges, and doors. In a top-down platformer, you can of course also have doors, but you won’t have the same dynamics of gravity with falling down, of dropping things. It’s easier to get down from a ledge, or to drop something than to lift it.

With a visible and embodied player character instead of an abstract cursor, every puzzle can be complicated by combining manipulation of the puzzle environment with traversal of the level:

The level has an “obvious” solution, but the real challenge is navigating the environment to get there.

The challenge is to manipulate the environment to open a path for the player to jump to the right place to implement the solution.

The level has a “red herring” solution that solves the main puzzle but leaves the player trapped behind an obstacle, unable to progress without undoing it.

Level Design, Progression

Multiple puzzles can be placed in the same platformer “level” or “room“. In a “pure” puzzle game, puzzles are self-contained, with a beginning and an end, a starting state and an explicit solution condition. In a platformer, the goal can be implicit: You want to go from left to right and traverse the obstacles.

If a puzzle has an obvious missing piece, it can be a prompt for the player to explore the surrounding areas, to look for a tool, or for a certain puzzle piece that is exactly shaped like the gap that needs to be filled in the puzzle.

Strange Keyworld is a puzzle platformer, almost a puzzle metroidvania. Every so often, instead of reasoning through the puzzle that is currently shown on the screen, you need to explore the adjacent rooms to find another piece and bring it over. Although the puzzles in Strange Keyworld are mostly self-contained, they are still embedded in the larger world.

Most levels in Braid are bigger than one screen, and they have more than one puzzle. Often the first order of business is to get your bearings and explore. Then you learn to traverse the level to get everywhere, identify and separate the different puzzles, and only then can you think about solving all the puzzles by manipulating time and level state to get everywhere.

An interesting twist on this happens in Recursed: Levels are always on one screen, 20x15 tiles... but you need to explore inside all the chests to see what the level actually looks like!

Of course, you could have the same kind of dynamic in an abstractly presented puzzle with a mouse-based UI, where you can zoom in and out, drag the viewport around, or enter doors (and Recursed-style chests) by double-clicking. Then you’d lose the sense of exploration and progression, and the challenge of traversing the space via platforming. Exploring a large level would be easy, but tedious. You would need to program (as the developer) and then learn (as the payer) a new user interface, or you can just move a player character in a world. This ties back into the very first point: Platformers don’t need many extradiegetic UI elements.

tl;dr “Puzzle Platformers” are actually a bunch of genres in a trenchcoat. Character-focused 2D side-scrolling graphics are compatible with many different mechanics and game designs. Character-focused 2D platforming can counterbalance the abstractness of puzzle games.

#game design #puzzle platformer #puzzle game

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buzzdixonwriter · 5 years

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Cowboys And Cavemen

This one’s gonna meander, but it’s about cavemen and cowboys and dinosaurs, so some of you may wanna stick around…

. . .

Recently watched the colorized version of One Million B.C. with Victor mature, Carole Landis, and Lon Chaney Jr.

I remember frequently watching the original black & white version of this as a kid; it popped up on local Early Shows a lot primarily because it could be chopped down to fit an hour’s running time without losing too much of the story (Early Shows were afternoon movies with a local host that typically ran only 90 minutes from 4:30-6pm; with commercials and host segments there wasn’t much room for uncut films and as a result they featured a lot of B-movies with 65 minute running times, or else cut out sequences from longer films not germane to the plot).

The colorized version surprised me in a couple of ways.

First, I’d forgotten just how well done One Million B.C. is in basic film making terms: Once past the opening scene, in which an archeologist explains some cave drawings to a group of mountaineers who then imagine themselves in prehistoric times, there’s no recognizable dialog; the film is told in purely visual terms.

Second, the colorization was incredibly sloppy: There’s a lot of weird blue artifacting going on that lays a strange mist-like quality over several scenes, and in several places the colorists inexplicably either colored the actors’ bare legs blue or else overlooked the mistake in the final color correction.

Third, the sloppy colorization doesn’t matter: If anything, it adds to the weird dream-like quality of the film. As an attempt to realistically recreate the prehistoric past, it’s gawdawful; taken as the imaginings of an average contemporary 1940s person with no real knowledge of prehistoric times (viz the prolog), and it’s pretty entertaining.

Technically the movie is a mixed bag. The special effects are pretty seamless (yeah, you can tell when something is a rear screen shot, but then again rear screen shots in every film of that era were obvious)). A travelling matte shot of a hapless cavewoman buried under a flood of lava is particularly well done and as amazing today as it was then (though the colorists dropped the ball and didn’t tint it a vivid red or orange in the colorized version).

There’s a lot of monsters, but they range from well done to just plaine…well…

The best are a woolly mammoth (i.e., an elephant in shaggy fur costume) and a baby triceratops (a large pig in costume) that really seem to capture the essence pf those creatures.

The worst is a guy in an allosaurus suit who kinda just shuffles along like a grandparent going to the bathroom, and in the middle are various lizards dressed up with fins and horns.

The lizards bother me more and more over the years. At first it was because they were disappointing -- they don’t look like dinosaurs, dammit, but like lizards with fins and horns glued on -- but now it’s because I realize they were goaded by their handlers into fights and reactions shots.

That’s plain ol’ animal cruelty, even if they are reptiles and not mammals.

There’s an armadillo and a koala-like animal that appear thousands of times their normal size. The koala-like critter (sorry, but I don’t know what it actually is) is passable as a giant cave bear or sloth, but the armadillo is just an armadillo (there was something about armadillos that 1930s audience found creepy; they’re waddling all over the Count’s hiding place in the original Dracula).

One Million B.C. was produced by Hal Roach and Hal Roach Jr. The senior Roach goes all the way back to the silent era, so this was not a huge stretch for him.

Originally D.W. Griffith was to direct the film, but while he did a lot of pre-production work including screen and wardrobe tests, he either dropped out or was replaced on the eve of production. (Reportedly he wanted the cave tribes to speak recognizable English and left when Roach refused.)

The special effects wound up in a ton of movies and TV shows over the ensuing decades; modern audiences are more familiar with the film through 1950s sci-fi than its original version.

All else aside, the picture is carried by stars Victor Mature and Carole Landis. Ms Landis in particular is a spunky, charming cave gal with a blonde-fro and while Mature would never be an Oscar contender, he at least has the physicality and screen presence to get his character across.

The scene where he thinks Landis has died in a volcanic eruption may be corny, but you can feel his character’s grief.

. . .

A quarter of a century later it was remade as One Million Years B.C. with John Richardson in the Victor mature role and Raquel Welch in the Landis role.

No disrespect to Welch, who by all accounts is a nice person, but she never showed one iota the acting chops of Carole Landis. Welch is beautiful, and as a generic pin-up model cast as a film’s “sexy lamp” (look it up), she presented appealing eye-candy. She appeared in one good sci-fi film (Fantastic Voyage), one campy monster movie (i.e., One Million Years B.C.), two incredibly campy WTF-were-they-thinking movies (The Magic Christian and Myra Breckenridge), and a host of instantly forgettable spy films and Westerns. The best movies she appeared in were Fuzz, based on the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain (a.k.a. Evan Hunter nee Salvatore Lombino), where she did an acceptable supporting turn as a police detective, and Kansas City Bomber, a roller derby movie that many consider her best role.

Landis never enjoyed the same level of fame (or notoriety, depending on your POV) that Welch did, but holy cow, could the gal act. It’s a pity Hollywood is crowded with talented, beautiful people because she certainly deserved a bigger career capstone than One Million B.C..

Welch’s personal life certainly proved less traumatic than Landis’, however. When actor Rex Harrison broken off his affair with her rather than divorce his wife, Landis committed suicide.

The scandal exiled Harrison temporarily back to England. A few years later One Million B.C. and Landis’ other films started playing on television.

Who knows what opportunities may have opened for her in that medium?

. . .

The original One Million B.C. is vastly superior in all areas but one (well, two -- mustn’t leave out the catfight between Welch and Martine Beswick): Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion dinosaurs

Mind you, most of the dino scenes in One Million Years B.C. are underwhelming. To stretch the budget the producers used close ups of spiders and an iguana to simulate giant monsters, a brontosaurus does a walk through in one scene and never appears again, and the first big dino moment has cave gals poking sharp sticks at a big sea turtle.

On the other hand, the remaining trio of dino scenes are the aces and vastly superior to their corresponding scenes in One Million B.C.. The latter film’s allosaur attack is one of the best dino scenes ever animated, and the ceratosaurus vs triceratops battle followed by the pteranodon grabbing Welch are almost as good.

Both versions of the film had an interesting influence on films that followed. One Million Years B.C. was followed by a host of prehistoric films, most of which existed only to cast voluptuous actresses in fur bikinis although When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth, a direct follow-up, offered more monsters and a better story.

While One Million B.C. wasn’t the first film to sub real life lizards for dinos, it certainly told budget conscious producers that such substitutions were okay.

The 1959 version of Journey To The Center Of The Earth cast iguanas with glued on fins as dimetrodons, and for once the impersonation proved successful as the two species do bear certain similarities.

Producer Irwin Allen (he of Lost In Space and Towering Inferno fame) hired Willis O;Brien (the animator behind the original King Kong) and his then assistant Ray Harryhausen to do accurate-for-the-era stop motion dinosaurs for The Animal World documentary but apparently frustrated by the time it took to get results opted for lizards in his version of The Lost World (which, ironically, O’Brien worked on in a non-animation capacity despite having done the original silent version of the film with stop motion dinosaurs).

I saw Allen’s Lost World as a little boy and felt grossly disappointed by the obvious lizards, especially since the script identified them as belong to specific dinosaur species when they quite clearly didn’t (had the script said they evolved from such creatures, the way the most recent version of King Kong did, it would have been less egregious).

Allen’s lizards popped up in several TV shows he did, most notably the TV version of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea. That show’s co-star David Hedison played a supporting role in The Lost World so once a season they found some excuse to get him out of his Navy uniform and into a safari jacket in order to match footage with stock shots from the movie.

The Animal World wasn’t the first time O’Brien and Harryhausen worked together, and Harryhausen followed up One Million Years B.C. with The Valley Of Gwangi, an O’Brien project that the older effects artist never got off the ground.

. . .

Let’s back up a bit to discuss “O’Bie” (as his fans refer to him).

O’Brien was a former cowboy-turned-cartoonist around the early 20th century who became interested in animation.

Movies were in their infancy then, and O’Bie shot a short test reel of two clay boxers duking it out.

This got him financing to do a series of short films ala The Flintstones with titles like Rural Delivery, One Million B.C. (the titles were often longer than the films).

These shorts featured cartoony puppets, no actual actors. O’Bie followed it up with The Ghost Of Slumber Mountain which was the first time dinosaurs were animated in an attempt to make them look real, and that was followed by The Lost World in which O’Bie combined live action with special effects, climaxing the film with a brontosaurus running amok in London.

O’Bie wanted to follow it up with a film called Creation but that got deep sixed. However, producer Merian C. Cooper saw O’Bie’s test footage for Creation and hired him to do the effects for the legendary King Kong.

While O’Bie followed that success with the quickie Son Of Kong he never got to work on a dinosaur film of such scope again.

War Eagles (a lost-civilization-with-dinos story) was supposed to have been a big follow up epic, but the Depression and the growing threat of WWII caused it to be cancelled in pre-production.

During the 1940s O’Bie pitched a number of stories to studios involving dinosaurs or other monsters encountering cowboys, one of which was Gwangi (he also pitched King Kong vs Frankenstein which eventually got made as King Kong vs Godzilla using two guys in rubber suits, not his beloved stop motion effects).

Gwangi had cowboys discovering a lost canyon inhabited by dinosaurs, chief of which being Gwangi, an allosaurus. O’Bie never got Gwangi off the ground but decades later Harryhausen did with Valley Of Gwangi.

. . .

I never cared for Valley Of Gwangi and much preferred One Million Years B.C. over it (and, no, not because of Ms Welch).

Growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, I enjoyed cowboys as much as dinosaurs.

I’ve posted elsewhere how my interest in dinosaurs led me to dinosaur movies which led to monster movies which led to science fiction movies which led to literary science fiction which led to science fiction fandom which led to my writing career, but my genre of choice before age 10 was Westerns.

As others point out, most Westerns are actually crime stories, what with bandits robbing stagecoaches and banks, rustlers making off with cattle, etc. The climax usually involves a lawman (or a vigilante who carries the weight of the law) confronting the evil doers and bringing them to justice.

Sometimes these vigilantes wore masks (Zorro and the Lone Ranger). Sometimes those they pursued wore masks, and sometimes those masked villains pretended to be ghosts or phantoms.

They weren’t, and were invariably exposed as frauds.

Westerns based themselves in a rational world.

Other times a criminal in a Western would be after some invention that could bring either a great boon (say an energy source) or great harm (a death ray) to the world, and wanted it for their own selfish ends.

The story would invariably use the invention as a mcguffin device, maybe letting it figure into the villain’s eventual comeuppance, but never really influencing the outcome of the plot.

Westerns and fantasy genres (including science fiction) don’t mix well, The Wild Wild West not withstanding (and The Wild Wild West was not a Western per se but rather what we would now call a steampunk commentary on James Bond filtered through the lens of traditional American Westerns).

(And don’t bring up Gene Autry And The Phantom Empire, just…don’t…)

Dinosaurs and cowboys don’t really go together.

That didn’t stop O’Bie from trying.

In addition to Gwangi, O’Bie had two other projects that he did get off the ground: The Brave One and The Beast From Hollow Mountain.

The Beast From Hollow Mountain is a standard Western about mysterious cattle disappearances and quarrels over who might be responsible, only to discover in the end it’s really -- surprise! surprise! -- a solitary tyrannosaurus that somehow survived since prehistoric times.

The movie is constructed in such a way that had the dinosaur element not panned out, they could have removed it and substituted a more conventional ending.

While O’Bie didn’t work directly on the film after he sold the story, it did feature a variant of stop motion animation known as replacement animation. Instead of building a realistic looking puppet with rubber skin and posable limbs, the dino in Beast was more solid and featured interchangeable limbs that could stretch and squash in a more realistic manner (rather, the movement looked more realistic, the dino sculpture no so much…).

The Brave One started life as a story about a young Mexican boy who raises a prize bull for the ring, only to have the bull face an allosaurus in the ring instead of a matador.

The producers who bought that idea hired blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to turn it into something filmable, and Trumbo sensibly jettisoned the dino to focus the story on the boy and his bull, much to the film’s advantage (it won an Oscar for best story when released, but Trumbo’s heirs had to wait decades before the award could be recognized as due their father).

The Valley Of Gwangi was yet another variant on the same basic idea, more expansive than the other two in terms of dinosaurs, and with at least a nod in the direction of trying to explain them (a “lost canyon” giving them shelter instead of a mountain plateau or remote island).

It never connected with me, despite having more extensive dino sequences than One Million Years B.C..

O’Bie animated stop motion cowboys fighting a giant ape in the original version of Mighty Joe Young but the context proved different. The cowboys’ presence in Africa is acknowledge in the film itself as a publicity gimmick, and therefore not a true blend of the American West with a fantastic element.

Mr. Joseph Young of Africa himself, a 12-foot tall gorilla, was also presented as an exceptionally large but otherwise natural gorilla, not a throwback to a prehistoric era.

. . .

Before there were action figures, but long after there were tin soldiers, we had plastic play sets.

They came in all eras and varieties, but among the most popular were Wild West sets, Civil War, World War Two, and dinosaurs.

My father took a business trip to Chicago when I was four, and when he came back I remember eagerly crowding around the suitcase with my mother, grandmother, and aunt as he opened it and brought out souvenirs for us.

I forget what they got, but I remember feeling disappointed and forgotten since their stuff was on top.

But, underneath everything else, sat a large cardboard box, and in that box was a Marx Prehistoric Times playset.

It’s hard to adequately describe the joy that filled my heart when I opened it; it was one of the best presents I’ve ever received.

And while I later acquired a Civil War set and a World War Two set and a bag of what we then called cowboy and Indian figures, the dinosaurs remained my most favorite.

I bring this up because I think the Marx playsets explain the origins of two comics books, Turok, Son Of Stone (an on-again / off-again series from 1954 to 1982 from Dell / Gold Key) and The War That Time Forgot (1960-68 from DC).

In both cases, I’m sure somebody from each company saw some kid combing their Wild West or their World War Two playsets with their dinos and realized there was story gold to be found there.

The War That Time Forgot felt much more my speed, a lost island inhabited by dinosaurs and visited by American and Japanese forces during World War Two.

World War Two effectively ended any hope of their being a lost island with prehistoric monsters; pretty much the entire planet was scouted either on foot or by air.

Turok, Son Of Stone didn’t connect with me. For one thing, it was too much like a Western in concept; for another, Turok and his brother Andar, being pre-Columbian Native Americans, were already from a neolithic culture, and the various cavemen and Neanderthals they encountered in their lost valley seemed more drab and colorless than their tribal background.

The dinosaurs they encountered always came across as large, dangerous, but wholly natural animals, different only from bears and wolves and bison by size and appearance.

Despite my indifference to Turok, I can absolutely understand why others love it and disdain The War That Time Forgot.

Different strokes for different folks.

. . .

We can’t close this without taking a look at The Flintstones, and we can’t consider The Flintstones without first examining Tex Avery’s The First Bad Man in order to bring this post full circle.

There’s a long history (har!) of contemporary satire using a prehistoric lens. The Flintstones started life as a knockoff of Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners told in a prehistoric setting; the series made no attempt to present itself as realistic in any shape, fashion, or form.

Among the many cartoons and short subjects that preceded it (including Chuck Jones’ Daffy Duck And The Dinosaur) is The First Bad Man by Tex Avery, an MGM theatrical cartoon.

Tex told the story of Dinosaur Dan, the world’s first outlaw, using Western tropes told through a prehistoric lens.

It works, because it’s a parody of the Western form, not a sincere effort to blend it with the caveman genre. It works because it’s a jarring clash of genres, not despite it.

The caveman genre itself has fallen on fallow times. Despite films like The Quest For Fire and Clan Of The Cave Bear attempting to do realistic takes on the topic, most people seem to prefer more fanciful approaches, best exemplified by the movie Caveman which sent up the entire genre while not skimping on the stop motion dinos.

With sword & sorcery / Tolkienesque fantasies finally acceptable to mass audiences and thus providing a venue for humans to directly fight giant monsters, there doesn’t seem to be a huge demand for a return to the glories of One Million B.C.

#Compare And Contrast #One Million BC #One Million Years BC #Ray Harryhausen #Willis OBrien #Victor Mature #Carole Landis #Raquel Welch #Hal Roach #DW Griffith #cavemen #cowboys #dinosaurs #sci-fi

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