#what’s arguably more frustrating is i’ve had opportunities but i have WASTED THEM

[calilk]

i need a day where i do nothing and intend to do nothing STAT (i havent had one in like a month) or i WILL EXPLODE. EMOTIONALLY. BIG TIME

[willel]

About Will and his friends:

I’ve seen some really weird takes lately. It’s surrounding the boys breaking up with the girls and Will wanting to play dnd.

People bring up how other characters are forced to care about Will, but not the other way around. What?

One of Will’s biggest character traits is being a people pleaser. In the end, he will always follow along with what his friends want even if he doesn’t want it or care. He doesn’t want to disappoint them or make they worry, he just wants things to be “normal”.

Exhibit A: Back in season 1, Will could not choose between fireball and protection. Lucas was shouting fireball, Dustin was shouting protection, and Mike was rushing all three along to make a decision. Arguably, Will’s hastiness and inability to make his own decision made him lose against the Demogorgon (in the game). Even at the end of season 1, he’s still the same way, but everyone isn’t arguing with each other anymore so he can roll properly. 

Exhibit B: Will backseats all his personal interests to please his father. Lonnie (once again) does not show up to pick up Will for father and son time. Jonathan asks if Will even likes baseball and Will tries to weasel out answering saying, “It can be fun sometimes....” Even when Lonnie isn’t present, Will is still trying to put his interests above his own.

Exhibit C: In season 2 when Max comes into the picture, Will doesn’t have much of an opinion except “Girls don’t play video games.” (that’s literally the only thing he’s said about her.) In an offscreen conversation, we��re meant to assume Dustin and Lucas eagerly approach Will asking him if Max can join them during Trick or Treating, and Will said yes. 

“They were so excited...” Even if he didn’t care one way or another if Max tagged along, he was still happy for his friends and wanted them to have fun. You can see Mike’s total annoyance at the situation caught him off guard and despite trying to smooth it over, it fails (and then he has an episode)

Exhibit D: The entire summer it’s implied Mike ditched hanging out with the party to be with El. Based on the big argument that happens later, we’re meant to assume leading up to this point in time, Will has said nothing to Mike (or Lucas) on his feelings. He hasn’t been ragging on them day in and day out about their girlfriends, he’s focused all his energy on making this big well thought out campaign probably quietly channeling any frustration he had into said game. 

Exhibit E: Dustin and Suzie. Will is up there with Max and Lucas helping Dustin build Cerebro after walking all that way. If he really didn’t care about his friends interests on relationships, he wouldn’t be there. Additionally, Will never doubts Suzie’s existence. When Dustin fails to get in contact with her, Will suggests, “Maybe Cerebro doesn’t work?” When Will leaves Dustin on the hill, it’s because it’s late (I assume Will doesn’t tend to hang out at night very much) and as he’s leaving, he says, “Let’s do something fun, like we used to?” and “Welcome home.” 

Exhibit F: When Mike and Lucas insist on going to the mall to get El a “Sorry” present, Will still ends up tagging along and looking just as hard as they were to find something interesting. He doesn’t say anything on screen, but he’s also sniffing perfume and looking in the glass case of jewelry. As they waste more and more time in the mall, Will’s request to go back and play dnd become more frequent. (Funnily enough, if they went back sooner, Mike and El would’ve have met and broken up in the first place.) 

Are you really going to feel sympathy for some dudes who in one breath say they’re so sad their girlfriends broke up with them, and then in the next breath say “Right, women don’t think with logic only emotion.” and “Right. A totally different species.” 

Who would take this drama serious? Not Will, clearly. 

CONCLUSION:

Will has always cared about his friends, their interests, and what they want to do. Even if it’s bringing new people into the group, he’s chill with that if it makes his friends happy. He’s just not here for the drama. He’s not interested in the conflict. It probably makes him uncomfortable even, he’d rather ignore it. 

And another thing, we know Will’s friends really care about him and his wellbeing... but technically, we’ve never been shown that they care about his interests. Not too long ago, Will’s interests aligned with his friends. Dnd, video games, dressing up, nerdy stuff in general. There was never a question if they cared about his interests because they were their interests too. Now? Most of them have found new interests. 

Even though Will tags along with them, tries to help them a little bit, and wastes time sitting around with them, they blow off playing dnd every single time. When they do finally sit down to play, they don’t take it seriously and mock him the whole time. At the earliest opportunity they have to blow him off again, they gladly take it. 

How can no one see the frustration that would cause? “I’ve been dealing with your guyses stuff all day, but you can’t spare a couple of hours to play a game once the entire summer?”

“Did you expect us to sit in my basement all day, playing games?” or whatever Mike said? Even though Will answers “Yeah, I did.”, I doubt he even expected that, but at least a few times every now and then? Will couldn’t even get that to happen. 

Also, bringing up Dustin during his outburst? All this time Will has probably been wondering where Dustin is. He possibly went through the effort of rewriting some of his campaign to exclude Dustin since Dustin never showed up even though he was invited. During the short time they got to play dnd, Will could've been hoping Dustin would show up late at any moment and join in. He was on his mind. 

He was truly and honestly trying to get his friends together to have some fun. And it probably cut real deep to see dnd no longer gives them joy like it once did. Him donating his dnd manuals makes a ton of sense. 

If you can’t see this from Will’s perspective, or assume he doesn’t care about his friends because of his outbursts, I think you’re being purposely obtuse. 

[ciathyzareposts]

The Sierra Discovery Adventures

Among the most rewarding hidden gems in Sierra’s voluminous catalog must be the games of the Discovery Series, the company’s brief-lived educational line of the early 1990s. Doubtless because of that dreaded educational label, these games are little-remembered today even by many hardcore Sierra fans, and, unlike most of the better-known Sierra games, have never been reissued in digital-download editions.

In my book, that’s a real shame. For reasons I’ve described at exhaustive length by now in other articles, I’m not a big fan of Sierra’s usual careless approach to adventure-game design, but the games of the Discovery Series stand out for their lack of such staple Sierra traits as dead ends, illogical puzzles, and instant deaths, despite the fact that they were designed and implemented by the very same people who were responsible for the “adult” adventure games. These design teams were, it seems, motivated to show children the mercy they couldn’t be bothered to bestow upon their adult players. While it’s true that even the Discovery games weren’t, as we’ll see, entirely free of regrettable design choices, these forgotten stepchildren ironically hold up far better today than most of their more popular siblings. For that reason, they’re well worth highlighting as part of this ongoing history.

I’ve already written about the Discovery Series’s two Dr. Brain games, creative and often deceptively challenging puzzle collections that can be enjoyed by adults as easily as children. Today, then, I’d like to complete my coverage. Although some of the other Discovery games were aimed at younger children, and are thus outside the scope of our usual software interests, three others could almost have been sold as regular Sierra adventure games. So, I’ll use this article to look at this trio more closely — the first of which in particular is a true classic, in my opinion the best Sierra adventure of any stripe released during 1992.

Gano Haine and Jane Jensen

One of the ways in which Sierra stood out in a positive way from their peers was their willingness to employ women in the roles of writer and designer. At a time when almost no one else in the computer-games industry had any women in prominent creative roles, Sierra’s gender balance approached fifty-fifty at times.

Gano Haine, one of these female designers, was also a fine example of what we might call a second-generation adventure designer — someone who had seen the genre evolve from the perspective of a player in the 1980s, and was now ready to make her own mark on it in the 1990s. She took a roundabout route into the industry. A mother and junior-high teacher of fifteen years standing, hers was a prominent voice in the Gamers Forum on CompuServe in the latter 1980s. She wrote extensively there about the good and bad of each game she played. “I don’t think it’s something you do to yourself on purpose,” she said of her adventure-game addiction. “I soon realized that I needed to find a way to make it a profession or I’d starve.” Luckily, Sierra hired her, albeit initially only as an informal consultant. Soon, though, she moved to Oakhurst, California, to become a full-time Sierra game designer. That happened in 1991, just as the Discovery Series was being born.

Everyone among the designers, whether a wizened veteran or a fresh-faced recruit, was given an opportunity to pitch an idea for the new line. The stakes were high because those whose pitches were not accepted would quite probably wind up working in subservient roles on those projects which had been given the green light. Yet Haine was motivated by more than personal ambition when she offered up her idea. One teenage memory that had never left her came to the fore.

I worked a lot in children’s summer camps. There was a beach where we took the children every Wednesday, a beautiful beach, with rocks and glittering sand. I remember once we sat on the rocks and watched a whole school of porpoises jumping in the waves.

Anyway, the next season when we went there, the whole beach was covered with litter. As I walked down to the water with the kids, I looked down, and there was human sewage running across the sand and into the ocean. To see that beautiful place trashed was tremendously painful to me.

Thus was born EcoQuest: an adventure game meant to teach its young players about our precious, fragile natural heritage. After her idea was accepted, Haine was assigned Jane Jensen, a former Hewlett Packard programmer and frustrated novelist who had been hired at almost the same time as her, to work with her as co-designer. This meant that EcoQuest would not only have a female lead designer, but would become the first computer game in history that was the product of an all-female design team.

Thinking, as Sierra always encouraged their designers to do, in terms of an all-new game’s series potential, Haine and Jensen created a young protagonist named Adam. Adam’s father is an ecologist who spends his life traveling the globe dealing with various environment catastrophes, and his lonely son tags along, finding his friends among the animals living in the places they visit.

In light of the disturbing memory that had spawned the series, the first game had always been destined to take place in the ocean. Adam gets recruited by one of his anthropomorphic animal friends, a dolphin named Delphineus, to search for Cetus, the great sperm whale whom all of the other undersea creatures look to for guidance, but who’s now gone missing. (One guess which species of bipedal mammal is responsible…) The game was therefore given the subtitle of The Search for Cetus to join the EcoQuest series badge.

Sierra was by no means immune to the allure of the trendy, and certainly there was a whiff of just that to making this game at this time. The first international Earth Day had taken place on April 22, 1990, accompanied by a well-orchestrated media campaign that turned a spotlight — arguably a brighter spotlight than at any earlier moment in history — onto the many environmental catastrophes that were facing our planet even then. This new EcoQuest series was very much of a piece with Earth Day and the many other media initiatives it spawned. Still, the environmental message of EcoQuest isn’t just a gimmick; anthropomorphic sea creatures aside, it’s very much in scientific earnest. Haine and Jensen worked with the Marine Mammal Center of Sausalito, California, to get the science right, and Sierra even agreed to donate a portion of the profits to the same organization.

There’s a refreshing sweetness to the game that some might call naivete, an assumption that the most important single factor contributing to the pollution of our oceans is simple ignorance. For example, Adam meets a fishing boat at one point whose propeller lacks a protective cage to prevent it from injuring manatees and other ocean life. He devises a way of making such a cage and explains its importance to the fisherman, who’s horrified to learn the damage his naked propeller had been causing and more than happy to be given this solution. The only glaring exception to the rule of human ignorance rather than malice is the whaling ship that, it turns out, has harpooned poor Cetus.

The message of The Search for Cetus would thus seem to be that, while there are a few bad apples among us, most people want to keep our oceans as pristine as possible and want the enormous variety of species which live in them to be able to survive and thrive. Is this really so very naive? From my experience, at any rate, most people would react just the same as the fisherman in an isolated circumstance like his. It’s the political and financial interests that keep getting in the way, preventing large-scale change by inflaming passions that have little bearing on the practicalities at hand. Said interests are obviously outside the scope of this children’s adventure game, but the same game does serve as a reminder that many things in this world aren’t really so complicated in themselves; they’re complicated only because some among us insist on making them so, often for disingenuous purposes.

Yet The Search for Cetus is never as preachy as the paragraph I’ve just written. Jane Jensen would later go on to become one of the most famed adventure designers in history through her trilogy of supernatural mysteries starring the reluctant hero Gabriel Knight. The talent for characterization that would make those games so beloved is also present, at least in a nascent form, in The Search for Cetus. From an hysterical hermit crab to a French artiste of a blowfish, the personalities are all a lot of fun. “The characters’ voices and personalities are used to humanize their plight,” said Jensen, “giving a voice to the faceless victims of our carelessness.” Most critically, the characters all feel honestly cute or comic or both; The Search for Cetus never condescends to its audience. This is vitally important to the goal of getting the game’s environmental message across because children can smell adult condescension from a mile away, and it’s guaranteed to make them run screaming.

The techniques the game uses to educate in a natural-feeling interactive context are still worthy of study today. For example, a new verb is added to the standard Sierra control panel: “recycle.” This comes to function as a little hidden-object game-within-the-game, as you scan each screen for trash, getting a point for every piece that you recycle. Along the way, you’ll be astonished both by the sheer variety of junk that makes its way into our oceans and the damage it causes: plastic bags suffocate blowfish, organic waste causes algae to grow out of control, plastic six-pack rings entangle swordfish and dolphins, balloons get eaten by turtles, bleach poisons the water, tar and oil kill coral. In the non-linear middle section of the game, you solve a whole series of such problems for the ocean’s inhabitants, learning a great deal about them in the process. You even mark a major chemical spill for cleanup. The game refuses to throw up its hands at the scale of the damage humanity has done; it’s lesson is that, yes, the damage is immense, but we — and even you, working at the individual level — can do something about it. This may be the most important message of all to take away from The Search for Cetus.

The game isn’t hard by any means, but nor is it trivial. Jane Jensen:

Gano and I are both Sierra players, so when we started to design our first Sierra game, we designed a game that we would want to play. The puzzles in EcoQuest are traditional Sierra adventure-game puzzles, with an ecological and educational slant. You can’t die in the game, but other than that, it’s a real Sierra adventure. Because it is aimed at an older audience, the gameplay isn’t simplified like Mixed-Up Mother Goose or Fairy Tales. The puzzles are challenging, and lots of fun.

Thus the concessions to the children that were expected to become the primary audience take the form not of complete infantilization, but rather a lack of pointless deaths, a lack of of unwinnable states, and a number of optional puzzles which score points but aren’t required to finish the game. Many outside Sierra’s rather insular circle of designers, of course, would call all of these things — especially the first two — simply good design, full stop.

Released in early 1992, The Search for Cetus did well enough that Sierra funded a CD-ROM version with voice acting to supplement the original floppy-based version about a year later. And they funded a further adventure of young Adam as well, which was also released in early 1993. In Lost Secret of the Rainforest, he and his father head for the Amazon, where they confront the bureaucrats, poachers, and clear-cutters that threaten another vital ecosystem’s existence.

With this second game in the series, Sierra clearly opted for not fixing what isn’t broken: all of the educational approaches and program features we remember from the original, from the anthropomorphic animals to the recycling icon, make a return. There’s even a clever new minigame this time around, involving an “ecorder,” a handheld scanner that identifies plants and animals and other things you encounter and provides a bit of information about them. So, in addition to hunting for toxic trash, you’re encouraged to try to find everything in the ecorder’s database as you explore the jungle.

Unfortunately, though, it just doesn’t all come together as well as it did the first time around. Jane Jensen didn’t work on Lost Secret, leaving the entirety of the game in the hands of Gano Haine, who lacked her talent for engaging characters and dialog. She obviously strove mightily, but the results too often come across as labored, unfunny, and/or leaden. (Haine did mention in an interview that, responding to complaints from some quarters that the text in Search for Cetus was too advanced for some children, she made a conscious attempt to simplify the writing in the sequel; this may also have contributed to the effect I’m describing.)

The puzzle design as well is unbalanced, being fairly straightforward until a scene in the middle which seems to have been beamed in from another game entirely. This scene, in which Adam has been captured by a group of poachers and needs to escape, all but requires a walkthrough to complete for players of any age, combining read-the-author’s mind puzzles with the necessity for fiddly, pinpoint-precise clicking and timing. And then, after you clear that hurtle, the game settles back down into the old routine, running on to the end in its old straightforward manner, as if it nothing out of the way had ever happened. It’s deeply strange, and all by itself makes Lost Secret difficult to recommend with anything like the same enthusiasm as its predecessor. It’s not really a bad game on the whole — especially if you go into it forewarned about its one truly bad sequence — but it’s not a great one either.

The poacher named Slaughter has a pink-river dolphin carcass hanging over his door, book stands made from exotic horns, a jaguar-skin rug on his floor, and a footstool made from an elephant’s foot. Laying it on just a bit thick, perhaps?

And on that somewhat disappointing note, the EcoQuest series ended. The science behind the two games still holds up, and the messages they impart about environmental stewardship are more vital than ever. From the modern perspective, the infelicities in the games’ depiction of environmental issues mostly come in their lack of attention to another threat that has become all too clear in the years since they were made: the impact global warming is having on both our oceans and our rain forests. This lack doesn’t, however, invalidate anything that EcoQuest does say about ecological issues. The second game in particular definitely has its flaws, but together the two stand as noble efforts to use the magic of interactivity as a means of engagement with pressing real-world issues — the sort of thing that the games industry, fixated as it always has been on escapist entertainment, hasn’t attempted as much as it perhaps ought to. “Environmental issues are very emotional,” acknowledges Gano Haine, “and you inevitably contact people who have very deep disagreements about those issues.” Yet the EcoQuest series dares to present, in a commonsense but scientifically rigorous way, the impact some of our worst practices are having on our planet, and dares to ask whether we all couldn’t just set politics aside and try to do that little bit more to make the situation better.

In that spirit, I have to note that some of the most inspiring aspects of the EcoQuest story are only tangentially related to the actual games. A proud moment for everyone involved with the series came when Sierra received a letter from a group of kids in faraway Finland, who had played The Search for Cetus and been motivated to organize a cleanup effort at a polluted lake in their neighborhood. Meanwhile the research that went into making the games caused the entire company of Sierra Online to begin taking issues of sustainability more seriously. They started printing everything from game boxes to pay stubs on recycled paper; started reusing their shipping pallets; started using recycled disks; started sorting their trash and sending it to the recycler. They also started investigating the use of water-based instead of chemical-based coatings for their boxes, soybean ink for printing, and fully biodegradable materials for packing. No, they didn’t hesitate to pat themselves on the back for all this in their newsletter (which, for the record, was also printed on recycled paper after EcoQuest) — but, what the hell, they’d earned it.

The words they wrote in their newsletter apply more than ever today: “It’s not always easy, but it’s worth it. Saving the planet isn’t a passing fad. It’s critical, for our own future and for the future of our children.” One can only hope that the games brought some others around to the same point of view — and may even continue to do so today, for those few who discover them moldering away in some archive or other.

Pepper’s Adventures in Time, the third and final adventure game released as part of the Discovery Series, was a very different proposition from EcoQuest. Its original proposer wasn’t one of Sierra’s regular designers, but rather Bill Davis, the veteran television and film animator who had been brought in at the end of the 1980s to systematize the company’s production processes to suit a new era of greater audiovisual fidelity and exploding budgets. His proposal was for a series called Twisty History, which would teach children about the subject by asking them to protect history as we know it from the depredations wrought by the evil inventor of a time machine. Because Davis wasn’t himself a designer, the first game in the planned series became something of a community effort, a collaboration that included Gano Haine and Jane Jensen as well as Lorelei Shannon and Josh Mandel. (That is, for those tracking gender equality in real time, three female designers and one male.)

Lockjaw has been captured by a spoiled brat of a Royalist!

The star of the series, as sketched by Bill Davis and filled in by the design team, is a girl named Pepper Pumpernickel, a spunky little thing who doesn’t take kindly to the opposite sex telling her what she can and can’t do. Her costar is Lockjaw, her pet dog. Davis:

We’d recently lost a dog to leukemia, had gone through an extended period of mourning, and had decided it was time to adopt. So my wife and son headed for our favorite adoption agency, the local animal shelter. They came home with a German shepherd/terrier mix. The terrier turned out to be Staffordshire terrier. For those in the dark, as we were, Staffordshire terrier is synonymous with “pit bull.” Anyway, she turned out to be a lovable little mutt with a bit of an attitude. Thirty pounds of attitude, to be precise. Well, as I was sitting at the drawing board designing characters for Twisty, she shoved her attitude up my behind and into the game proposal.

Lockjaw threatens at times to steal the game from Pepper — as, one senses, he was intended to. The player even gets to control him rather than Pepper from time to time, using his own unique set of doggie verbs, like a nose icon for sniffing, a paw icon for digging, and a mouth icon for eating — or biting. It’s clear that the designers really, really want you to be charmed by their fierce but lovable pooch, but for the most part he is indeed as cute as they want him to be, getting himself and Pepper into all kinds of trouble, only to save the day when the plot calls for it.

Ben Franklin’s doctrine of sober industriousness has been corrupted into hippie indolence. It’s up to Pepper to right the course of history as we know it.

Otherwise, the theme of this first — and, as it would turn out, only — game in the series is fairly predictable for a work of children’s history written in this one’s time and place. Pepper travels back to “Colonial” times, that semi-mythical pre-Revolutionary War period familiar to every American grade-school student, when Ben Franklin was flying his kite around, Thomas Paine was writing about the rights of the citizen, and the evil British were placing absurd levies on the colonists’ tea supply. (Perish the thought!)

While its cozily traditional depiction of such a well-worn era of history doesn’t feel as urgent or relevant as the environmental issues presented by EcoQuest, the game itself is a lot of fun. The script follows the time-tested cartoon strategy of mixing broad slapstick humor aimed at children with subtler jokes for any adults who might be playing along: referencing Monty Python, poking fun at the tedious professors we’ve all had to endure. Josh Mandel had worked as a standup comedian before coming to Sierra, and his instinct for the punchline combined with Jane Jensen’s talent for memorable characterization can’t help but charm.

The puzzle design too is pretty solid, with just a couple of places that could have used a bit more guidance for the player and/or a bit more practical thinking-through on the part of the designers. (Someone really should have told the designers that fresh tomatoes and ketchup aren’t remotely the same thing when it comes to making fake blood…) And, once again, the games does a good job of blending the educational elements organically into the whole. This time around, you have a “truth” icon you can use to find out what is cartoon invention and what is historically accurate; the same icon provides more background on the latter. You use what you have (hopefully) learned in this way to try to pass a quiz that’s presented at the end of each chapter, thus turning the study of history into a sort of scavenger hunt that’s more entertaining than one might expect, even for us jaded adults.

What had been planned as the beginning of the Twisty History series was re-badged as the one-off Pepper’s Adventures in Time just before its release in the spring of 1993. This development coincided with the end of the Discovery Series as a whole, only two years after it had begun. Sierra had just acquired a Seattle software house known as Bright Star Technology, who were henceforward to constitute their official educational division. Bright Star appropriated the character of Dr. Brain, but the rest of the budding collection of series and characters that constituted the Discovery lineup were quietly retired, and the designers who had made them returned to games meant strictly to entertain. And so passed into history one of the most refreshing groups of games ever released by Sierra.

(Sources: the book Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games, and Hidden Objects by Anastasia Salter; Sierra’s newsletter InterAction of Spring 1992, Fall 1992, Winter 1992, and June 1993; Compute! of January 1993; Questbusters of March 1992; materials in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play. And my thanks go to Corey Cole, who took the time to answer some questions about this period of Sierra’s history from his perspective as a developer there.

Feel free to download EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus, EcoQuest: Lost Secret of the Rainforest, and Pepper’s Adventures in Time from this site, in a format that will make them as easy as possible to get running using your platform’s version of DOSBox.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/the-sierra-discovery-adventures/

[emprezz48]

Midnight Thoughts Part it’s-about-my-oshimen-graduating-soon-so-I-need-to-let-it-out-somewhere

Haven’t done this ever since Murai Junna grad... and here am I doing another one about Sakai Mei... 

As usual, Imma put the “keep reading” thing after this so you can skip this post and have a nice day (if you want to read this, feel free to waste your time)

Enjoy~

It all started when I watched the first episode of ebi calcio which was aired in late 2014 (but I watched it like really early 2015). It was a danso episode and Mei participated in it and MAI GAWD SHE WAS IKEMEN AS FFFFFF!!! My weakness is danso, so Mei really caught my attention... It wasn’t the first time I heard of her name (I found out about NonMei combi first but I never really paid much attention???) but after watching this episode, I totally could remember her.

2015 was a busy year for me, so I only had time to focus on a few SKE members (with my oshimen being Rena at that time) but months later after Rena graduated (and when I gave up being busy lololol) I started focusing on more and more members, with Mei being one of them. I found out how cool she is, but at the same time really cute and pretty, and quite a chikin XD (and also how she’s a 97 liner like me whaaaaaaat???) and that was the time when I really like NonMei as a pairing and shipped them like a delulu fan I am lol... I really started to like Mei more and more and she became one of my favourite members.

This photo was back in Fuyucon 2015? I stumbled upon this and I asked myself “Oh? Isn’t this Goto Risako? Wow she’s actually so prettyyyyyyy~ I wonder if she’s close to Mei?” I did my research and found out that this two same-aged girls get along pretty well despite being from a different gen and team, Risako appointed Mei as the leader of gorisa children, Mei calling Risako “Gori” despite the seniority, and there are few others cute moments here and there. If wasn’t for this photo, I wouldn’t have gotten soooooo into Risako, the member whom I can relate to the most... 

Also, being a DD then (without me realizing actually) I like a lot of SKE members, like really a lot. I couldn’t just stick to a member or two, pretty much I didn’t have an “oshimen”. But I was really really really following this two, commenting on their SNS, reading their blogs, digging up their older times in SKE, so on and so forth that it led to my decision to support them equally in 2016 (IT WAS ONLY LAST YEAR WTH) It was a gamble tbh. Despite being the youngest in their respective gens, they belong to the old gen of SKE. They’re also underrated as fuck (oh my god don’t get me started talking about Mei especially, wait you know what? I’ll actually get into that soon.) but I still decided to make both my oshimen instead of finding young buds (I DID FOR A WHILE BUT JUNNA...........)

I never felt so happy for an idol before. SSK is something that I have mixed feelings about, but when Mei finally ranked last year, I was so overwhelmed with emotion that I eventually cried. 63rd was a nice rank, and although it was just ONE vote, I was proud to be part of the meiteam (name of her fanbase) that helped her rank in^^ A part of me wished I had more money to spend on votes, but in general I was really happy because Mei was happy. In 2015, she managed to rank in during the preliminary round, but not getting ranked in the actually was really a frustrating moment for her. Getting ranked in SSK is one opportunity to get exposed, and I must say I was glad Mei had quite a number of jobs last year. 

I started to think “Wow, 2016 is really a good year for Mei” and everyone was like “RISE MEIMEI RISE” thinking she’ll continue getting chances to shine. Too bad, what we all thought was WRONG.

16th February, that was when Mei announced her graduation during Team E kouen in order to focus on achieving her dreams in becoming an actress. It’s a dream she had for a long time, and her thoughts of graduation wasn’t a sudden one. She has talked more in her blog (I translated it here) Basically this will be a positive graduation as she’s taking one step ahead in her life. 

To be honest, when she said she has thought of graduating since a year ago, I really didn’t know. All the good stuff happened in 2016 made me didn’t realize that she could leave just anytime. Then again, I can’t say that I wasn’t prepared for this. In fact, a day before her announcement, the list of members being able to participate in P4U event was released, and aside from members who already announced graduation before, Mei’s name was the only one not in the list. I must say, her fans got really scared and worried, and watched kouen the next day in fear. I was in that situation too, but I told myself to just think positively. 

Of course, even with that hint, I still cried. I barely heard what she said after the “I will be graduating from SKE” part that I had to find a clip and re-watch it. I thought to myself “I wonder if my reaction would be worst if I didn’t found out about the P4U thing” but after a while, I realized that I’ll still feel sad no matter what. Yes, I am happy that Mei is starting a new chapter in life, I already told myself I’m still gonna support her and try to follow whatever stuff she gonna do in the future. But Mei being in SKE played an important role in how my wota life went for the past year. I was never SO gachi before. Yes, one year is so short, but in one year, a lot of things can happen. So I think things will change a little for me once April starts.

Ok, if there’s one thing I should be frustrated about, then that’s about the fact that she’s a freaking underrated member. Although I did say that a lot of good things happened in 2016 for Mei, that’s just because for the past years she’s in SKE, there was absolutely nothing for her. I guess it was because she was young or something, but I’ve seen her performances at least way back to 2014, and I must say, she is arguably a really good performer! No matter what she does, she looks cool. Besides that, she’s also a fun person who not only just perform, but also “interacts” and play around with members during kouen. MC, excellent. She’s good at tsukkomi. Despite overall being a good performer, it just gets me sometimes seeing her dance positions during kouen.... It’s always at the back... On top of that, never had a chance to center any unit before!!!!!! This is insane to me tbh... There were so many times I saw chances for her to center a unit (for eg. Ame no Pianist unit during TeTsuna shuffle kouen) BUT IT NEVER HAPPENED!!! I WAS SO DISAPPOINTED LIKE THERE WERE SO MANY CHANCES!!!!!!! Like come on... if we can see bad dancers being put up as center (not pointing on any member btw) then why can’t we see members who are clearly capable to center, not getting a chance? Like seriously, all I wanted was just ONE chance... 

Which is why, when Suuchan started her own Suumelo Senbatsu (or what she name it as Melodies) and appointed Mei as the center, I was on cloud nine. Mei never had such opportunity for the past 6 years, yet her own fellow team member could gave her that spotlight. I could never thank Suuchan enough for this, although sadly, Melodies hasn’t fully formed yet (Suuchan still haven’t announced all the members) so they can’t start any activity. With Mei graduating already, we can never get to see her acting out as the center of the unit... but nevertheless, the title still counts, so I’m really thankful to Suuchan, really.

I may have sounded like I’m complaining a bit too much, but overall, I think Mei had a really really great time in SKE. She definitely learnt a lot in the past 6 years and grow up to be the best she can be. I know she love her fans a lot, she’s nice to everyone, even though she don’t give kami taiou during HS or something. In my case, since I’ve never been to HS, I could see her kindness through her replies in 755 (ok at least back when she often uses it before having twitter) I could be asking something specific, or commenting generic stuff like “have fun during kouen” or “how’s your day?” and she would still reply to them^^ Seriously nice. Like really. Cuz I do know that my japanese grammar is kinda horrible, some sentences sound weird, but she was really nice^^ It maybe ridiculous, but I screenshot all her replies to me, since I’m just an international fan who does not have $$$ and freedom to go to HS .^. SIGHHHHHHHH but anyways, I really treasure those replies as those were our ONLY interactions~ I actually wanted to write a fanletter (like legit write one and send it) but there’s way too much problems in my hand so I regretfully decided to leave it out... 

ANDDDDDDD I should wrap this up since it’s already so long......... 

As I’m typing this, it’s roughly 5:10 AM Japan Time so there’s around 13 hours till her graduation kouen? Obviously gonna watch it, but I’m gonna have to sleep first lol. I don’t know what kind of emotion I should have, but I hope the kouen will run smoothly. I also hope she’ll have fun and have a memorable last kouen, and although it’s weird to say this, I am looking forward to it.

Bye.

[miasanmuller]

A few thoughts on ‘The Rise of Skywalker’

Not that any of you asked me to do this, but after watching the movie yesterday I felt compelled to write something, most likely to organize and register my thoughts and feelings about it and this ‘New Trilogy’ as a whole. If (for some reason) you feel like reading it, be warned that the whole post is filled with spoilers.

I remember when the first teaser to ‘The Force Awakens’ was released back in 2015 and the impact it had on me. Star Wars was a huge part of m me growing up - I’ve never been one of those die-hard fans, obsessed with the Expanded Universe and theories and basically living the franchise 24/7, but still, it was one of my favorite movies overall. I always felt very passionate about it, particularly about the mythology, a few outstanding characters and about the overall universe created by George Lucas and the way it has impacted science fiction since 1977. Of course, there were a lot of mistakes a long this ride, a lot of storylines and characters that could (and perhaps should) have been handled way better, but still - the plot was great, the development was great, and even after the weak and (let’s be honest, sloppy) start of the Prequel Trilogy, it still was able to develop what was promised and gave us a decent origin story to one of the most iconic characters of the science fiction genre.

Back to 2015, when the first teaser to TFA was released, I remember feeling thrilled in a manner I find difficult to explain. As I said, I was never obsessed by the EU and honestly knew very little about its mythology, but I have always been curious to what could happend to that franchise, how those characters could be developed further and what more could be told about that galaxy far, far away. And when more news about the movie came out, my excitement only grew - there’s no hero, there’s a heroine! There’s a POC who’s not a mere supporting character! Leia is there! Han if there! It felt like a dream come true, if I can be this sappy. And when the movie came out, boy, I wasn’t disappointed. The new storylines were great, the characters were interesting and complex, and even though the original characters didn’t stand out in this new movie (and even after Han died) I felt like the movie did what it needed to do: introduced new possibilities, new stories to develop without harming what was done before and (from my point of view) not relying too much on what was done before, something that was really important to me back then. The message I got after watching TFA was “This is a new story. It’s not about Luke or Leia or Han or Vader or the Empire. It’s a sequel to that, but it’s new”. And I was excited to see what was coming next. 

But ‘The Last Jedi’ came out two years later and my expectations were smashed. The brand-new feeling I got after watching TFA was gone, the complex characters I fell in love with were turned into abnormal, weak, nonsense versions of themselves. The plot had barely any link to the plot of TFA, it basically didn’t feel like I was watching a sequel to that movie. It felt like I was watching a sloppy attempt to reconnect the sequel to the original movies and fill it with stupid, unnecessary twists that bring nothing to the story or the development of the characters and are simply there to provide shock value. I understood the intention Disney had to subvert the common sense regarding some concepts and characters in order to produce a different, new approach to a Star Wars movie. And honestly, there’s nothing wrong with that: it just wasn’t developed in a way that made sense. And I’m not talking about making sense in regard of the original movies - I’m talking about not making sense regarding TFA, released only two years prior. What happened to the bond between Finn and Rey? Why is Poe acting like a drunk, low-witted heteronormative straight man? What the fuck did they do to Luke Skywalker? Why Kylo Ren (arguably one of the most interesting and complex chaarcters introduced in TFA, who had a great potential to be developed into one of the most memorable characters of this new trilogy) was turned into a whining, spoiled toddler who acts as if he was just told he cannot have dessert before dinner by his parents?

Anyway, I’m writing all of this just so you’ll understand the mixed feelings I had when I entered the movie yesterday. Part of me knew nohing good could happen after that mess called TLJ, but a part of me was still too attached to TFA and wanted an ending that fitted and made justice to everything that was promised back then. But well, that first part of me wasn’t wrong. Unfortunately.

It is clear to me now that this entire trilogy was simply develop so Disney could fill their already full safes with a bit more million, billion dollars. Yes I know that’s not surprising and all and honestly we all knew that was (and still is) their intention, but as long as I am aware, it is possible to conciliate both approaches - the greed and a decent storyline, or at least the intention of developing one. But after TROS, it is clear to me there was never a central plot connecting these new movies, there was never a story to be told, there was never anything. Or at least that’s the impression that was left on me. The new movie is rushed, truncated, badly developed, filled with more holes than a slice of Swiss cheese. The atmosphere of freshness that existed in TFA was completely obliterated only to be susbtituted by an overeliance on the original trilogy. Damn, the movie itself was advertised as ‘the end of the Skywalker saga’ as if it was a good thing! The Skywalker saga finished 36 years ago, in ‘Return of the Jedi’. I didn’t want that ending to be reimagined and retold. I didn’t ask for it. I wanted to see the story that began in TFA expanded, developed, finished. But what did I get? A reeling chimera, a mindless Frankenstein monster constructed through fragments of the other eight movies.

It’s like Disney suddenly remembered that Finn and Rey existed in the same space and decided they needed to interact agaun, but had forgotten completely they tried to build something between Finn and Rose (was that her name? I don’t know, and apparently Disney doesn’t either), a character that barely had anything to say in the entire movie. And now suddenly Finn has a new friend, a forgetable character that contributed very little to anything. I’m not even gonna comment on the Finn/Poe relationship and the blatant heteronormativity regarding both because that would need a whole other post. Poe, on the other hand... I don’t know what they did to that character. I think Oscar Isaac and John Boyega are better qualified than me to discuss these issues regarding their characters - and, well, they did. If not even the actors who play the caracters you invented are satisfied with what you made of them, well, that’s a big red flag.

And the remaining of the characters? You don’t bring Lando Calrissian back for nothing like that. What happened to Maz Kanata, one of the most interesting characters in TFA? I mean, you don’t bring Lupita Nyong’o to the set only so she could record four sentences and then go back home. General Hux was a spy? Okay, but give me more thoughts on that. Oh too bad he was already blasted. Where is BB8? Why isn’t it doing anything? 

And then we get to Kylo Ren. Such wasted potential. This character could have developed in SO MANY WAYS only to become exactly what everyone knew (and nobody wanted) he would become: the once-evil-turned-good-guy-that-saves-the-girl-then-kisses-here-and-dies-and-she-is-sad. Jesus fucking Christ. Disney, I thought the entire point of TLJ was “we’re taking everything that was convential and smashing that and creating something new’ but I’m story, this boring trope has already been used and reused and reused again thousands of times. It’s not new. It’s not interesting. You could have done so much with this character, but in the end, you did nothing. And that’s frustrating. 

Finally, we get to the part that frustrates me the most: the return of Palpatine and imminent rise of the “Final Order”, or, as I prefer to label it, “Return of the Jedi re-imagined by a straight, low-witted white guy who had nothing better to do”. I’m not even gonna comment on the complete nonsense of this entire storyline because I think the movie talks by itself in this matter. The thing is: this entire plot was unnecessary and had approximately nothing to do with what was developed back in TFA, but since you chose to use it, the least that could be done was DO IT RIGHT. Do I need to say it wasn’t? 

It’s frustrating, you know. To see something that was so promising once become such a waste of potential, waste of character development, waste of opportunities, waste of innovation. I’m not gonna lie - I was expecting the movie to be WAY WORSE than it actually was, but that’s most likely because I already was with the lowest expectation possible. In the end, TROS was a fitting end for the Sequel Trilogy, because it symbolizes and summarizes it in a very simple and true manner: it is forgetable. It’s is superfluous. Just like the appendix attached to the large intestine: it contributes nothing and most of the time you forget it exists, and when you remember, you wish you didn’t. And, to me, that’s the worst thing a Star Wars movie can be: forgetable. 

[charismathing]

Charisma as a Lack of Social Barriers

Charisma Therapy:

Learning to Let Your Personality Shine Through

As a child I was very socially awkward.   I was constantly bullied in school, and it seemed I was always doing something inappropriate, or blurting out the wrong thing.  I marveled at how easily social interactions seemed to come to other people.  But I was lucky enough to have a few acquaintances and relatives who happened to be charismatic.  I made it my goal to observe these seemingly magical people, and learn what made people like them so much.  I can’t say exactly how long I’ve been studying charisma, both by reading about it and observing it in my life, but it has been more than 10 years since I found out this mysterious phenomenon had a name, and since I made it my goal to figure out how it worked.  I can’t attest to my own level of charisma, but what I can do is share some of my thoughts and experiences, especially the ones I feel have been particularly beneficial to my mental health, and my life as a whole.

One of the reasons I am writing this article is because I want to advocate learning charisma as a form of therapy.  Personally, I know that the progress I have made since first deciding to learn charisma has facilitated literally every aspect of my life, as well as made me more sure of who I am, and I want to help others have similar experiences.  I have struggled with severe depression my whole life.  Before I learned about charisma, I just assumed I had been dealt a bad set of cards, destined for social failure.  It is only in retrospect that I realize that most of my problems were due to awkward social situations that could have been easily resolved.  I’m not saying that all my problems were my fault, but learning about social dynamics made it easier for me to interact with everybody, resolving pre-existing conflicts as well as preventing new ones.  Although I still occasionally struggle with depression, learning about charisma has helped me improve my relationships with my friends and family, and ultimately made it much easier for me to cope with my depression.  

So first of all, what is charisma?  Merriam Webster’s Dicitonary defines Charisma as:

1. a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure (such as a political leader)

• His success was largely due to his charisma.

2: a special magnetic charm or appeal

• the charisma of a popular actor

Well it turns out that what appears to be “magic” on the surface is actually a specific set of learned behaviors.  The reason they appear so natural is because charismatic individuals happen to learn these behaviors from a young age, and so by adulthood, they use their social skills constantly and naturally.  Think of when you were a child, how difficult it was to learn to eat with a fork.  Now it is probably so easy, it would actually take effort not to do it correctly.  Charisma is the same way: once you adopt charismatic habits into your life, they become second nature, since every social interaction is an opportunity to practice.  Once you understand that charisma is not a mysterious magic but an understandable psychological phenomenon, it becomes much more approachable.  

Olivia Fox Cabane is one of my favorite charisma experts, and I highly recommend listening to any of her talks, and reading her book The Charisma Myth, which outlines many ways to both project charisma and care for one’s own psyche to maintain the healthy state of mind needed to foster a charismatic state of mind.  (Here is a link to her talk:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMu_md_5PQ4&t=680s)  Without going into too much detail on what has already been said,  psychologists have determined that the content of what charismatic leaders say actually matters very little.  It is more important to use non-verbals such as eye-contact, posture and body language to project presence, power and warmth.  It turns out that, through the use of non-verbals we “can talk to ourselves” as well as others, to enter a charismatic mindset and to shape our social interactions.

Instead of something you either have or you don’t, it is possible to cultivate a variety of different kinds of charisma, and to be more or less charismatic.  I used to wish I would one day “be charismatic” but I am now aware that this wish stemmed from a misunderstanding of the nature of charisma itself.  To learn charisma, first one must accept that one will never truly know if one has a achieved one’s goal.  There will be no owl to bring you a congratulatory letter confirming your charismatic wizardry, and even using systems that purport to quantify how much people like you (ie. counting “likes” on facebook or instagram) will do more harm than good for your psyche, and the results will be skewed by a number of confounding variables.  When it comes to charisma, one must accept the paradox that you are striving for perfection, yet perfection does not exist and therefore you will never reach it.  So instead of getting frustrated by your imperfections, it is crucial to enjoy the process of striving and accept that you will never see a definitive result.  

After years of excitedly telling people I study charisma, I have noticed that the word often seems to leave a bad taste in peoples’ mouths.  It is true that charisma is commonly associated with manipulation and dishonesty.  Most sources that purport to teach charisma do it through the lens of some ulterior motive:  “Be Charismatic To Pick Up Girls!” or “Learn Charisma Today, And Succeed Instantly In Business!”  I have a problem with these sources for a number of reasons.  Although they use certain rudimentary psychological tools, I find their facade is usually quite transparent.  I believe this “means to an end” approach is a product of a modern western culture in which we are trained to be goal-oriented go-getters, and any activity with no obvious, concrete result is seen as a waste of time.  I believe this cultural mind-set is diametrically opposed to the relaxation and self-compassion necessary to hone a charismatic mindset.  Instead of seeing charisma as a means to an end I like to think of it more as an art form:  something it is best to learn for its own sake.  If charisma is something you respect or admire in other people, you don’t need any other reason to start learning.

I also think charisma has a negative reputation because the first charismatic people who jump to mind are unsavory historical figures who have used their charisma to commit atrocities, such as Hitler and Charles Manson.  However, I do not think this is a reason to fear charisma itself.  If anything, I believe that if knowledge of charisma were to become more widespread, charismatic leaders would cease to possess an unfair advantage.   Furthermore,  there are abundant examples of charismatic leaders who use their abilities for good, from Stephen Colbert to the Dali Llama.  And I personally know many individuals who happen not to be leaders or even extroverts, but are still very charismatic, these individuals simply never become the focus of the public eye.  

Charisma is simply what allows us to have smooth and pleasurable social interactions.  This is beneficial to all parties involved.  So although charisma can be used for self-serving purposes, in can just as easily be used to simply make those around you feel good.  I like to compare charisma to martial arts:  although learning a martial art arguably makes you more dangerous, this doesn’t mean you are going to go around assaulting people.  Learning a martial art can actually boost one’s confidence, self-control, and coordination, decreasing the risk of any actual altercation.  Charisma is the same way.  Just as learning a martial art is a way of mastering your body, learning charisma is a way of mastering your mind and social abilities.

I want to dispel another myth which is that learning charisma will make you “fake.”  Charisma is not about teaching you to have a personality that isn’t your own.  Rather it’s about understanding social obstacles, and cultivating your social skills to navigate these barriers.  I think this is why people often compare charisma to a “shine, glow, or aura.”  Cultivating charisma literally makes your personality clearer, easier to read.  For this reason, I have come to understand charisma as a lack of social barriers rather than one specific capability.  I truly believe that a charismatic version of every person exists, and the key is to simply overcome the social obstacles you confront habitually, and allow your charismatic self to shine through.

Looking at charisma as a lack of social barriers allows us to approach it in a more relaxed, passive way.  Charisma isn’t necessarily about being the center of attention,  or always saying the right thing.  Sometimes it’s about not saying anything, and instead, giving your full attention to another person, just letting the interaction flow in whatever way is natural.  Personally, learning charisma has allowed me to let go of distracting self-focused thoughts, (ie. am I acting awkward or uncomfortable?  Can the other person tell? etc.) and really pay attention to the person I’m interacting with.  I have come to realize that there is something interesting in almost everyone I meet.

I started learning charisma as something of an act of desperation:  I needed to understand human behavior to avoid being a social outcast.  I never expected that learning charisma would not only be intellectually fascinating, but also allow me to appreciate life in a way I never had before, and I hope sharing my insights and experiences inspires others to investigate this field as well.

[therummesoccupied]

1-Upping the Ante: A Review of Super Mario Odyssey

If one was to ask me about my personal philosophy on video games and their design, they would receive a good many thoughts in response, but among them would be an assertion that one of the greatest pitfalls a game, or any piece of art for that matter, can find itself victim to is the lure of a formula. A formula, or a specific set of techniques adhered to in order to create something, can certainly be useful, and arguably necessary, when making a game, but a stubborn over-reliance on a formula can turn out to be one of a game's greatest weaknesses, especially when that game is a part of a running series or franchise. While its true that some games could use a bit more formula (see Sonic the Hedgehog), I believe it absolutely always works in a game's favor to try something new in order to determine how well it worked and how best to use it moving forward. In this way, a series is never stagnant, but continues to grow, bringing an exciting new experience to our screens with each new installment. One series that has proven itself time and time again in the fields of creativity and experimentation is the ever-iconic Super Mario franchise. While Nintendo's flagship face of video games has had his fair share of struggles relying too heavily on a formula (see New Super Mario Bros. 2), Mario has never been afraid to venture into the unknown and try something new, from endlessly enjoyable spin-offs like Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga and Mario Party to main installments with unique mechanics such as Super Mario Sunshine's FLUDD and Super Mario Galaxy's gravity-based physics. The latest installment in the jump-man's adventures, Super Mario Odyssey, absolutely does not disappoint when bringing new ideas to the table. The game cleans and freshens up the existing 3D Mario formula set in place by 1996's Super Mario 64, while adding a slew of new design nuances and mechanics to the series' ever-growing repertoire, and while some ideas could possibly go a bit far, it could be said that to venture far beyond one's limits is exactly what an Odyssey is all about.

When Super Mario Odyssey was first unveiled to the world, what first struck the vast majority of viewers was the manner of the game's presentation. Visually, the game is absolutely stunning. Perhaps it is biased of me to say so, but it seems to me that Mario has been borrowing a couple of the more useful notes from Sonic's playbook, throwing players into environments that can be described as nothing short of majestic, appearing absolutely enormous while still drawing focus to beautiful views that are sure to keep us gazing in amazement from one wonder to the next as we traverse the level's obstacles. The objects and characters in the game look no less brilliant than the world in which they are set. Even Mario, Bowser, and Peach look phenomenal, with every hair in Mario's iconic mustache and every seam in his clothing being rendered and visible to the naked eye, yet somehow maintaining a shape and color that lend themselves to the goofy and easy-going look that the franchise is known for. The rest of the game, however, tends to miss this seemingly-unattainable middle ground. The game suffers from a bit of an aesthetic whiplash, with some areas featuring cartoon-y food worlds or goofy hat-ghosts with lots of bulgy shapes and flat surfaces, while other areas boast enormous, painstakingly detailed cliffs with awe-inspiring waterfalls, or realistic cities full of lovingly modeled skyscrapers and anatomically correct humans. Seeing the iconic plumber so on-model in these environments can be jarring, and at time, leaves the game feeling sadly without a solid identity, trying to be too many things at once. Thankfully, the impact of this issue is lessened, as these environments are presented to players one at a time, giving us plenty of opportunity to take in every world as its own, and gain a strong sense of the idea each area is attempting to convey before needing to move on to the next. Any issue this game has with clashing aesthetics is nicely resolved by its thoughtful pacing and immersive level design.

The story of Super Mario Odyssey wastes absolutely no time, throwing players right into the action and getting the game going as quickly as it starts. This lack of exposition quickly solves any issues that have existed in the series prior with games being slow to start. However, it can also make the plot feel a bit rushed at times, leaving the player confused or wondering which part of the game they're in, if they're still in the early game, or if they've hit the proper progression and have gotten into the game as it should be, or even how much game is left ahead of them. Thankfully, the game tries to streamline the experience of progression by abandoning 3D Mario's usual system of putting players into a hub world and having them select their levels from there. Instead, the game moves forward one level at a time, with a certain number of objectives within needing to be completed before the next level becomes available. Similar to the game's aesthetics, however, the game's tone can vary wildly, generating feelings ranging from shocked and confused, to amazed and excited. Some encounters find a perfect balance between fun and epic, while others, namely a specific boss fight about 3/4s of the way through the game, can be described, comically enough, as “simply too badass to be from a Mario game.” Again, the game's streamlined nature helps to lessen this shock a bit, but the issue of clashing tone remains. Still, one theme the game manages to portray consistently throughout is one of adventure and exploration, something that the game faithfully maintains as its core idea. Every wild or out-of-place occurrence the game throws the player into successfully fits under this umbrella of excitement and ambition.

Odyssey's gameplay succeeds in being the most fluid and clean of any I've encountered in any Mario game. The movement of the game feels nearly perfect, and getting Mario from Point A to Point B is never not an absolute joy. This movement is supplemented by fantastic level design. The game's levels are contained, yet give players tons of room to explore and try new things, and are certainly never without something to do. The game boasts an insane amount of collectibles and activities that might be intimidating at first, but quickly sweep the player off their feet, turning into a never-ending fountain of enjoyment. Within the levels are a number of enemies and objects that can be possessed, or “captured,” the game's core mechanic. Each capturable object displays its function clearly before the player even gets the opportunity to throw their cap in its direction, so one always knows what to expect when going after a new enemy. Every capture has its own specific functions, and are always placed with a specific purpose in mind, though these purposes do not necessarily need to be adhered to, leading to nearly endless possibilities when playing as a new character in a new environment. What isn't endless, unfortunately, is the number of objects available for capture. Contrary to the beliefs of many when the game was announced, players are not given the freedom to capture anything and everything reasonably available to them. Instead, there is a sizable collection of things to play as, leading to “capturing” feeling at times more like a power-up than a core mechanic. In terms of difficulty, the game finds itself toward the easier end of the spectrum, falling somewhere between Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario 3D World. This is due, in part, to the game moving away from the”life counter” that video games as a whole have relied on for decades. Instead, when a player fails a challenge, they are penalized by losing a number of their coins, a move reminiscent of indie powerhouses like Shovel Knight. While coins aren't necessarily useless, their loss in no way hinders a player's ability to progress through the game. Because of this, many of the game's challenges are far less needlessly frustrating than they could be if a player had to restart an entire level whenever they failed too many times. Because of this the game remains constantly engaging while never getting to be too repetitive. Odyssey's aim of endless fun built on environmental power-ups and low-risk challenge gives it a level of enjoyment that one would expect from a well-built 3D Kirby game rather than a Mario game, but manages to weave flawlessly together with Mario-style movement and platforming.

Super Mario Odyssey, if nothing else, is ambitious. The game attempts to cover a lot of new ground while relying on the most tried-and-true tools at its disposal. Not everything it tries works absolutely flawlessly, but is presented in such a way that it can be not only accepted, but enjoyed, albeit in a different way from the rest of the game. As an attempt to expand Mario's horizons, I would say that Nintendo nearly made the mistake of biting of more than even they could chew. Thankfully, the trademark artistic dedication and clever design that Nintendo's creative team has come to be known for ultimately paid off, bringing an enormous range of ideas together for one exhilarating experience. Is it the best 3D Mario game? Contrary to popular opinion, I wouldn't say so, but I do believe it is the most successfully ambitious entry in a notably adventurous and beloved franchise.