Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen

"Dragon Quest IX" represents what seems to be a dieing breed.  Good RPGs on Nintendo systems is a dream slowly fading away.  Really great games like "Xenoblade" and "The Last Story" will never reach North America*.  Heck, even the latest "Fire Emblem" game wasn't localized.  Its becoming a nightmare.  Meanwhile the PS3 has "Resonance of Fate", "White Knight Chronicles", "Valkyria Chronicles" and yes, even "Final Fantasy XIII".  What does the Wii have?  "Crystal Bearers"?  When the Hell is "Dragon Quest X" coming???

Well, to get me through this drought until the PS3 is cheap enough that I can buy it for peanuts, I am proud to announce a new goal for this summer, gaming-wise.  I hereby declare that this season is The Summer of Dragon Quest!  This is pretty fitting because this year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the series.  Dragon Quest is one of the great sacred cows of the RPG genre, being the main rival for Final Fantasy in Japan.  If you've ever wondered why "Enix" is now half of "Square Enix" its entirely because of this one franchise.  It has something like twenty games all-together, but I'm going to keep my focus on the main series.  My first target is the remake of "Dragon Quest IV" for the Nintendo DS.

"Dragon Quest IV" was originally the last Dragon Quest game on the original Nintendo Entertainment System, back in the days that it was localized as "Dragon Warrior" for no apparent reason.  It is the first part of what is called the "Zenithian Trilogy", three Dragon Quest games that just so happen to include Zenithia, a flying castle filled with angels - like the Observatory from "Dragon Quest IX".  Its not really much of a trilogy, totally different games with totally different stories.  More importantly for me, "Dragon Quest IV" is the first classic style RPG I've played in three whole years.

Bleach Recaps: Ep. 210, Auxahra

This is where the job gets difficult.  Last Saturday's "Bleach"... happened.  It was all in all probably the least interesting episode of the show in awhile, proving to be completely infertile for me in terms of jokes or sarcastic comments.  I spent about an hour yesterday trying to come up with a name for this post, and failing.  Then I went to see "Green Lantern", what probably will turn out to be the worst movie I'll see all year, and suddenly recaping "Bleach" was at the very bottom of my priority list.  So I'll just get this recap out of the way and move to reviewing something more inspiring.

Last week Captain 69 and the rest of his Boy Band got attacked by some kind even force that looked something like Tosen's Bankai.  This week we see Captain Yamamoto be a dick, and then send out every single person who will be a future Visored in an extremely transparent plot-twist that is guaranteed to turn them into Visoreds.  Also we learn that Tessai, Urahara's assistant/male prostitute was formally a vampire.  I really could not make this shit up if I tried.

So the episode starts with Soul Society-wide alert.  Squad 9's Spiritual Pressure has disappeared.  Apparently the Gotei 13 could sense this kind of thing back 101 years ago - a trick that might have been useful back when Aizen was fake-murdered in Season 2.  Urahara immediately regrets sending Hiyori, because it turns out that the threat is actually serious.  They were having a weird kind of romantic moment last episode, and I can't decide if that's pedophilia or not.  I mean, Hiyori is treated like an adult, but she has the body of a nine-year-old.  And the maturity of a six-year-old.  Well, Urahara is right to be afraid because Hiyori is attacked by something with red eyes.

Green Lantern

Oh God...

This movie is "Twilight" bad.  Its as bad as a "Transformers" movie.  Its "The Last Airbender" bad.  What we're dealing with here is something that takes what should be a fine time at the movies and turns it into raw electric pain.  This isn't merely mediocre or forgettable, its one of the worst movies I have ever seen.  "X-Men Origins" and "Spiderman 3" simply had bad structures and screwed-up plots that could have been good.  This is one of those movies that from conception to final cut was never good, never could have been good, and is completely awful in every way.

If there are Green Lantern fans reading this blog (I assume there's always at least one), I'll go ahead and explain my experience with this character.  I only know Green Lantern from the "Justice League" cartoon that I watched occasionally in its first couple of seasons.  Yeah, I was one of those people who were like "why is Green Lantern White now?  He's a Black dude!"  Ultimately I was able to get over the race issue, because honestly that doesn't matter.  Green Lantern was only Black in cartoons to be the token minority anyway.  But I was never able to get over Ryan Renolds as the lead.  I could not imagine a person worse for the role of the the hard-nosed, no-nonsense, ex-marine Green Lantern then Ryan Reynolds... except maybe Jack Black.  And of course this means that Hawkgirl won't be here either, which is too bad.  So the picture for this review is going to be the real Green Lantern and his girl looking sad, because his good name has been forever ruined by this piece of shit.

Metroid Revival

Today I remembered "Metroid Other M", probably the biggest disappoint video-game wise for me last year.... aside from "Final Fantasy XIII", of course.  But that already was the subject of a Fanwank Corner.  I don't think Metroid is a dead franchise, it just had the bad luck of having one utterly horrible game.  The biggest debate with "Other M" is not if its good or bad (pretty much all of us agree its bad) but whether or not its simply a bad game with a bad story, or something outright insensitive and sexist towards women*.  It can be saved - but only with my vision!  On today's Fanwank Corner, I save Metroid using nothing but common sense.

I think I was as disappointed as anybody else to see that Nintendo did not have a new Metroid title to announce this E3.  Because if there is any franchise they need to rescue stat, its Metroid.  They lost a huge amount of goodwill from just about every but the hardest of the hardcore Metroid fans with "Other M".  That's not good.  Sales were just plain bad too, because people heard all this controversy and stayed away from the game.  Nintendo doesn't have to openly declare "Other M" non-canon and set a copy of the game on fire at a press conference.  But they need to do something.  What they should have done is announced a classic 2D Metroid game at E3 for the 3DS, something to let the fans know that they aren't being abandoned.  Something unoriginal, uncontroversial, but properly "Metroid".

Of course, that would be a bit boring and wouldn't warrant a whole post, so I'm going to be more creative than that.

American Gods

After suffering through the untold misery bound inside a paperback novel that was "Atlas Shrugged", I decided that I don't want to read bad books anymore.  This realization probably should have hit me earlier, I admit.  But since that fateful moment where I finally excised terrible literature from my life, I have to say I've been considerably happier.  Not euphoric, but measurably more content.  Maybe I should cut out bad games from my life too...  Its worth considering at least.  Anyway, to christen my new Ayn Rand-free existence*, I decided to read "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman.

"American Gods" is a novel with a great premise, which is good.  Because novels that don't have great premises are usually bad.  (See how that works?)  That premise is:  what if the Gods we humans worshipped thousands of year ago were still walking around amongst us?  What if they were aged, forgotten beings desperate for the love and sacrifices they once received.  They are as much immigrants in the New World as the peoples who once worshiped them.  Now they work in butchery shops, run funeral homes, or just bum around the country looking for people to rip-off.  Of course, there are new Gods in America, the iron gods of the railroad, the teenage nerdy gods of the Internet, and Media itself.  What happens when Old Gods meet New Gods?  What else?  They go to war.

The main character of "American Gods" is Shadow - just Shadow.  He's a freed convict with a penchant for coin magic tricks with a wife and a best friend waiting for him at home.  Oh wait, he doesn't have those things because they both died in a car accident while she was making his penis happy with her tongue.  Now Shadow is recruited by Wednesday, a crooked con-artist who is actually the American avatar of Odin, and brought into the bizarre world of Gods, magic, and undead zombie wives following you around.  ...This is a weird book.  Shadow himself is a pretty vague dull-minded protagonist, as per his name, something that often annoys everybody around him.  He kinda takes everything that's happening to him with a weird kind of acceptance.  You'd think that hanging around with the All-Father, Lord of Asgard might make a man a bit disturbed, but not Shadow.  He joins with the Old Gods in their war only because it seems they're his only job prospect.