Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis

Have I ever mentioned that I love strategy RPGs?  Because I feel it needs repeating every so often.  And I also desperately love Yasumi Matsuno, one of the few men on Earth whom I would willingly give up my freedom for in exchange for a life of pretty sexual slavery if he so desired.  Yasumi Matsuno is the incomparable genius who created such games as "Final Fantasy Tactics", "Final Fantasy XII", "Vagrant Story", and "Tactics Ogre".  "Tactics Ogre"'s PSP remake, by the way, was the best game I played last year, by some margin.  Matsuno built not just Ivalice franchise within the larger Final Fantasy label, but also the Ogre Battle franchise, which is probably the second most illustrious SRPG name behind Fire Emblem.

Unfortunately, SE, in their usual wisdom, has let Ogre Battle lie fallow for years.  What I'm reviewing tonight is actually the last Ogre Battle game ever released, a prequel to "Tactics Ogre" called "Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis".  By the way, this game was made entirely without input from Yaizmat, so its existence is hope - for me at least - that some new Ogre Battle games can be made.  "Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis" came on the GBA some ten years ago, making this my least timely review yet.  Since its a handheld game, its basically a microsized adaptation of of the Tactics Ogre/FFT gameplay that I would usually enjoy on my PSP remakes.  And it plays just as well as any of its big brothers.

The plot essentially is the story of Lancelot Tartaros, the one-eyed leader of the Lodis Dark Knights in "Tactics Ogre", and by far the coolest character in that game.  Tataros wasn't actually fully evil in that game, but he was pretty much the central villain.  This game takes place when Lancelot was young enough to qualify as a hero of a JRPG, had both of his eyes, and went by the name of "Alphonse".  Alphonse travels to the war-torn island of Ovis, a client state of Lodis, along with his best friend and commander officer, Rictor, in a secret mission.  Though the mission seems like a simple mission to stop a local civil war, its actually much deeper.  Something evil is afoot in Ovis, and its up to you to stop it.  That ultimately makes for a great little video game.

The Hunger Games

Right now "The Hunger Games" is the biggest thing ever in the history of evers.  It is setting the box office records on fire, and this movie is huge.  Right here is the heir to that teen fiction hole in Hollywood's gut that Harry Potter and Twilight are leaving behind as their franchises wrap up.  I was at a diner yesterday and the two old gentlemen behind, people roughly fifty years too old to be in this film's core demographic, had only one topic of conversation on their mind:  this movie.  This is the flavor of the year.  Unfortunately for many viewers, it isn't very good.

At its core, "The Hunger Games" is a pretty basic plotline that roughly five hundred action movies have done before.  Gather up a group of people in a confined environment, then have them kill each other for the entertainment of the deranged audience at home.  Let me just list off the top of my head five movies just like this:  the 80s action classic "The Running Man", both versions of "Death Race", a crappy Stone Cold Steve Austin called "The Condemned", the Japanese action movie "Battle Royale"*, and a crappy Robert Carlyle movie called "The Tournament" - and there are probably fifteen thousand more I don't know about.  I'm not going to call out "The Hunger Games" for being unoriginal, because honestly, who cares?  Everything is a rip-off of everything else.  The only thing that was ever orignial was "The Epic of Gilgamesh" and that probably ripped something else off too.  All I care about is if "The Hunger Games" can do what those movies did and do it better or in a new interesting way.

The difference between "The Hunger Games" and all those other movies is that they were pretty much solidly unapologetic action B-movies.  "The Hunger Games", in contrast, is a two and half hour epic aimed not at goofball action junkies like myself, but instead the teen crowd.  This movie comes packaged with the first trailer for "Twilight 5".  Now it is interesting to see a more emotional take on the "kill em all on TV" movie, with an attempt to build a whole dystopian future around the idea.  In fact, "The Hunger Games" probably could have been the best movie of this entire micro-genre.  Unfortunately, for all the epic weight and needless length thrown on the story, its ultimately pretty damn boring.  The fight scenes are terrible, the main characters are needlessly flat, and all the side characters are undeveloped.  Its a wasted opportunity for a better more awesome movie, I think.

Our Future Pioneers: Abandoning Destiny

"Dedicated to You, Our Future Pioneers..."

This is the final epitaph of "Macross Plus", a SciFi anime miniseries/movie that I absolutely adore, a show that all people need to see.  The entire Macross franchise, being space giant robot adventures, is largely a tale of humankind stepping out into space and traveling the stars.  By "Macross Plus", mankind has settled an entire planet for at least a generation or two, has faster than light travel, has cohabited with an entire alien race, and is rapidly spreading out into the stars.  "Macross Frontier" takes place a generation later, where the covered wagons that settled the Old West have their successors in nation-sized armadas of space stations soaring through the cosmos looking for new worlds to inhabit.  Yeah, this isn't exactly the most hard science franchise, but it still imagines a future where mankind has stepped deep outside of the solar system, well beyond our home planet.  "Macross Plus", by the way, is set in 2040, an immensely optimistic date for such achievements.  Ignore the science and practical concerns, and just look at the message for a second:  Macross is the dream of exploration, the dream of spreading outward, the dream of our children spanning the galaxy and ruling the universe in a sea of endless space and freedom for all.

Meanwhile, in the real world, that dream seems to be going nowhere fast.  2030 is the current fantasy date of most space projects, from landing men back on the Moon to sending something or another to Mars.  In my lifetime, in the realm of space exploration, we've accomplished basically nothing.  2040 is going to pass, and we're not going to be settled on any other world, let alone Eden so many lightyears away.  I've long ago accepted that I'm going to spend my entire life on this one world, and the day I realized that was massively depressing.  Look, on a fundamental level I believe the only real future of the human race is in outer space.  We either move on to other worlds, spread out genetic material out into the vast reaches of the stars, or we go instinct, either due to some manmade disaster here like nuclear war or overpopulation or whatever, or a big figgin' space rock blows up the Earth!  Either way, if mankind wants to survive, we need to spread out.  Its a wild dream, but I'm a wild guy, I dream big.

But right now... we're fucking it up.  Even in the minor goal - relatively speaking to full galactic human empire - of landing a man on Mars, we're screwing it up.  Our space program is a mess.  We seem to have no real goal, no money, no plan, and finally, most embarrassingly, no spaceship.  NASA just doesn't have the money or the resources to accomplish what we need.  This is a depressing post to write.

Macross Frontier

There haven't been any major anime posts in a while because I haven't found a show that I liked enough to comment upon.  "Macross Frontier" has broken that streak, happily.  This isn't a show I think I'm just going to forget about any time soon.

The greatest giant robot anime franchise is without a doubt Gundam.  However, in second is Macross.  Gundam has had something like ten gazillion series and movies and whatevers, while Macross has had only about five.  But the history of Macross is at least as storied, and it is a name that every true anime fan knows, or should know.  "Macross Frontier" is the heir to that long legacy, which includes the super-classic anime "Robotech" and arguably the best anime movie of all time, the supremely fantastic "Macross Plus".  Unlike Gundam, however, Macross is a lot lighter, typically.  The giant robots transform from humanoid to fighter-form, that's a rule.  There's a love triangle, that's another rule.  Usually at some point during the series, some female character will sing a reality-defying Jpop ballad that will pacify the universe and spread love throughout the cosmos.  Because love, as we all know, is the greatest weapon - if Obama were to drop a Love Bomb on Afghanistan, all our problems would be solved.  But as you can see, Macross is a lot more idealistic than Gundam, the shows aren't going to end with every major character dead or insane.  Instead, raw anime heroism will win the day, usually in an absurd twist of events.

"Macross Frontier" makes itself a great heir to that family of anime.  I can say with nothing but 100% certainty that "Macross Frontier" is not as good as "Macross Plus", but honestly that's being cruel to a very fun show.  As a matter of fact, "Macross Frontier" is usually the kind of anime that I hate, but we'll get into that confusion later.  What is important that "Macross Frontier" was so good, that my waning interest in anime has been seriously resparked.  And that is remarkable, I have to say.

Doctor Who

"Doctor Who" is that show you should have been watching your entire life, but only discovered last fall.  Wait, I'm sorry, I slipped into the second-person there.  I'll start again:  "Doctor Who" is the show I should have been watching my entire life, but only discovered last fall.  And by the way, you should have watched it too.

When I was a little kid I loved anthology SciFi/Horror shows like the 90s "The Outer Limits", "Tales From the Crypt", "Are You Afraid of the Dark?", the original "Twilight Zone", and of course - and this one is closest to my heart - "The X Files" (which technically had a plot but who cares?).  I just loved that idea of sitting in front of the TV waiting for a new fantastic adventure to start up, never having any kind of clue what kind of insane things can happen.  One week its wizards in the woods, another week you got incestuous hillbilly monsters, and then there are killer fire ant aliens, its was awesome.  Sometimes they were scary, sometimes they were funny, and often enough, you'd realize that the possibilities to your universe are far more infinite than you would possibly imagine.  Where are the anthology SciFi shows of yesteryear?  Where is the comforting cackle of the Crypt Keeper making terrible ghoulish puns?

"Doctor Who" basically is one of those SciFi anthology shows.  Its like a British "X-Files", only with its own deranged wackiness and genius.  The Doctor is a character everybody needs to know, and then love.  I usually don't review non-anime TV shows, if you've been reading this blog for a few years you'd know that.  I'm making an exception here.  Because "Doctor Who" is that good.  I'd put it in the running for some of the best television I've ever seen.