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.

X-Men: First Class

A good Superhero movie for once?  Am I hallucinating?  Is this some kind of wild fever dream?  Did the utter and complete blandness of "Kung Fu Panda 2" break my soul so badly as to crush my limited grip on reality?

I guess its not much of a surprise that among the seemingly endless super hero movies this year, "X-Men" would represent the lone decent title.  "X-Men 1" and "X-Men 2" are actually not bad movies, this is universally agreed upon.  Of course, this is almost entirely thanks to Hugh Jackman's badass charisma as Wolverine, but even his talent couldn't save "X-Men 3" or "X-Men Origins".  The second one is probably the highest bar for this series - not a great movie, but certainly worth seeing.  You got the Patrick Stewart, you got the Ian McKellen, you got Mystique, and Nightcrawler, and Rogue - all great roles in a movie that just brought it all together.  What I really like about "X-Men" films in general is that they don't need to deal with all the Superhero movie cliches:  no origin stories, no one puts on a mask, and no rescuing a damsel in distress off a falling building.  Its about the characters primarily, not the Superhero persona, and it usually works.   Of course, "X-Men Origins" is probably the biggest mess of a movie I've ever seen - such a titantic failure that I could spend hours complaining about that one subject alone*.  And I have.  Trust me, I seriously have.

"X-Men First Class" is something of a do-over for "X-Men Origins" attempting to create a prequel to the first three movies that isn't a titanic lumbering ball of failure.  Instead of the side-characters being  zero-dimensional set pieces that exist only for empty fanservice ("wow, Blob is in this movie!"), actually have depth and meaning.  The film manages to get a large enough scale to give major characters arcs, complex relationships that have emotional depth.  "Thor" just had a girl giggling at him, the intricate dynamic between Magneto and Professor and Mystique makes for a far better movie.  It isn't a string of action scenes connected with a pathetic excuse for a plot - its a movie.  That's why "X-Men First Class" is a really good film.

Bleach Recaps: Ep. 209, Hollowsaurus

Last week's episode was fairly decent.  This week's episode is good too.  The difference is plot movement.  Because the Turn Back the Pendulum Arc is a self-contained story, single episodes can actually cause major twists in the narrative.  This is unlike the main "Bleach" storyline, where individual episodes usually boil down to "hero #18" is fighting "villain #34".  Because of how huge the scale that "Bleach" has reached at this point, it is almost impossible for any one thing to really matter in the long run.  In a mini arc, a new threat can be revealed and actually create dramatic weight.  Episode 209 introduces the first real threat to the Visored characters we've met, and so its pretty okay.  Thumbs up.

Last week ended with a bunch of dudes screaming.  We now find out they're actually melting or something, and they spit up some up weird gravity-defying vomit.  This effect looks far too much like that completely forgettable horror movie "The Haunting in Connecticut", a movie which bet its entire fortune on the idea that puking upsidedown would scare the living Jesus out of me.  (Hint:  it didn't.  Virginia Madsen deserves better than this.)  Well, it turns out that these random dudes have puked so much that they exploded... somehow.  Two evil people - obviously Aizen and Gin - have an umbrella open to block the gore.  Aizen is very happy.  Then he jizzes all over the title card.  Fucking gross, man!

Obviously the rest of this episode is going to deal with finding out why these people exploded, who exploded them, and all that assorted stuff.  Or a monster of some kind will attack.  Works either way.  But first, we must get some character banter between our Soul Society characters from 101 years ago.  Sadly Yoruichi is nowhere to be found, but we do have Shinji, Urahara, and Hiyori.  Which means the inevitable logical conclusion - somebody is going to get hurt.

Kung Fu Panda 2

The hardest reviews to write by far are ones for movies that generate no particular opinion in me of any kind.  I was left so uninspired by "Hanna" recently that even after two hours of work, I was completely unable to write a review longer than "its okay".  It was awhile ago that I realized that I have a much easier time writing negative reviews than positive ones - this is because I'm an evil person who may or may not be able to experience joy.  But writing a review that is neither positive or negative, just "meh".  Now that is a task so difficult as to tear the joy right out of being a film blogger... person.  You got respect real film critics for what they do, because 99% of the movies they see must give them nothing to work with.  So if they sound bitter and sarcastic a lot, its only because you either go negative or you have no review at all.  Of course, that doesn't excuse professional critics for being aggressive and hateful towards movies that really did not deserve the bad reputation, like say... "Battle: Los Angeles" which is a fun movie through every perspective other than the cynical "seen-it" eyes of a middle-aged critic with back issues.

Luckily I can completely pick and choose what films I actually review.  So when "Hanna" turned out to be really forgettable, even in how amongst forgettable movies it was only moderately forgettable, I just didn't write a review.  But I think I'll write a review of "Kung Fu Panda 2" anyway, even though it didn't inspire all that much thought in me.  The first one really wasn't all that impressive either, though far above the standard of normal DreamWorks films.  I mean, the movie was okay, not as great as say, "How to Train Your Dragon".  A pile of kung fu cliches rolled together into a decent enough script that managed to make Jack Black not suck for once.  But it managed to work.  And now there's a sequel, so there you go.  Hollywood never just lets good stories lie, they have to try to double their money.  Then they almost always lose it all - the Sequel Casino is the most rigged game out there.

"Kung Fu Panda 2" is notable to me at least, for being the very first movie I ever took my baby brother to.  He's three-years-old, and somehow or another, has never been to the movies.  Not once.  This was of course a huge embarrassment for me, since I own a largely ignored blog that chiefly does movie reviews.  I mean, I always win games of "Seen It".  I've watched the movie "Secret of Kells", I'm hardcore with my movies.  No brother of mine is not going to see a movie!  And now that that's been fixed, I have a review.

Bleach Recaps: Ep 208, The Ministry of Love

For the first time in weeks, honestly all year, I actually missed an episode of "Bleach".  I'm busy this week, posts are going to be hard to work out.  Once upon a time, that would mean that I was screwed and would have to wait for a rerun to see the episode I missed.  But now that we live in the great prosperity that is the Future, I can just go on the Internet, play the episode on one of the dozens of possibly illegal sites that upload full "Bleach" episodes.  And they're also the sites that I steal screenshots from.  The Future is awesome.

Last episode Lt. Hiyori, perhaps furious over the failure of the plot to move at all, kept kicking people in the face over and over again.  Now things start to happen a bit.  We're going to the Maggot's Nest, a scary-sounding place of some kind of another.  Urahara spends about five minutes explaining various bits and pieces about Soul Society politics.  The Soul Society Ninja Force are under the control of Yoruichi and Squad 2 (which we knew already).  The Maggot's Nest is a secret prison hidden underground in the Squad 2 barracks, which Urahara used to run before becoming Captain*.  This is the place where they hold disgruntled Soul Reapers who wanted to quit.  Apparently you cannot ever quit the Gotei 13, and if you try to retire, you're locked away in prison forever.  Also, if you're the guy who runs the Maggot's Nest, you get to arrest potential troublemakers, before they ever commit a single crime.  Um... am I the only one noticing a problem with all this?

So as it turns out, the Soul Society is a vicious dictatorship with a secret prison filled with people who have committed no crime at all.  And remember, the Soul Reapers are the good guys.  Also, it appears to me that Urahara could have arrested anybody he wanted back when he was Warden, even Yamamoto himself.  No trials, no appeals, no chance for release, nobody even knows where you are, you're just put in a hole and forgotten about.  Enjoy your stay in the Ministry of Love.  Did you know that North Korea's justice system is based off of the Soul Society?

Super 8

"Super 8" is the kind of movie that so almost works its painful.  Somewhere inside this movie (actually roughly the first thirty minutes) is a really good film that I'd recommend without a thought.  Half of this movie is a classic "Stand By Me" story of children growing up in the American suburbs.  Someplace else is a monster movie.  These two concepts do not belong together in this movie.  I really don't know why J.J. Abrams thought to try to remake "E.T." by replacing the alien with a monster that eats people.  But then, I also don't know why Abrams constantly refused all movie to ever let you see the monster.  Its a decent kid's movie, a horrible awful monster movie.

Me and J.J. Abrams don't have a very close relationship.  For one, I've never met the man and I don't believe we've ever been in the same state at one time.  But also, the movies he makes are never things I ever like.  "Cloverfield" comes back again and again on this blog as easily the most infuriating SciFi movie that's been made in the last decade.  You barely ever see the monster, shakey-camera, all the best action sequences happen off-camera, the movie explains nothing, the characters are awful, etc.  Then there's "Lost", a terrible show that pretended to be deep by conjuring up armor of mysteries and clues, only for it all fall down and eventually prove to be completely hollow and pointless.  "Star Trek" was a straight-forward space opera movie, and I can ultimate respect that.  I didn't really love "Star Trek", but it was okay.  For some reason or another Abrams decides to bring back some of the worst features of "Cloverfield" here.

"Super 8", however, is a much much better movie than "Cloverfield" thanks entirely to its cast.  J.J. Abrams shines in directing the small emotional kid's story, with expert casting and a brilliant script.  Then he fails completely when it comes to the monster movie.  The love letter to late 70s/early 80s small town life is far more effective than the love letter to the SciFi films of the period.  Why did this need to be a monster movie at all?

E3 2011 Reactions

Here's some truth for ya:  this is the first and last year I'm going to get so excited for any E3.  I got hard core, watched all the trailers, wrote up an entire pre-show post, and everything.  Now I can basically conclude that it was all a waste of time.  You know how bad it got?  I actually sat watching the GameSpot live-feed of the Sony conference, listening to some Used Car Salesman in an ugly suit tell me how great the PlayStation Move is going to be.  It was at that point that I realized that I had reached a brand new low.  Me, in front of a computer showing a blurry video of some corporate piece of shit spill meaningless crap with his hands folded like a Bond villain.  "Never again" I told myself - and I meant it.

Alright, I'll try to not be so negative for a second.  Negativity is probably the number two issue with the so-called "gamer culture" right now, the number one problem the ludicrous concept that you need to belong to an exclusive click of nerds in order to play "Half-Life 2".  So let's be positive.  Give love instead of hate.  "Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword" was everything I wanted and more.  And there's an new one on its way for the Nintendo Wii U.  "Final Fantasy XIII-2" seems determined to correct the many mistakes of its predecessor, starting with adding Moogles for extra fun.  And there were at least three more games that looked really great.  The PlayStation Vista Vita has potential, as does the Wii U.  Finally, that chick in the "Bioshock Infinite" trailer has some huge.... lightning bolts.

But E3 really was a mixed bag for me.  Half of the games I really wanted to see more of weren't there at all, and there were only one or two surprises that caught my eye.  The rest was... "Halo 4".  The kind of meaningless mediocrity you'd see staffing a DMV.  Read on for more.

Twilight 4 Trailer

You are cordially invited.

In case you haven't been following around, I am a huge fan of mocking the Twilight movies.  It all has been leading up to this one great moment, the time when the facade of teen-romance fantasies comes crashing down to its very illogical conclusion.  Vampire babies!  Bella grows a hideous dhampir creature inside her belly after some wild extremely un-PG-13 sex with Edward.  The results are horrifying, and hilarious.  I greatly recommend finding "Breaking Dawn" in your local bookstore, skipping over to the chapter where Bella gives birth, and reading that for your amusement.  Then put that wretched book down and read something else.

In the spirit of humor, I'll now give a small breakdown of this first ridiculous trailer, because watching it is as much fun as watching these ridiculous movies.  I never really have done a trailer breakdown before... sounds intriguing.  But the question is, which will break first?  This trailer, or my own fragile psyche?

0:00 - 0:05 - The Motion Picture Association of America has seen this trailer.  It is approved for "Appropriate Audiences", whatever that means.  What's an "Inappropriate Audience"?  Somebody pleasuring themselves to this thing?  Because I rather suspect the Twilight fans are doing that right now.

0:06 - 0:11 - Summit Entertainment logo.  This holds no interest to anybody.

Bleach Recaps: Ep 207, A Boot To the Face

I know the Turn Back the Pendulum Arc isn't technically filler crap like we've seen before, but Episode 207 sure did try its hardest to make me forget.  This is because the "Bleach" anime right now is trying to make twenty-two minutes of television out of twenty-one pages of comic.  Episode 207 here is made from the Bleach Chapter -107*, which you can find online and read thought in about three minutes.  You know those recaps at the start of every episode?  Yeah, the average weekly Bleach comic isn't that much longer.  This means that this entire season is going to made out of only twelve issues of Bleach comics, and that's not a lot of material.  So there is going to be a lot of filler here.

Tonight's episode is a perfect example, because the only part that actually comes from a comic panel is the first two minutes and the last two minutes.  The rest is Lt. Hiyori, the bratty Visored, repeatedly kicking Urahara in the face.  Then she punches him in the face.  If you really love Hiyori, congratulations, this will be the best episode of "Bleach" yet.  Also, if you love Urahara, I guess you're in luck too - if you hate him you'll be just as happy.  Also if you have a disturbing interest in Squad 12 politics, my God, you will be raving about this episode for the rest of your life.  Oh, speaking of Squad 12, even though that place is currently filled with monsters and human-bombs, Captain Insano hasn't joined with them yet, so its a far less entertaining place.  Its basically Squad 3 from the Amagai Arc, two named characters and a full deck of nobodies.

So Episode 207 basically sucked.  Here's the recap:

E3 2011 Christmas List

So its now late spring again, which means only one thing:  it is time once again for that incredible video game expo that involves an 'E' and a number that is an 'E' backwards.  Yes, its E3 time.  Where all the biggest video game manufacturers deliberately misrepresent their products in order to excite one half of their fanbases and cause the other half to continuously bitch for roughly fifteen months.  And of course, about 10% of the stuff will never get released at all, going up to that big GameStop in the sky along with "Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Dead" and "Starcraft: Ghost".  Naturally of course, I will never ever be bothered to go to this place, because it sounds like the single most awful, crowded, and loud place on Earth*.  So instead of actually going, I'll just write a list of stuff I want to see, so that I can be properly disappointed when its over.  And then I too can join the rest of my video game-playing brothers in bitching endlessly.

And thanks to Square Enix, I can be disappointed already.  Their line-up for this show isn't actually a Square Enix line-up, its the devoured studio Eidos in disguise.  No Kingdom Hearts.  No Dragon Quest.  No Final Fantasy aside for "Final Fantasy XIII-2", a quick cash-in sequel to a game I didn't want to play the first time around (but maybe they can get it right this time, eh?).  I mean, if you love "Tomb Raider", you'll be happy.  But I distinctly remember "Type-Zero" and "Kingdom Hearts 3D" being promised for this show.  Then again, SE might not even exist in a few years at the rate they're going, so I'll move on now.

Ultimately the sad fact is that I'm just a guy who relies entirely on some company or another to decide my gaming fate.  I might dream of  "Sheik: the Game" but it will never happen until Nintendo decides to actually make it.  I am at their mercy.  So here I'll just recap whatever games are coming up that I think are particularly interesting, and perhaps might pepper in some random idea for a game that exists only in my head.  Read on if you're interested.  But know this:  there is no way in Hell that "Modern Warfare 3" will ever appear on this list.