Futura&!

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Monthlyish Digest, 4/30/2017 - 6/10/2017

BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad (dropped, episodes #1-6)  — modest, casually-paced show about falling in love with music that never really reaches the proper emotional heights that would communicate that theme most effectively. Turns a premise with real heart into something very, very average.

Best: Believable code switching with multiple characters who prefer English to Japanese. Those voice actors do a pretty damn impressive job and the scenes specifically about it are hands down the best code switching I’ve seen portrayed in fiction. Worst: By the later early episodes, the conscious directorial choice of slow pacing turns into budget-saving and excitement-killing stills and unnatural dead air. Like, this scene is amazing but, nodding off multiple times during #6, I can’t imagine it as anything but a beautiful outlier.

Pokemon White 2 (complete, 82.5 hours)  — what should be the blueprint for any Pokemon sequels to come, with a lot of practical lessons and palpable ambitions that any RPG franchise should internalize.

Best: the Pokestar studios mini-game where you get to “film” movie franchises and release ‘em to a growing fanbase. A perfect example of extra content that builds upon world and character  Worst: the story doesn’t exactly flow, nor does it really make much room for character writing outside of cartoonish, robotic motivations. That said, it’s an acceptable level of amateurish that, paired with the pacing of special Pokemon trainer boss battles, still drives you to explore the whole game

Close-Up  — one of the absolute best works of metafiction to ever exist, covering the trial of a man who just happened into conning a family by pretending to be a famous film director. Intimate, real court footage mixed with reenactments with the involved parties played by ... themselves.

Best: after opening with a very structured sequence that plays out like fiction, the opening credits immediately let us in on the secret that everything both is and isn’t as it seems, casually disregarding both truth and fiction, opting for something weirder but ultimately genuine

Miami Connection (rewatched)  — still one of the great goodbad movie treasures, its earnestness is infectious and pure, all in the service of a self-aggrandizing plot about a bunch of tae kwon do friends who have a really bad, modestly successful band. But with folks this innocent, you do want to cheer for them after all.

Best: on this rewatch, a certain something stood out to me. Director/writer/star Y.K. Kim really insisted on highlighting how he and his friends represented the best of the American melting pot. In the current political climate, really seeing that theme emphasized added yet another layer to the movie’s naive but comforting earnestness

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Not-So-Weekly (Monthly?) Digest, 3/30/2017 - 4/29/2017

No Man’s Sky (basically finished, ~30+ hours)  — A lonely, lonely time wandering around an empty universe with very rare bits of epic beauty or resonance. Playing post-Foundation Update gave me a game that did a better job of staving off boredom than it did at launch, but even if I don’t regret my time with it, I wouldn’t mind getting that time back.

Best: discovering a crashed ship and making the decision to take it and make it your own Worst: the slow realization that the aliens/buildings/events you tired of after seeing once would basically be the entirety of the game 

Oxenfree (finished, replayed, ~6 hours)  — Time loop fiction that tempers the sci-fi horror chills to match a young adult story with magnificent results; it’s unnerving without the threat of bloody violence. Experimental dialogue system that allows for natural flow and interruptions in conversation does convincing work for the modern argument that adventure games are defined by dialogue and narrative rather than puzzles. I like that.

Best: the very analog and very lovely distortion effects that take over the screen during scenes of reality bending Worst: while the dialogue system makes a strong case for dialogue itself, the lines leave a lot to be desired. Whedonesque witticisms and an overuse of “naturalistic” um’s and uh’s make everyone sound annoying and artificial far too often

Your Name  — Shinkai shows off a surprisingly nice sense of humor that balances out his usual melancholy, het, sadboy story, making this his first movie worth watching. His defining flaws linger as moderate criticisms here, so while it’s far from perfect, it’s still a good movie and its runaway popularity as a YA romance is worth celebrating.

Best: as with any Shinkai movie, it’s the backgrounds—heavenly lighting and divine clouds Worst: Mitsuha may be Shinkai’s best female character to date but the film’s structure makes it pretty clear that het, sadboy, Taki is still the type of main character Shinkai prefers to highlight, leaving Mitsuha as a merely a supporting character (albeit a major one)

Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid (finished)  — Goofy anime comedy that actually finds the time to take it easy to tell the touching story of two moms and their adopted daughter. Impressive KyoAni direction elevates silly source material and proves that happy home lives can be good TV, too.

Best: those very mature, contemplative moments of rich character writing and strong layouts that were all about making this bizarre anime comedy family feel like a real, loving one. Also, Kanna Worst: any of the usual raunchy comedy stuff that’s part and parcel of the anime comedy genre. While it’s usually fine with the moms—Kobayashi and Tohru—when it’s uncomfortably, erotically charged elsewhere it runs counter to the better parts of the show

Scum’s Wish (finished)  — Perhaps the horniest anime I’ve ever watched and one of the few with great reasons to be that way. Honest about sex and love and how weird they can be without disqualifying those experiences from being good, nice, necessary. A melodrama about retaining a moral center and learning to not hurt others. Absolutely phenomenal stuff.

Best: the villain (or, in the case of this show, its “worst person in the room”), a woman who has built an existence fighting against the central theme of the story by finding joy in the jealousy of others. She is perfectly awful and her character is unforgettable

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Weekly Digest, 3/22/2017 - 3/29/2017

Deus Ex (finished, 29 hours) — Certainly one of the reasons modern AAA games feel the way they do right now (lots of game things to do in a fully populated world) but with a design philosophy that still feels refreshing today (a small area made expansive instead of a big world made exhausting). I honestly felt amazed at the ambition on display the whole way through.

Best: missions with only one major objective but set in big levels that tempt you to poke at a variety of very different solutions which are somehow all feasible Worst: obviously white voice actors doing racist “Asian” accents for the Hong Kong section

Uncharted 1, 2, 3 (finished) — The first game is a tech demo for boring combat and some climbing. The second game is one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played that unfortunately uses the incorrect thematic push for these characters. The third game is also very pretty and the closest this trilogy gets to telling the right story, but it’s still very stupid. Combat is medium, climbing is decent, setpieces are great, characters are irritating.

Best: signature setpiece for Uncharted 2, a trek from the back of a moving train to the front that is the perfect realization of the series’ design document, paired with the technical wizardry of a constantly scrolling and shifting setting Worst: the wiseass characters who spew bottom of the barrel sarcasm and nothing else because the game doesn’t know what to do with them

Night in the Woods (finished) — Cartoon animals continue to be one of the best ways to communicate any sort of story. Stories about college dropouts returning home to old Rust Belt towns are rare and the quality of NITW’s characters and setting really make you wonder why that is. We’ve already got great stories about going from “kid” to “young adult” and getting a story about going from “young adult” (still basically a kid) to “actual adult” is super important.

Best: the characters are unforgettably genuine. It’s very important that main character Mae is kind of an asshole because knowing she’s not a great person and finding out that she’s still very much a good person means a lot. Also, Bea Worst: beautiful character and setting study scooching aside to make room for an explicitly real supernatural narrative is odd and I like it less the more I think about it

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Welcome to FUTURA&!

Hi! My name is Futura and this is a blog for opinion-having.

What is Futura&!?

Futura&! is going to be a place for me to post quick thoughts about the media I consume. This is usually going to be anime and video games, but I like film and comics as well! The whole purpose of the blog will be to get me writing more (and better) by asking myself to write more quickly and more frequently. I’ve been in a rut for a few months where I really haven’t sat down to write anything because I’ve been stuck without the time or energy to write the usual longform stuff I’m used to. But I really should write, huh ...

Why “Futura&!”?

One of my favorite manga, Yotsuba&!, is a slice-of-life story about a young girl named Yotsuba who enjoys just about everything about everyday life. Each chapter is the discovery of something new. “Yotsuba & Souvenirs,” “Yotsuba & Cleaning,” “Yotsuba & Blue.” It’s a nice structure! So why not Futura & Things?

It’ll be touch and go for a while at first, but I hope you’ll stick with me.

[This intro post will probably be updated in the future.]