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Now using this space as a personal repository for my thoughts on fiction and media www.willknappart.com @oddygaul

[oddygaul]

Metroid Fusion

When it comes to gameplay, picking my favorite Metroid is tricky. Conceptually, though? It’s hard for me to pick anything but Fusion as the coolest.

Point 1 – The titular fusion After three games of committing genocide upon the Metroid race, Samus is forced to fuse with her enemy on a genetic level. All of those weaknesses she previously exploited are now hers to bear. The iconic Ice Beam? Untenable. Chilly rooms? Newly problematic. Plus, the suit is sick as fuck, let’s be real.

Point 2 – The setting of the BSL Research Station The video game status quo demands that each level be a radically different biome, with its own enemies and aesthetic… even if that doesn’t make much sense. Here, though, it’s perfectly diegetic – the game takes place on a space station specifically designed for researching different environments, with each of its 6 sectors tailor-made to house creatures that prefer a distinct climate. It’s a type of sci-fi the Metroid series, with its blasted caverns and abandoned precursor technology, usually isn’t, making the game feel fresh. Plus, they nail the aesthetic, with each natural area girded by the station's uniform construction – big shout-out to AQA’s immense tanks and aquariums.

Point 3 – The X Now you’re telling me all those unique creatures on the station have been replaced by nightmarish shapeshifters masquerading as their former prey? Again, sci-fi gold: this research station is basically the worst possible place for the X to have been introduced, as it can now get its hands on the DNA and abilities of hundreds of species from across the galaxy. The hubris! It’s a great add from a gameplay standpoint, too – the designers have free reign to add whatever enemies they want, including fun callbacks to Metroid II’s SR388 denizens, bizarre hybrids like the mermaid Space Pirate, or Ridley returning yet again in a, well, slightly less contrived way*.

*I can’t be too mad about it when his sprite is this dope

Point 4 – The SA-X AND one of those shapeshifters has taken YOUR form, meaning the player must spend the whole game in fear of an enemy who uses your own techniques and items against you? Hell yeah. I love the twist later on, too, that it’s not just one boogeyman that’s taken you as its nemesis: there’s dozens roaming the station. Especially given that we’re told the X subsumes memories and intelligence as well as physical prowess, why wouldn’t they start mass producing an organism as successful as the SA-X?

Point 5 – Adam AND your sort-of-dull computerized AI guide is actually an LLM built from the knowledge and personality of Samus’s dead former colleague? Like a perfect mirror of the SA-X situation, where one’s very essence has been stolen and used without consent to pursue nefarious ends? That’s a throughline, baby.

When I was younger, I remember this game getting a lot of flak for how linear it is. It’s certainly a departure; I can imagine the betrayal oldheads must have felt going straight from Super to Fusion. Honestly, though, for me, the moment-to-moment Metroid gameplay is fun as hell on its own even without the wandering. And since Fusion’s gameplay is in peak form – a handful of dubious bosses aside – I’m still charmed by its more guided experience. Plus, the directed nature makes those moments when you have to go off-book more impactful. In Zero Mission I’m rolling through crumbling infrastructure all day; in Fusion, when the power shuts off and I have to bomb my way out of an elevator shaft, I know some real shit’s going down.

Combine that with the aforementioned rock-solid premise and immaculate horror vibes? It works for me.

My one exception to Fusion’s gorgeous spritework: MAN, do the beams in this game look wack. It really made me appreciate how stylish Zero Mission’s beam upgrades are, compared to Fusion’s boring lines and triangles. This is only aesthetically speaking, of course, because it’s hilarious how absolutely broken the charge beam is in this game.

[oddygaul]

Koike's Lupin the IIIrd / The Immortal Bloodline

Well, here we go, Takeshi Koike’s take on Lupin the IIIrd has finally come to an end with the release of his first full feature-length film since REDLINE. I know, I know, I of all people should be really excited about this, but… the truth is, I just haven’t been over the moon about Koike’s Lupin.

A big part of it is that I’m ambivalent on the premise of Lupin as a whole. I’ve certainly enjoyed parts of the franchise: I haven’t gotten through any of the mainline shows, but Sayo Yamamoto’s Woman Called Fujiko Mine was stellar, and I like Castle of Cagliostro as much as the next guy. It just feels limiting to attach someone as creative as Koike to a setting so grounded in reality. This is a man who can’t help but worldbuild, who reimagines a scifi version of a cigarette pack as a background gag, who’s compelled to hide intricate mechanical designs into inauspicious articles of clothing... and we’re sticking him to a retro spy series?

This isn’t to say Koike doesn’t enjoy it, mind you. It’s no coincidence that every single entry in his Lupin series has at least one car chase – even Immortal Bloodline, which is set entirely on remote Caveman Assassin Island, features Lupin drifting a WWI-era car AND a flashback of Lupin driving a classic cruiser along a winding forest road. Plus, Koike is still Koike. Reminiscent of World Record’s devoted obsession to capturing the rippling muscles of an Olympic sprinter, each Lupin OVA has a sequence clearly driven by Koike’s observational hyperfixation: Goemon’s blade shearing off slices of muscle like cuts from a filet in Blood Spray, for example, or the slow-motion detonations from Zenigata and the Two Lupins, with their shockwaves lifting snow off the branches of nearby trees before the explosion has even spread.

Unfortunately, these highlights notwithstanding, the series is visually defined by its compromises. We have sick hand-drawn car chases, yes, a rarity in this day & age, but every other vehicle is a 3D model. Zenigata showcases gorgeous effects work as mentioned before, but each other entry deploys clunky CG for explosions, waves, and water. The series is chock-full of excellent character animation and designs, then deploys stiff CGI models for background characters (understandable) and mooks (wack). I understand it’s a franchise, and some trade-offs need to be made, but it’s simply not nearly as exciting to me as Koike’s maximalist sicko shit.

The writing… woof. It’s hard for me to focus on anything other than Fujiko here, who can’t seem to go thirty minutes in this series without being stripped naked or sexually assaulted. Now, I understand that Koike’s OVAs aren’t necessarily in the same continuity as Woman Called Fujiko Mine. However, given that the success of that series – widely lauded for its mature take on the franchise and for granting Fujiko more agency and depth – purportedly led to the creation of this OVA series, it’s wild to me how little they seem to have learned from it.

The best part of Daisuke Jigen’s Gravestone, the sick-ass car chase, is constantly broken up by cuts to scenes with Fujiko, who's been stripped naked and covered in oil, as she slips and slides around a glass chamber and tries to avoid being raped / killed by a giant drill-dicked cyborg. Not five minutes after rescuing Fujiko from this, Lupin gropes her as they ride away on a motorcycle. Lies of Fujiko Mine is built around the ‘femme fatale forced to take care of kid’ trope – a premise already handled better by Yamamoto herself in Michiko & Hatchin – and still manages to make it feel sleazy and juvenile with its treatment of Bincam. The Immortal Bloodline doesn’t even have anything for Fujiko to do: despite being specifically invited on the mission by Lupin, the writers just create a flimsy excuse to strip her naked again, then she spends the rest of the movie hanging out in the background wearing an absurdly skimpy and vaguely racist outfit.

Look, Koike didn’t write these movies, so I’m willing to pin this on Yuya Takahashi, who did. All I’m saying is, when we look at the unbroken line of shoehorned pervy shit from Kawajiri to earlier Koike to now, Koike isn’t exactly beating the allegations.

This has turned out largely negative, I guess, but there’s still a lot I like here.

I think the overall pitch of the series is clever for a franchise built around its ensemble cast: each member of the gang gets a spotlight film where they fight their doppelganger. Daisuke is hunted down by another marksman; Goemon is bested by a warrior who's powerful despite his lack of honor; Fujiko is saddled with a charge she can’t seduce while hunted by an assassin who uses coercion tactics like she does; Zenigata is stymied trying to pursue justice in a country whose institutions have none; and Lupin, well, Lupin faces off against a literal body double, just in case you hadn't picked up on the metaphor by that point.

Koike’s directorial penchant for interesting framing and tricky perspectives keeps the series consistently interesting, even in its slower moments. Plus, I love that it still gets dumb and cartoony despite ostensibly being a more adult, ‘hard-boiled’ take, like Goemon using his sword like a paraglider in Immortal Bloodline or this fucking shark.

Plus, credit where it’s due, they let Koike get fairly weird – Immortal Bloodline is a movie whose primary antagonist is an immortal kung-fu neanderthal, and features an assassin with really really hot hands whose combat style is speedwalking up to people and holding them with his hot hot hands, and I have to respect that at least a little bit.

Still, I can’t pretend – my favorite part of The Immortal Bloodline’s release is that it means my boy is finally free after being trapped working in the Lupin mines for over a decade. I’m happy Koike had a stable recurring gig while he was raising his child, now let’s get fucking weird again!!

[oddygaul]

Random Band Challenge 2025

Every other year or so, a record shop in my city called Square Cat Vinyl hosts the Random Band Challenge. First, there’s an open callout for local musicians. Once they reach 50, they put all the names in a hat and draw them out randomly, five at a time, and each group of five becomes a band. There’s no weighting for instruments – your band can easily have five guitarists or five drummers. Once the drawing’s done, each band has two months to prep an original 15-minute set, at the end of which Square Cat hosts a battle of the bands.

This past year I entered for the first time. It’s honestly amazing how the setup of the challenge manages to condense multiple years of simmering band drama into a two month timespan – by the day of the show we were only a four-piece, because our fifth member dramatically quit halfway through via Google Doc manifesto*.

*the funny part is his manifesto was totally earned, lmao

Nevertheless… we ended up taking first place in the end. In addition to cash, one of the grand prizes was studio time to record one of the songs we wrote, and it finally dropped last month. so here's Hourglass:

art by Josie Johnson Youtube | Spotify | Download

—

All of the bands had a noun they had to work into their songs. I think we got lucky with ‘hourglass’; it’s a bit boring, sure, but other groups got saddled with some real stinkers like ‘zamboni’ or ‘Danny DeVito’. Mind you, the zamboni band really came through with their matching jerseys, lead organist, and world-debut genre of “hock rock”, and the Danny DeVito band was stymied less by their noun than by the fact that they rolled a full stack of 5 acoustic-strumming singer-songwriters.

[oddygaul]

All You Need Is All You Need Is Kill

I wake up. I write a book. It’s good, but there’s some issues with the prose and characterization – what if we got a big-budget cast to give it that grandiose Hollywood feel? I wake up. There's a movie now. Tom Cruise is here. The American secondary market seems to like it, but the nuance of the original was lost – what if we did a Japanese production, and switched up the protagonist? I wake up. This time, there’s an anime…

All You Need Is Kill (2025)

Well, this is maybe my least favorite Studio 4°C joint, but still a solid movie.

Craft-wise, it’s good. The colorwork is incredible, and there’s lots of beautiful environment art. The sound design was great; I particularly dug the whirly tube used to indicate wind whistling through Darol’s core, and the bassy hits of the axes in the final battle were a nice contrast to the typical treble shing of movie swordfights. 

The 3D here I actually don’t mind, and surprisingly, it’s at its best in the slower, more character-driven scenes; they did a great job of capturing the rough, oblong charm of 4°C’s chara-designs without them feeling too tamed by the consistency of 3D modeling. The character animation also shines in capturing Rita’s slow, steady increase in dexterity. It’s frustrating to watch the characters pilot the jackets at first, their movements sluggish and clumsy, which only makes it all the more satisfying a dozen loops later when Rita and Keiji lithely prowl the battlefield like predators on their suits’ digitigrade legs. 

The action boarding is where it lost me, and, well, there’s a lot of action in this movie. It’s constant and frenetic in a way where your eyes never have a good spot to rest – there’s not enough strong, lingering keyframes to ground the action. A lot of the fights use this zoomed-in, first-person view where all you can see is the overwhelming radial symmetry of a Darol and some splatter effects, which doesn’t help, and even in the fights that don’t, the camera is still going crazy, with the animators presumably drunk on the power and freedom CG has given them.

Script-wise, I found it to be a smart adaptation that stumbled at the finish line…

…but after watching, I wanted to make sure that statement was qualified, and being the person that I am, I went back to the other versions of the story to make sure my opinion was properly informed.

All You Need Is Kill (2004 LN)

oops, this pic shows how long it took me to write this

Well, reading this again for the first time in over a decade certainly made me less precious about its adaptations straying from the source material, because honestly? It’s messy as hell, and there’s quite a few elements that could use a touchup. The world has enough military scifi as it is, and that goes double for military scifi that’s played this straight. Our protagonist is a generic, sexist meathead whose internal monologue is composed entirely of cliches and hamfisted similes, and the rest of the book’s prose isn’t much better.

— “The squad was full of badasses who had been through Hell and back so many times they were on a first-name basis with the Devil. When shit started flying, they started telling jokes. Not the kind of joke you told your mother over dinner, either.” — that’s a real quote from the book. jesus christ.

I think the success of All You Need is Kill might have been a right time, right place sorta thing. Stories about time loops are perennially popular, of course, and Japan is no exception. Before this era, time loop stories tended to be character studies: tales about finding love, about the desire to fix past mistakes, or about using repetition to overcome one’s personal failings. All You Need is Kill was a harbinger of a new breed: the time loop as a power fantasy, where even the most hapless schmuck can level up and grind XP, videogame-style, to become exceptional in a world where they were previously a nobody. This conceit is everywhere in anime these days: Re: Zero, Solo Leveling, Reincarnated as a Slime… All You Need is Kill just arrived early, and the concept resonated with people.

Interestingly enough, though, after re-reading it, All You Need is Kill doesn’t actually show all that much repetition. After Keiji finally answers the call to action, we quickly cut to dozens of loops later, where he’s already achieved prowess in battle and figured out quite a bit about how to combat Mimics. For a story whose legacy and adaptations focus so much on the leveling aspect, there’s shockingly little sense of incremental progress in the original book itself. Mind you, showing that sort of repetition is inherently tricky to pull off in a book; it’s way easier to do a snappy, well-paced montage sequence in a visual medium.

— “Anyone who has spent any time in a kitchen is familiar with the inherent risks, such as they are, and know what can be done safely and what can’t. Never throw water on an oil fire, keep the knife pointed away from your carotid artery, don’t use rat poison when the recipe calls for parmesan cheese.” — what are we doing here?

For all my issues with its prose, All You Need is Kill does land its emotional beats, and the ending is its saving grace. Once you put all the sci-fi aside, when you ignore the lizard brain satisfaction of watching someone get stronger, the emotional meat of the story is about human connection. It’s about the catharsis Keiji experiences when he finally finds someone who understands what he’s going through, and about the relief he feels with Rita at his side, knowing he doesn’t have to do it all alone any longer. And that’s why the book’s ending – where Keiji’s forced to kill Rita in order to exit the time loop – hits so damn hard. 

What makes this ending work is that it’s not an edgy grimdark anime twist just for the sake of it – it’s tied in rather well with the story’s themes and structure. Unlike future works in the genre, Keiji’s steadily improving combat skills aren’t just a mindless power fantasy – every step he takes to become a more efficient killer erodes his humanity. The power of trial & error sets him apart not only in increased skill and results, but in an atrophied ability to empathize and form meaningful relationships. As foreshadowed by the rank-and-file soldiers’ perception of the Full Metal Bitch, Keiji finds that becoming the world’s savior does not result in happiness and fulfillment, but infamy and scorn. To become the ultimate warrior is to become Atlas, bearing the Earth upon his shoulders, or Jesus on the cross – a sacrificial figure that forsakes their own life in service of mankind – and killing Rita is the final act that pushes him across that tragic threshold.

For all the bullshit you have to deal with to get to this conclusion, it is, at least, a strong one. If there’s anything in this story worth iterating on and retreading, it’s making that ending land properly.

Edge of Tomorrow

Now this is a truly awful adaptation. It’s not that they changed the details – Rita’s axe is now a sword, Farrell is a strait-laced religious nut instead of a brotherly training partner, Shasta’s been changed from a shy cutie to a bearded physics major. It’s not even about the fact that they abandon the jackets halfway through, so Tom Cruise can run around in a black jumpsuit with an assault rifle like every other Tom Cruise movie*. No, the problem is that Edge of Tomorrow fundamentally misunderstands what’s interesting about this story.

*It is sort of about the fact that the very first time we see Rita in combat, it’s her taking a stupid hit and getting laid the fuck out. That’s not a minor aesthetic detail, that’s full-on character assassination.

When you put aside all the set dressing, the pillars of All You Need is Kill’s story are threefold:

- Pillar One: the satisfaction of self-improvement through repetition - Pillar Two: the Sisyphean torment of being trapped alone in an unending nightmare, and the emotional catharsis of finally meeting someone else who understands what you’re going through - Pillar Three: the gut-wrenching pain of having to fucking kill that person

Edge of Tomorrow manages to bungle all three of these.

Instead of keeping the source material’s horror angle of slowly learning to fight back in between being violently killed by monsters day in and day out, Tom Cruise spends his time inside in a gym, training the way anyone else could, with only the minor inconvenience of occasionally being shot by Emily Blunt. Worse, that training barely even makes him more competent; instead, Edge of Tomorrow seems to think the advantage of the time loop is just that you can memorize everything that’s going to happen ahead of time. Our lead advances confidently across the battlefield not because he’s improved himself and become a lethal warrior, but because he’s memorized each twist and turn like a rat in a maze. This is why Rita, who’s not presently in the loop, has no remaining advantage and gets killed constantly without his help. L.

The second pillar is a total wash, because the protagonist meets his allies a mere quarter of the way into the movie. He barely has time to understand he’s in a time loop, let alone get existential about it, before he’s spirited into a secret planning room with Rita and He-Shasta, so there’s no sense of relief. Hell, he’s not even convinced to help until after linking up with the others! I initially didn’t mind the changes to Cruise’s character: “talking head military PR guy forced onto the front lines for being an impudent dickbag” is a lot more fun than “generic MC who joined the army for unspecified reasons and has no interesting backstory to speak of”, after all. But when you take away the self-determination and crushing isolation? You’re taking away the whole story. Another L.

Obviously, since things are so off the rails by this point anyway, they don’t manage the ending, either. I shouldn’t be surprised that they wouldn’t let Hollywood darling Tom Cruise do something as objectionable as killing the female lead. They try a softball attempt at this theme: that Cruise has to learn to let her go, and accept that she can’t make it all the way through the loop with him. It’s weak as hell, though, and she ends up surviving anyway. Three for three on Ls.

I’ve focused entirely on the writing here, by the way, because visually Edge of Tomorrow is simply dreadful, from framing to design. Who would’ve thought you could make powered exoskeletons feel this drab and boring?

All You Need Is Kill (2025), again

Alright, so, let’s compare for real now that we’re informed. 

This version nails the time loop schtick easily the best of the three. We hit the ground running, establish the loop’s key grounding moments efficiently, and get into our second loop within like, ten minutes. Equally commendable is that All You Need is Kill 2025 doesn’t shy away from having short or unceremonious loops for fear of moving the plot along too slowly: Rita spends a good ten minutes and a few dozen loops just absolutely beefing it before anything like a plan or improvement makes itself known. I really appreciate this in a time loop movie – it really sells the appeal of incremental improvement when someone does so bad for so long.

So, we’ve retained the horror of the original scenario, nailed the self-improvement idea, and added visual flair in a way that’s uniquely suited to the medium. Great job, Pillar One has been achieved handily.

Like Edge of Tomorrow, Kill 2025 makes pretty drastic changes to the lore, setting, and characters. Most notably, while our protagonists are still named Keiji and Rita, everything about them has changed. In the promo material, the movie’s creators made a big deal about the fact that they ostensibly swapped the story’s protagonist by choosing to follow Rita instead of Keiji. The thing is, though, both characters are so fundamentally different from the source material that it doesn’t really matter who’s named what. If the characters are soldiers, they sure don’t look like it, act like it, or discuss it, and neither Rita nor Keiji is a decorated, near-mythological war hero.

None of this matters, however, because the most important part of the narrative – Pillar Two, the trauma bonding – is the primary focus of the movie, and it’s delivered excellently. Through its increased focus on the grinding hopelessness of Rita’s initial loops, Kill 2025 sells her lonely anguish hard, leaving the viewer well and properly primed for that feeling of catharsis once Keiji shows up. What’s more, this adaptation takes things a step further with a subtle but significant change to the source material: both Rita and Keiji’s memories stay intact loop to loop.

The power imbalance inherent to single character time loop stories has long been an issue in the genre, particularly those featuring romance. To its credit, the original Kill novel actually engages with it more than most. Keiji is devastated when he realizes Rita has forgotten all the time they spent together, and struggles to reconcile his feelings with the reality in front of him; this loss is one of the final straws leading to his actions in the book’s finale. Since Studio 4°C is taking a less cynical approach to the characters, though, eliminating this pitfall essentially allows them to turn the second act into a feel-good scifi romcom while sidestepping the ethical problem altogether.

Pillar Two: handled with aplomb!

And then they beef it.

Much like Edge of Tomorrow, Kill 2025 strays from the source material’s pitch-dark ending, in that Keiji and Rita both walk out alive. Sure, it’s closer: they have their climactic final battle, and Rita ostensibly kills Keiji… but he comes back. Unlike Edge of Tomorrow, I think Kill 2025 has a justification for this: that with its increased focus on its characters’ backstories, resolving those characters arcs is enough to satisfyingly conclude the story without needing to resort to tragedy*. Unfortunately, the conclusion of those arcs doesn’t really feel earned.

*The director’s quote that the story is “about killing someone you love” notwithstanding

There’s certainly some great, subtle characterization to be had in this movie. Without much dialogue, we’re shown how Rita makes her way through life: how invisible she is in the lunchroom, how no one really knows her, how shocked they are when she talks to them. Hell, we see how she’s literally willing to be repeatedly torn apart by aliens rather than directly ask someone for help. So when she trauma dumps her tragic past on Keiji at the end and explains what made her this way, sure, it’s satisfying enough. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for Keiji, who basically starts and finishes his arc within a span of 15 minutes.

Moreover, what’s hardest for me to believe is that anyone could achieve any meaningful character growth in this particular situation. In a typical time loop movie, the protagonist is stuck reliving a normal day: it’s over the course of hundreds or thousands of human interactions that a character is forced to look within, to think about how their reactions to social situations shape their lives and their own relationships, and what they can do to change. This makes an intuitive sort of sense to me.

Keiji and Rita, on the other hand, are in an action movie. They spend their days programming robo-dogs, upgrading mech suits, and killing, and killing, and killing. How is someone supposed to reflect on past trauma, examine their own behavioral shortcomings and grow as a person amidst all of that violence?

And then we have the ending proper, with Rita finding Keiji safe, sound, and alive when all’s said and done. Look, change is fine, and I’m not beholden to the original novel’s nihilism – there’s nothing wrong with a happy ending. But when the ending of the story is the thing that ties your source material together, you better have a damn good idea if you want to replace it, and they simply don’t here. The climactic finale battle doesn’t really have any stakes if whoever’s killed will just come back to life, so why build it up so much? Even worse, by portraying this outcome as a happy ending, Kill 2025 blunders right back into the genre trope it so deftly avoided earlier: Keiji’s lost all his memories, yet the narrative wants us to think the two still share something. From Rita’s perspective the two have gone to hell and back together, sure, but Keiji has no idea who she is, and the chances the two will form that same meaningful bond together again are extraordinarily unlikely. 

So ultimately, I’m left cold. We’ve thrown away the thematically coherent ending of the original, replaced it with muddy character arcs and an ambiguous ending whose text and tone are at odds with each other. We were so close this time…

But hey, if there’s any property it makes sense to constantly reboot, it’s All You Need is Kill, right? Maybe fourth time’s the charm…

I wake up. I write a book. It’s good, but there’s some issues with the prose and characterization – what if we got a big-budget cast to give it that grandiose Hollywood feel? I wake up. There's a movie now. Tom Cruise is here. The American secondary market seems to like it, but the nuance of the original was lost – what if we did a Japanese production, and switched up the protagonist? I wake up. This time, there’s an anime. The director seems to understand the building blocks that make the story compelling, but fumbles things at the finish line. What if, next time–

[oddygaul]

AM2R & Samus Returns

…so after Zero Mission, I realized I finally had a handheld to try out AM2R on for the first time. Once I beat that I thought, well, I only played Samus Returns once back when it released, so I ought to play that again for comparison’s sake, right? anyway now I’m playing through the whole series again I guess.

AM2R was an interesting ride. Mechanically, I largely liked it – as much as I dig the path the MercurySteam games have gone down in evolving the Metroid formula, it’s exciting to have a bonus game in that speedy GBA era run’n’gun style. It’s largely iterative gameplay-wise, though it does have some unique wrinkles, like the weird Arachnus fight where you have to launch him at certain angles with bombs, or the Spider Ball preventing pitfall blocks from triggering.

The aesthetics are distractingly inconsistent, which I supposed is to be expected from a fangame. From animation to spritework to music, there’s series high and lows throughout. For instance, AM2R features what I think is the series’ first idle animation, and the explosion FX when you pop dudes with the Screw Attack or Speed Booster are so absolutely sublime, my first Screw Attack in Samus Returns was almost embarrassing in its feebleness. On the other hand, most of the boss animation consists of awkwardly puppeteered sprites, and AM2R’s save rooms are the most sauceless in Metroid history.

The same goes for the spritework itself. Much of it is ripped straight from other Metroid games, leaving the game feeling more like a ROMhack than a proper standalone entry, and the artstyle varies wildly – depending on the area, you might see Zero Mission’s cartoony rendering, gorgeously realized natural vistas, or clunky amateurish tiling. 

Samus Returns, in contrast, is as consistent as you’d expect from a mainline title, for better and worse. While comparing the two is fun, though, it’s hard for me to call one better than the other – they have such different goals. Samus Returns is laying the groundwork for a new vision of the Metroid series, to be fully realized in Dread, while AM2R is determinedly sticking to the old formula. I like them as companion pieces, to be honest.

Due to its narrowed field of view and emphasis on reactive melee parries, Samus Returns is slower & more methodically paced than your average Metroid game. I found that this worked for me on a thematic level, though. Since each hit takes so much of Samus’ health away, you often find yourself on the back foot in terms of health, incentivizing you to carefully kill each of the crowded level’s enemies rather than just run past them. This makes Samus feel like a scourge, a predator slaughtering her way through the local ecosystem in order to feed on their life energy… which is a pretty god damn interesting feeling to evoke in a game whose premise is hunting down and causing the extinction of the Metroids due to their supposed threat to the galaxy.

My favorite thing about Samus Returns is all of its excellent character animation work. I think the jump to 3D was inevitable, if risky; there’s a lot of charm to Metroid’s environmental spritework that they didn’t quite capture in the transition. There’s some good ideas here – I particularly like the sense of depth the 3D environments add, especially when there’s creatures skulking about in the background – but the areas simply aren’t memorable or distinct compared to those in Super or Zero Mission. Hell, it even falls short compared to AM2R: for all its inconsistency, AM2R areas like the Industrial Complex, with its malfunctioning drones, or the gloomy half-light of the Breeding Grounds are series standouts, and the team’s decision to weave the Chozo lore throughout gives each location a sense of verisimilitude and purpose that’s lacking in most Metroid environments outside of Fusion.

Samus herself, though, feels like more a part of the world than she’s ever been in Samus Returns – even the feeling of smoothly going from a ledge grab into Morph Ball feels excellent, and it’s only a taste of what Dread would have to offer. I love all of her counter animations and badass cutscene moments, too. As someone whose first experience with Samus was Smash Bros., I feel like I’d been waiting for her to do this kind of action hero shit for years.

All of that combined with one of the coolest suit designs the series has ever seen? Hell yeah, brother, this is my Samus.

a nearly 10 year-old illustration I did of SR's Gravity Suit

When it comes down to it, though – and this is not an original thought – the biggest problems with both games are problems inherited straight from the original Metroid II. The designers of both remakes were clearly aware of these flaws, but there’s only so much that can be done without straying away from the vision of the original.

First and foremost, of course, is that the Metroid fights are simply not that fun, let alone fun enough to do dozens of times. Samus Returns takes the slight edge here in that its Metroid fights are merely tedious rather than frustrating – if you don’t immediately hit all your Supers while fighting an Omega Metroid in AM2R, you may as well reset the game. Both games pepper their runtime with additional bosses to break up the monotony, to varied success. I found AM2R’s added bosses largely forgettable, while Samus Returns features both series highs (Diggernaut, Proteus Ridley) and series lows (the awful trial-and-error Diggernaut chase sequence). Still… 50 Metroids is 50 Metroids.

There’s other examples, too, though. Take the Spider Ball, an upgrade that was never re-used after Metroid II: it was probably never re-used because it sucks. It’s a boring upgrade. There's no skill expression, you just hold the button and watch the Morph Ball slowly crawl its way across immense caverns. What’s worse is that there’s usually rewards hidden within those heights, so the player is incentivized to do this sluggish circumnavigation in each & every room. Each remake has its own salve for this: AM2R gives you the Space Jump waaay earlier than most 2D games to make the Spider Ball irrelevant, while Samus Returns mercifully blocks off those caverns to dissuade its use.

Still, inherent flaws notwithstanding, I enjoyed my time with both remakes. There’s some all-time Metroid Moments – I loved how both games feature the number of remaining Metroids slowly ticking down on your screen, only to have the scanner start going wild Aliens-style once the Queen starts popping more out in the final area.

Plus, each game grounds the narrative of the franchise in its own way.

Samus Returns reveals the Chozo’s history with the X parasite, and foreshadows its splintering factions in a way that smooths the transition into both Fusion and Dread. And AM2R finally got me to understand something I’d always found baffling – the fact that our story’s protagonist kills off every single Metroid in only the second game of a series called Metroid. With its more somber ending sequence, no bombastic Ridley fight to be found, though, I get it. After committing stone-cold genocide on the rest of the species, Samus just doesn’t have it in her to kill the baby Metroid. Consequences be damned, mission be damned, she’s found a member of the species that doesn’t attack on sight, and she can’t bring herself to condemn it to death.

[oddygaul]

Skeleton Crew

Look, it’s no Andor in terms of writing quality, but as far as I’m concerned this is some of the freshest Star Wars that’s come out of the Disney era.

I loved seeing a Star Wars story that was all from a kid’s perspective – there’s something about seeing the setting through young eyes that brings some of the magic back. Sure, the franchise has had Lone Wolf & Cub-style pairups, stories where a precocious child is thrust into an epic adventure (everyone liked Episode I, right?), and some child-centric one-offs in series like The Clone Wars. But a whole, big-budget series? Pretty rad. Plus, honestly, it helps alleviate a lot of the series’ consistent tonal issues.

Because it’s a series largely aimed at a younger audience, despite being about war and political conflict, Star Wars has always had to walk a fine line with its tone. From the goofy schlock of the original films to the wooden melodrama of the prequels, there’s been many different approaches with varying levels of success. For my money, though, the Disney era has been the worst. The Whedonesque flippancy of the sequel trilogy or The Mandalorian simply leaves me fully unable to suspend my disbelief. The opening scene of The Last Jedi, where Poe drives straight up to an entire fleet of battleships, prank calls them, then flies away without a scratch was the moment I knew I was personally decanonizing the whole thing.

The fun thing about Skeleton Crew is that while it has goofy cartoon energy through and through, for once that tone actually fits the story they’re trying to tell. Is it silly that the ship’s droid has a peg leg and talks like a pirate? Sure, but the whole story is about a bunch of kids going on a big dumb pirate adventure already. Do we go on lots of random side tangents that don’t serve to advance the story of the wider world? Absolutely, but this story itself is a random side tangent, rather than some big galaxy-spanning war. Do the characters make stupid, frustrating choices sometimes? Sure they do – because most of them are literal grade-school children who were having toy lightsaber fights two days ago. By picking a lane and sticking to it, the show stays consistent and avoids the tonal whiplash that kneecaps stories like Rogue One. 

—

When Skeleton Crew was airing, the only buzz I remember seeing was from Serious Star Wars Fans™  who were mad about seeing suburbs and sidewalks in Star Wars. Look, though, when your setting is this big, there should be variety like this. Coruscant is the capital for a reason. Not every planet can be Space New York City, man, there’s gotta be Space Minneapolis too. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some set dressing that feels lazy – seeing the Onyx Cinder land on At Achrann amidst a totally normal playground replete with a merry-go-round and a slide sucks. But At Attin itself? It’s a settlement specifically designed as a closed ecosystem company town where a comfortable, unquestioning populace will work for the state their whole lives and never leave. I think it tracks that the city planning looks the way it does, both from an in-universe and concept design perspective.

Plus, I think it’s weird to fixate on At Attin when we spend so much time in other fun locations. One of the best things about Skeleton Crew is how disconnected it is: no established franchise characters shoehorned in, no knowing winks as our heroes somehow find themselves on Tatooine again, just a whole cast of new characters exploring new planets in their own little corner of the galaxy. I enjoyed the spaceport, with its crowded interiors, space-rowboats and weird little puppet guys everywhere. And the planet with the dreaded pirate base built into “Skull Ridge Mountain”, which in the intervening years has been turned into a destination spa resort? That might as well be a Ratchet & Clank level, that’s comic gold.

dont talk to me or my son ever again

also glad to see we're still sitting the kids down in front of the horny hologram machine from the Holiday Special

If I had to make any criticism, it’s that the gang’s parents all feel like cardboard cutouts. I was dying how in the first episode, Wim’s dad exits nearly every scene by saying “I have to get back to work” and busily striding out of frame, regardless of the time of day. Now, I think it’s intentional that the adults all feel like big children – I think the idea here is that everyone on At Attin is oblivious and sheltered due to being raised in a big human terrarium by a droid nanny that shuffles them from birth to death with little autonomy of their own. Still, though, I found them just a bit too hapless to be believable.

Outside of that, there’s plenty of good character work and writing here. Jude Law’s charismatic, competent opportunist Jod is the obvious standout. From the jump, “grown man bullshits about the Force to a bunch of impressionable middle schoolers” is a great pitch, and he has a great rapport with the kids (“What’s a concubine?”) that only serves to heighten the drama as he makes his heel turn. At Attin’s barrier and status as a secluded planet hidden from the wider galaxy for centuries was a fun little mystery. I also really loved the recurring theme that everywhere the kids went, they ran into at least one reasonable adult who was like “what the fuck are you doing here jesus christ”.

[oddygaul]

Quick Hits #20 - Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, The Running Man, Coo of the Far Seas

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

A collection of vignettes that somehow add up to less than the sum of their parts. It feels like the writers had good ideas for a handful of compelling scenes – Sam Rockwell’s initial restaurant monologue, for example, or the absolutely surreal sequence of events that follow Juno Temple’s son being killed in a school shooting – and much less of an idea about how to connect them into a meaningful narrative.

Lacking a satisfying throughline or conclusion, and with its satire feeling soapboxy & surface-level at best, the only leg Good Luck has left to stand on is whether or not it’s an entertaining ride. Given that I didn’t find any of its bit characters especially memorable and didn’t think its setpieces were anything to write home about? Swing and a miss.

I did watch this the day Meta announced they’re giving up on their Metaverse, though, so that was a fun bit of serendipity.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

If Mario goes in the lava does he also become bones?

anyway, Daisy relegated to post-credit sequence, 0/10 trash movie

The Running Man

Kind of a nothing movie for me – I felt nothing while watching it and felt nothing afterwards. Cornball dialogue, a shit-eating villain with no real depth, a take on dystopia and uprising that’s so shallow it might as well be parody, and action well below the standards Edgar Wright has set for himself.

As a protagonist, Ben Richards had promise at first – “quantifiably the angriest man to ever audition for this show” sent me – but the movie didn’t lean hard enough into his absurdity or provide enough depth for me to really care about him, leaving the character in a dull limbo. Michael Cera was fun, at least. Him shoulder-checking his way through that wall was probably my favorite moment in the movie.

And the ending, with its tacked-on, all-too-easy revolution? Awful. Despite The Running Man’s damning portrayal of The Network, it’s all so conveniently packaged that it’s hard for me to see it as anything but cynical: a studio regurgitating a by-the-book, manufactured revolution narrative that lets the audience walk away feeling satisfied rather than forcing them to sit with the similarities they bear to the viewers of the diegetic Running Man show.

It made me think of Chain Gang All-Stars, a book that handles many of these same themes and ideas with far more nuance, and which refuses to give its readers easy answers or a clean ending.

Coo of the Far Seas

I loved the first 30 or 40 minutes of this movie. It’s beachy, it’s dreamy, we get a rare healthy single-parent household where father and son just nerd out together about marine biology all the time, it’s great. I was less enthused when Cathy showed up, informed us that this is actually a military action film, and made everyone spend the next 30 minutes disassembling and cleaning submachine guns. By the third act, when the movie had turned into a maritime political thriller, I was just bored – Yosuke’s sudden, unexplained ability to communicate telepathically with sea creatures notwithstanding.

Still, all of the water animation was gorgeous – you can tell what the staff was excited to work on in this production, and anytime Coo or a dolphin is on screen you can expect a treat. Seriously, look at that dappled light coming through the water’s surface, damn.

this was fucking out of pocket lmao. anime always takes its shot

[oddygaul]

Metroid: Zero Mission

This playthrough had me thinking a lot about Metroid’s evolution from the GBA era to now. When I first played through Samus Returns (and to a lesser extent Dread), my biggest reservation was that I felt the addition of free aim and the melee counter drastically slowed down the pace of moment-to-moment gameplay. In Zero Mission, Samus moves exclusively at a full sprint, with optimal navigation post-Wave Beam typically consisting of running full-tilt from one side of the screen to another while fuckin blasting anything in your way. The high number of long, narrow tunnels in Zero Mission’s map only reinforces this playstyle.

In Samus Returns, though, you’re unable to lock your aim at an angle while moving, so unless the enemies are right in front of you, blasting with wild abandon will often miss. On top of that, unless you’ve parried them, enemies take significantly more shots to down. The result is a typical play pattern of running up to an enemy, stopping dead, waiting for them to attack, parrying and killing them, repeat. It’s not bad, necessarily, but it’s a much slower-paced experience than the frenetic race of Zero Mission.

What I realized this time, though, is that the opposite is true when it comes to boss encounters. Bosses in Metroid are nearly always significantly bigger than Samus; since you can only fire at fixed angles or while jumping, this places a lot of constraints on the boss design. The result is bosses that are largely slow-paced and more puzzley. Typically, the fights are more about finding the spot you can hit a boss’s weak point from, and then figuring out how to be in that spot at the right moment, rather than a frantic back & forth based around dodging blows. The subsequent games’ free aim mechanic, however, means you can hit the boss back from nearly anywhere, which opens up the design to allow for more dynamic boss battles.

So, y'know, I can see the vision now. After all, the only technically challenging boss designed that way in Zero Mission is Mother Brain, and it sucks fucking ass -- maybe things needed a shakeup.

Also, I always remember dreading the Zero Suit section as a kid, but… it’s actually a real fun change of pace that comes at just the right moment in the game. I love a lot of the weird environmental puzzle elements, too – using the beetles to chew through alien vines after you get the Varia Suit is some straight-up adventure game shit.

Big fan. Zero Mission rules

[oddygaul]

Mars Express

For a decent chunk of the movie, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Mars Express felt a little too familiar. That it was following too closely in the footsteps of Ghost in the Shell, right down to details like its climactic showdown with an animalistic military automaton. At a certain point, though, I was able to let that go and think, holy shit, two cakes!

Plus, being a European production, there’s some things Mars Express does that no Japanese production could match – like that sweet, sweet full minute of logos before the movie starts.

Visually, it’s… fine? The designs are good, but the animation, boarding, and camerawork are all rather workmanlike. Don’t get me wrong, what they managed to accomplish with the budget they had is pretty exceptional, but it’s pretty rough when compared against its stated visual influences like Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor. In somewhat of a rarity for the medium, however, Mars Express is absolutely carried by its outstanding writing. The pacing is tight, the dialogue is great, and watching the mystery slowly come together is satisfying.

Most impressive, though, is how well-integrated all of its sci-fi ideas are into the story. There’s plenty of little show-don’t-tell moments that immediately clock as, yeah, of course that’s what would happen: I loved Carlos’ go-offline-after-grabbing-someone trick he uses to prevent someone overriding him with the prime directives, for example. All throughout, from the car crash’s anti-impact foam to students making a quick buck donating plasma paying a visit to the brain farmer, futurist concepts are married with the plot so seamlessly that the world feels effortlessly grounded and believable.

Isn’t it wild that the brothel touts itself as ethical by saying all of its prostitutes are synthetic backups, when the movie later establishes that legally, backups can only be in use when the original human has died? “Hey bro, wanna go with me to the sex club where everyone we’ll bang is basically a ghost?” jesus christ

"we saw you from across the bar and really dig your vibe"

I was sort of surprised the twist wasn’t about the biological computers running things behind the scenes, but in the end I kinda like that it was only a red herring. The organics aren’t inherently evil, just like the robots aren’t inherently evil – they’re simply another tool made by humanity for their own ends, to be marketed and sold and eventually replaced when the shareholders have approved a new product for release.

[oddygaul]

Lumines

I started Lumines because I wanted to find a new eternal puzzle game for my Thor. The kind of game you can deploy when you need to kill a couple minutes while waiting on the kitchen timer or whatever. And at first, it worked for that – I’d play for 10 or 15 minutes, then call it a day. Hell, at that point I thought I might not even come back to it. “Yeah, it’s alright,” I thought, “but I feel like I’ve got the measure of this, there’s not really much more to see.” But then, the day after that, I still booted Lumines up. And the next day. And the next. And with each successive session, my brain started seeing the patterns, the strategies, the blocks unconsciously working their way into my head while I was sleeping.

The thing about Lumines is that once you get even moderately competent, it becomes a game where runs take like, an hour minimum. Once you know the basics, blocks don’t build up the way they do in Tetris. And even when they do, well, there’s a mechanism in place for that. There’s nothing quite like the rush of hitting a bomb square into a perfectly organized trail of colors and wiping out half the screen at once, I tell ya. Comebacks are possible in Lumines, and they are addictive.

The best thing about Lumines’ structure is that, much like the music that guides its aesthetic, it has peaks and valleys. This is not Tetris, where the game simply gets faster and faster, making dexterity the name of the game. No, things will slow down, speed up, ebb and flow. And every time I clocked one of these moments, I felt like the designer themself was giving me a nod. The first time I broke 100k and discovered Lumines II’s secret reggae section I almost laughed out loud – it’s like the game is giving you a second to breathe and catch up.

So, as a game that works in five minute bursts in a waiting room? Maybe not. As a game that can serve as functional time travel on a long intercontinental flight? Yes sir, Lumines is your game.

Well, as long as you’re not ashamed by the thought of a random stranger watching you go absolutely sicko mode on Gwen Stefani’s Hollaback Girl for two straight hours.

[oddygaul]

Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary is a book with excellent pacing, interesting sci-fi concepts, and a surprisingly effective emotional arc, let down by dogshit prose and character writing that isn’t nearly as clever as the author thinks it is. The movie keeps all of the good parts and replaces the awful quips with a charming lead in Ryan Gosling, so honestly, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a pretty optimal adaptation.

If there’s anything they skimped on, it’s that the actual science and problem-solving gets glossed over. Credit where it’s due to Weir, in the book he consistently comes up with compelling scenarios for the protagonists to deal with. In the movie, though, the problems our heroes face are introduced in the most general possible terms, and solutions are typically found through dramatic montages rather than well-documented experimentation. This isn’t just nerd shit we’re missing out on – there’s a few dramatic beats tied to these revelations that are either undercooked or skipped over in the movie, like the Eridians not understanding radiation or the dramatic lengths people back on Earth are forced to go to while buying time for the mission.

The thing is, though, where Weir’s The Martian has this trial & error problem-solving as its foundational core, Project Hail Mary has another, more important pillar – Grace & Rocky’s friendship – and they nailed that here. Pretty much all of the cutest beats from the book made it into the movie, plus a few extra*, and they adapted it to film pretty damn well. I never listened to the audiobook, so I was surprised at how well the (fake) text-to-speech works for conveying Rocky’s endearing cadence. I love his visual design, too, with subtle touches like Eridians carving certain patterns onto themselves for communication purposes. Only on the second watch did I catch the Petrova line carved into one of Rocky’s shoulders like a little mission patch! 

*Rocky hate Mark.

Keeping in mind that the bromance is the most important bit, I still had a few quibbles. I didn’t think Grace felt quite despondent enough before Rocky shows up in the movie. In the book, Rocky’s arrival is a revelation on two fronts. Not only is he another person, ending Grace’s solitude, he’s an engineer – which is crucial, since by that point in the novel, Grace has already run up against multiple walls due to his expertise being more on the biological side of things. 

I also specifically really hated the gag with Rocky & Grace’s ships before they’ve even met. Look, Project Hail Mary is a wholesome story that’s more focused on optimism and connection than extrasolar dread. But the brief window between Grace’s arrival to the system and the duo’s first contact is the one portion of the story where there ought to be a little cosmic awe, where Grace doesn’t know quite what to expect from humanity’s first contact with an alien species, and the ship gag immediately scuttles any of those feelings. It even takes away from their initial meeting in the tunnel a bit – they try to play up the tension, but how could there be any tension after the grandeur of the ship was played for a joke?

Still, nitpicks aside, it’s such a great adaptation I think I more or less consider it the definitive version of the story. Hell, even the epilogue worked better here! In the book I found it corny and unnecessary, Albus Severus-style, but with Grace & Rocky in the flesh selling their bond, it actually kind of works.

[oddygaul]

Pluribus

Despite the entire world at the time telling me how good it was, I dropped Breaking Bad after a season and a half or so because I hated it. The catchy soundbite I have prepped for when it comes up is that the premise was boring: wow, a U.S. resident so overcome by medical debt they turn to crime? If I wanted to watch something that mundane, I could just turn on the news.

Truthfully, though, that’s only partially the reason. I’m naturally more drawn to stories with some element of the fantastic, for sure, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to appreciate a prosaic tale told well. No, I think what really turned me off of Breaking Bad was that all the characters are so fucking miserable. Look, I don’t need all my characters to be morally correct or anything – I can fuck with an antihero – but I need someone to root for, someone that’s fascinating to watch, even if they’re making all the wrong choices. But in Breaking Bad, no matter the character, my overwhelming reaction was simply “I hate all of these people, and I do not wish to see any of them ever again”.

When I heard buzz around Pluribus, though, I think some part of me had bought into my own narrative: here we have a new show by acclaimed director William Gilligan, but its bedrock is sci-fi? Consider me intrigued! The thing is, while Pluribus’ premise is miles more interesting than Breaking Bad’s, the show is a character study first and foremost… and unfortunately, it’s a character study of one frustratingly neurotic woman who I just don’t find all that compelling.

Constantly while watching, I found myself asking questions about how the hivemind works: what are their goals? How exactly do they reach decisions? Are they really incapable of creating art, despite having the entirety of human culture residing within them? Are they breeding? How much of what they’re saying are flat-out lies? Why does strong human emotion throw such a wrench in their system? How did this organism successively evolve this way when something so simple can bring their entire existence to a screeching halt?

And while a scant few of these questions are touched on through the course of the season, Pluribus is far more interested in exploring the self-loathing and spiraling alcoholism of its charmless lead. Look, I like a study of a flawed character if that character is interesting, but when it feels like a show is skipping over its juiciest bits in order to focus on well-trodden narrative ground, it’s just frustrating.

The craftsmanship of the show doesn’t help in this regard. I found there to be a distinct lack of visual flair: outside of some pretty killer sequences of humans filing around en masse like worker ants to accomplish tasks, the visuals are fairly generic, the score doesn’t pull much weight, and the acting and dialogue vary wildly in quality.

The pacing is grueling, too. When a particular sequence is slow and methodical to emphasize a point, that’s fine. When 75% of your show is this slow, it feels like a failure of editing. Take the phone message gag, for example. The first time, it’s funny. When we hit the rule of three, it’s still funny as a solid brick joke, which also serves to reinforce the stubbornness of our protagonist and her tendency towards self-sabotage. By the eight or ninth time, though, of listening to the full 20-second message, only for the payoff to be Carol bitching about Gatorade or whatever? It just feels like a punishment for the audience. 

This sluggish pacing is sharply put into focus by the season finale, in which they attempt to cram an entire character arc into 40 minutes by giving Carol and Zosia a romantic travel montage. Maybe this betrayal and whiplash could’ve had a little more time to breathe if we hadn’t spent ten minutes watching Carol do scratch-offs a few episodes ago, or spent a whole episode investigating secrets of the hivemind that every other character already learned simply by asking?

There’s a few moments of sci-fi brilliance that shine through when they’re allowed to. Kusimayu’s conversion was an absolute showstopper. The goat she adored moments ago abandoned like it’s nothing, her family ceasing their song mid-word the moment her seizure begins, the joined packing up and leaving the village derelict… it’s a truly chilling sequence that shows how any semblance of human culture displayed by the hivemind is purely for the benefit of the unjoined. Despite having the sum of human culture and creativity stored across a vast neural network, the second everyone is joined up, all of it will be made irrelevant.

And yet, Pluribus is determined to make all of this secondary to fucking Carol. Look, I get it, it’s not an accident – this is a purposeful choice by the showrunners. It’s just an focus I have no interest in.

[oddygaul]

Quick Hits #19 - Sinners, Didi, Dust Bunny, Hoppers

Sinners

I enjoyed this a lot. Despite all its genre trappings and supernatural twists, the characters at the heart of the story are what makes it work – even before the vampires show up, I was already invested in Sinners as a period drama. And even when things take a turn, all of the movie’s best moments are built upon its characters: Stack’s tragic death, the multiple dramatic standoffs as the baddies try to trick their way inside the building, Smoke’s hands shaking as he tries to roll a cigarette on his own for the first time in years.

That being said, I did love Sinners’ take on vampires. When the trio sings their first song outside the juke joint, I asked my partner, “Did that couple already know how to play these instruments, or does becoming a vampire just make you innately know how to play bluegrass?”

Little did I know!

Even if you put aside the metaphor of American whiteness assimilating other cultures into itself, the vampire hivemind is just a cool idea. I mean, the Irish vampire jam, their eyes glowing like coals in the dark as they riverdance? That’s good stuff.

v cool of the twins to wear these color coded hats until their character traits were established, thank u Ryan

Didi

Wow, I’ve never felt so catered to by a specific era of nostalgia – hearing someone say “that’s so wet” absolutely shook me to my core. Is this what boomers feel like all the time?

What makes this movie work for me, though, is that outside of its 2009 time capsule trappings and AIM notification sounds, it manages to land emotional beats that feel like the real teenage experience – moments like Didi’s sister helping him out after the party despite him being a shit to her, or Didi desperately needing to talk to somebody but rejecting his mom’s attempts anyway both resonated with my lived experience in ways I wasn’t expecting.

Dust Bunny

You know, I feel like I put “feature length Bryan Fuller film” on a pedestal for so long, I didn’t think about the fact that a movie actually gives you less time to languish in a particular setting than a TV series does. Smartly, though, Fuller chose a premise here that can more or less be satisfactorily explored within the runtime of a movie, so it doesn’t feel like it’s playing against his strengths. If anything, to be honest, Dust Bunny feels a little long – we spend an appropriate amount of time building the titular Dust Bunny up, but it then sticks around just long enough to lose its luster and mystery as we watch it kill off characters for nearly twenty minutes.

Still, if you like Fuller’s aesthetic, it’s got the goods. While the exterior shots were hit and miss, the hotel interiors and colors are all gorgeous. The cast of characters are classic Fuller fun too – Mads and Irora Aurora’s rapport is cute, I love how in Dust Bunny’s universe the FBI is comprised exclusively of dark-skinned black hotties, and Sigourney Weaver really makes the most of her role here and goes full scenery-chewing sociopath.

Hoppers

At one point, while the premise of the movie is being explained to her, Mabel excitedly exclaims “Guys, this is like Avatar!”

Hoppers: like Avatar, but for cowards who can’t admit that violence is justified when it’s against colonizers.

—

[oddygaul]

A Comparative Analysis of the Bloodborne Artbook

I love Bloodborne, but the Bloodborne artbook sucks.

It hit three strikes:

First, the art is just not terribly interesting to look at. It’s all dreary, sauceless digital painting: the environment concepts are faithful, by-the-book renderings of the game’s locales, and the character art is loose and statically posed. I’d posit that this approach is successful for its aim as concept design – certainly they nailed the gloomy color palette that defines Bloodborne, and the characters are as detailed as they need to be to pass along to the modelers – but as illustrations in their own right, they’re not especially pleasing to look through.

Second, even if the pieces were good enough to want to get engrossed in, the actual formatting and printing of the book itself would prevent you from doing so. Multiple pieces are crammed into each spread, with landscape-format illustrations cut in half for a vertical layout and character renderings packed in six to a page. Even if you want to look closer at all the details, you can’t, as it’s all printed barely big enough to be legible.

seriously, look at all that dead space

Finally, perhaps its biggest sin, all of the images shown are of the final version of each design. We don’t actually get to see the concepting process: the initial sketches & ideas that provided a foundation for the game’s aesthetic, first-pass character designs that weren’t quite there, creature concepts that were formative to deciding the game’s direction but didn’t make it into the final product*. As far as I can tell, we get none of this! It’s just a by-the-numbers, in-order look at the final, polished design for each environment, enemy, and weapon in the game.

*I wonder, particularly with the enemy design, if this is because FromSoft has a tendency to repurpose anything that doesn’t make it into one game in future projects, so they’re loathe to show tabled concept designs.

I would contrast this with the artbook for James Cameron’s Avatar, which I also read through for the first time recently. Now, the Avatar artbook is about the same on the first front: much of it, particularly the environment art, is soulless, realism-chasing photobashing, of a sort that is undeniably the most useful method for quickly developing concept designs – especially for a movie that is, after all, chasing realism – but which I find no pleasure whatsoever in looking at. Despite that, it stomps Bloodborne’s artbook in point two: the book is wide-format, features plenty of full-page landscape illustrations, and even has a fold-out section to appreciate the dirty nasty photobashes in all their pixelated glory.

Where Avatar’s artbook excels, though, is showing us the iterative process of design, and how things arrived at where they are in the final product. Look at the pages detailing the concepting of the Na’vi: we go all the way from James Cameron’s 199x paper sketch of a hot alien lady he wants to bone to professionally illustrated concepts that are a hair’s breadth away from what ended up in the film. Each design that wasn’t used has elements that made their way into the final, showing how each step along the way contributed meaningfully to the end result.

Or take my GOAT concept design book, The Art of Episode I. This book is a swan song from an older era of pre-production, before digital art became the norm. Filled with lush matte paintings and elegant marker drawings, each illustration is a joy to look at on its own merits. Doug Chiang is a master at the height of his craft here, pumping out hundreds of beautiful drawings that I could stare at for hours regardless of context. They’re served by the format, too – while some illustrations are relegated to a smaller print size, that’s only because each page is absolutely packed with as much material as they could get away with, with little dead space to be found.

More importantly, though, that cutthroat iterative process is on full display here. For each and every character, vehicle, and creature design that made it into Episode I, we are presented with the many different versions that led up to it, many of which are wildly different from the final product, and detailed notes from the artists discussing their train of thought as they worked. Oftentimes the original concepts are even more striking than what they ended up using, but as described in the margins, they just weren’t conveying precisely what they were meant to narratively… so they took the elements that worked, scrapped the ones that didn’t, and kept sketching.

This is what sets concept design apart from illustration – it’s a whole different muscle these artists are flexing. It’s not just “design something cool”, or “make a good piece of art that features a cool monster”. It’s making a cool design, keeping in mind the feelings that design should evoke and the role that design will serve in the narrative, and chipping away or building onto an idea until you have arrived at a concept that serves exactly the purpose it needs to. To have a window to this process, to get even a brief peek like this into what can be a grueling, months-long ordeal, to understand exactly how much thought goes into making these iconic designs, is what makes an artbook amazing to me.

And if your book doesn’t have that? Then it’s not a proper concept art book, it’s just a glorified wiki page.

[oddygaul]

Across the Monsterverse - Godzilla x Kong: King of the New Empire

Well shit, all of this was downhill from Skull Island as far as I’m concerned.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

As expected, Skull Island’s tonal pivot didn’t quite make it into the next Godzilla movie. Despite the presence of a couple thin comic relief characters, King of the Monsters is still largely going for an epic, cataclysmic blockbuster feel and falling on its face – it’s like someone took Final Wars and sucked out all the fun, leaving an all-out melee of giant monsters somehow feeling dour, grey and rainy.

I respect Ghidorah’s commitment to constant aura farming though

Honestly, it’s kind of astounding how stacked the cast is for how charmless and lacking in charisma King of the Monsters is. Any given scene will have powerhouse actors like Charles Dance, Thomas Middleditch or Ken Watanabe, and still fail to elicit any emotion. It’s like they heard all the complaints about Bryan Cranston dying halfway through Godzilla 2014 and tried to fix it with star power instead of a stronger script.

It was cool to finally discover why Sally Hawkins isn’t in the third Paddington movie, though – because she canonically died here after the filming of Paddington 1 & 2 lmao

Godzilla vs. Kong

Easily my favorite of this bunch. Skull Island’s vivid colors and neon lighting have returned, Kong returns to his role of Just A Dude Being A Guy, and the action is straight outta the late Showa era – Godzilla is running and jumping around like he’s a guy in a suit again. Seriously, I felt like we were back in the 60s with Godzilla’s use of atomic breath: it’s not a last-ditch measure, it’s not a climactic moment that the whole movie builds up to, mf just lets it rip right off the bat seconds into any fight. 

The character work is, well, bad. I can’t believe they wasted Brian Tyree Henry by making him a fluoride conspiracy-peddling podcaster, although it does give us a great after-school special line from Kyle Chandler to his daughter: “That podcast is filling your head with garbage! You should be in school!” Alexander Skarsgård is initially introduced with a fun conceit, as a disgraced geologist seen as a quack for his Hollow Earth theories, but he’s stripped of any and all characterization immediately afterwards and portrays Generic Surprised Male Lead for the remainder of the movie. Hell, one of the main antagonists turns out to be Serizawa’s son, a hook that in any other movie would be played for at least some emotional resonance, yet here he’s a nothing background character.

I wish it leaned into its absurdity more, like Skull Island successfully did. There’s brief moments where the movie is actually just a cartoon, like when Millie Bobby Brown pokes her head out of a vent while sneaking around, but the human bits still take themselves a bit too seriously to be anything approaching entertaining. 

Fortunately, Kong as a character receives much of the spotlight, and he has more charisma than everyone else put together. Every one of his musical montages put a smile on my face.

Plus, at least they deliver on the dumb action here. If nothing else, I gotta respect the sheer opulence of the final battle – if this were the early 2000s, this movie would’ve been twenty minutes longer and the fight with Mechagodzilla would’ve lasted about 45 seconds. But here, no, we get to see Mechagodzilla in all his goofy Truckasaurus-lookin-ass glory as he throws down with the boys in the ring.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

As soon as it was offhandedly mentioned in King of the Monsters, I hoped we’d delve more into the Hollow Earth; in hindsight, though, the way Monarch casually discovers Atlantis and forgets about it within the span of ten minutes should’ve been a red flag. Unfortunately, The New Empire’s Hollow Earth feels exactly as flimsy and paper-thin as that plot beat did. “But that’s not a big deal,” I hear you say, “it’s just the backdrop for a monster movie!”, and it’s certainly true that convincing worldbuilding is not typically a focal point of these movies. Crucially, though, The New Empire attempts to put its setting front and center, and falls flat as a result.

This focus on the setting made all of my issues with this series’ visual design bubble up to the surface: namely, there’s absolutely no cohesion or consistency with any of the designs. The tech in each movie looks like it’s from a different franchise – Godzilla 2014 was your standard All Vehicles Pictured On-screen Are Property of the United States Air Force tax write-off, King of the Monsters introduced the USS Argo, a vehicle that’s fictional but still hews close to a traditional futurist miltech aesthetic, and then in The New Empire even the kaiju dentist is flying around in a fucking Guardians of the Galaxy-ass hoverjet.

The creatures of Hollow Earth don’t fare much better – they’re a rag-tag group of goofy giant monsters with no shared design language, of which we only see maybe a half-dozen species over the course of two full films. How do these creatures survive? Why are the trees and flora normal-sized if all the fauna is giant? How does the food chain work down there? How has the giant ape civilization been around since Earth’s last ice age and not progressed one iota, despite the fact that we’ve seen them create and use tools? Were they just pushing boulders around in that big pit for 13,000 years?

I know the internet has a hate boner for Cameron’s Avatar movies, but having recently rewatched that series before this, with its grounded mechanical designs, cohesive design language, and exhaustively thought-out ecology makes The New Empire look like fucking amateur hour.

And that’s just talking design, not even getting into the rendering! Weta’s Apes movies from over a decade ago are miles ahead of Skar King’s tribe, and I was never once convinced of Hollow Earth as a real, lived-in space. All the environments consist of soft, flat-looking CG, and the whole setting has serious scale issues – everything is supposed to be gigantic, but no humans are around and no smaller species seem to exist, so perceptually everything just looks normal. The team’s only attempt at a solution to this issue seems to be making every creature’s movement cause bassy booms and hoping that'll be enough.

loved the scene where Mothra filmed a L'Oréal ad tho

At least Dan Stevens had a good time. I’m so excited whenever I see High Maintenance alumni in anything, honestly.

feat. Bernie's pristine flaired-up vest that came right off the wardrobe designer’s hook

[oddygaul]

Pokémon Pisces

I recently got an AYN Thor. After spending the requisite 2+ weeks tweaking all the settings and getting things where I wanted them aesthetically, and downloading all of the PS2 games I ever wanted to play as a kid but didn’t have the cash for… my first stop was, of course, to instead play a Pokémon romhack I’d just heard of that I probably could’ve played on my phone.

I have a lot of nostalgia for the 2D era of Pokémon games – Game Freak’s spritework, though simple, had more charm than any of their 3D stuff ever has, as far as I’m concerned. Unfortunately, I got just deep enough into the series during the Diamond era to learn about stuff like IVs, EVs, & movesets, and so BOY, do I find it difficult to go back to the pre-Gen IV games that don’t have the physical / special split. 

Fortunately, it seems many people share this opinion, and there’s whole communities of fans making romhacks to iron out problems like these! At first I was just looking at projects like Modern Emerald, which take the older games and add the physical / special split, standardize IVs, make all Pokémon available instead of locking them behind trading or versions, that sort of thing. But then I remembered, years ago, seeing a glimpse of Pokémon Sage, a different kind of fan game – one with all-new Pokémon. And that’s what really excites me.

I’m not a big Game Freak hater or anything. I certainly think their design language has changed drastically since the early days of Pokémon, and in some ways for the worse. I’m not so blinded by nostalgia to claim there weren’t plenty of dogshit designs in Gen I & II, though, and despite some aesthetic issues, each new generation of Pokémon I played (I stopped after Alola) had enough guys I dug to put together a team or two. Still, the amount of incredible fanart I’ve seen online has always made me wish for a world where I could play full games with fan Pokémon I truly vibe with. And, wow, turns out that’s totally an option nowadays!

Mind you, if you have taste, finding a romhack that fits this bill takes a little work, because the art in a lot of them is honestly trash. Looking through lists and threads of the top Pokémon romhacks, I immediately wrote off 90 percent of them; look, I’m willing to believe people claiming the gameplay or story of such-and-such fangame might be good, but a lot of them have awful spritework. And that’s just talking about the rendering, not even the actual designs themselves – can you believe one of the most commonly talked-about and well-regarded Fakemon fangames has an entire evolutionary line of KKK Pokémon? And plenty of projects, like Sage, are basically vaporware, with the devs plugging away for years between public updates.

Despite all that, a few projects stood out, with designs & art that look like they could’ve been an official release, and none of them excited me more than Pokémon Pisces. A sequel to Ruby & Sapphire that explores the ramifications of Team Aqua / Magma’s drastic environmental tinkering? A backwards trip through Hoenn, with all the original’s cool locations included plus brand-new areas? And most importantly, over 200 new Pokémon to catch, nearly all of which have cool as hell designs? Hell yeah, man.

Unfortunately, despite all this buildup… I just did not find Pisces fun. It’s clear that the game’s difficulty is intentional, but I found the majority of its design choices frustrating rather than engaging.

On the way to each gym battle, your Pokémon will be level capped, meaning you can only get your team so strong until you’ve defeated that gym. In theory, this allows for tight balancing – since the design team knows exactly what level your team is and what moves they have access to, the battles can be precisely designed to be challenging, rather than pushovers like the main series games. And for gym leaders, this more or less works. It’s straight-up scary when you finally make it to a gym leader, they throw out their first Pokémon, and it’s two full levels above yours. No grinding or overleveling can save you – you’re just gonna have to figure out a good strategy to take them out. These fights feel like true boss battles in a way Pokémon games typically fail to.

The problem is, when every other fight in the game is this challenging, it becomes numbing. Because of how tightly the experience is controlled, the levels of nearly every trainer you encounter on a route will match those of your own Pokémon, turning every single battle into a knock-down, drag-out fight with multiple faints. I imagine there’s a crowd for whom this is a positive, but when you’re just trying to make it to the next city, it gets tedious having to run to the Pokécenter in between every two or three fights – and the routes are not short, with some runbacks taking quite a few minutes. Towards the end of my time with Pisces, I found myself savescumming before every battle, simply to save myself time.

It’s also basely unsatisfying that half your team will just not be leveling up at a given time. Let’s be honest, the lizard brain seeing number go up is part of the fun of any RPG – doubly so in Pokémon when level-ups are tied to cool evolutions – and stopping that in its tracks is a fun-killer. The “solution” is to swap out your party for other Pokémon once you’re capped so they can level up, but when the margin for error is so tight that having one or two weak Pokémon in your party can mean the difference between winning a battle and a total team wipe, this approach doesn’t feel great either.

It doesn’t help how opaque the game is about its mechanics. Pisces has a lot of mechanical differences from standard Pokémon. Aside from all the new monsters, there’s a new type, new moves, new status conditions, and plenty of rule changes: for example, the power of super effective moves are lessened, while critical hits now pierce through enemy stat changes. Individual types have interesting tweaks, too – Bug Pokémon, for example, can’t be stopped by defensive moves like Protect or Reflect, while Psychic Pokémon are now immune to confusion and sleep.

And all of this is cool, but it’s not fucking recorded anywhere. As you make your way through the game, random NPCs will introduce these concepts to you, and then… you’re just supposed to remember it, I guess? There’s no central database or saved notes. The same goes for the Pokémon. Part of the fun of a new region is having to guess the typing of each new monster you see, don’t get me wrong, but once again, the information isn’t stored anywhere once you’ve found it. Even after catching a Pokémon, the Pokédex doesn’t show their typing – if you want a refresher you’ll have to go to your PC box and manually check the Pokémon. And since nearly every new Mon in this game is dual-type, there’s a lot of needing to cross-reference a type chart just to figure out what moves you can use.

Man. I want to like this game so bad, because everything else is awesome. 

There’s great quality of life – TMs are reusable, moves can be re-learned from the pause menu, you don’t need to teach Pokémon HM moves, IVs aren’t a concern, and EVs can be switched on the fly from the menu, a feature I am now going to miss in every single Pokémon game I play without it.

The writing is often genuinely funny – I’m excited to talk to NPCs instead of mashing through the text, because their dialogue catches me off guard with jokes instead of the maximally bland NPC slop of mainline Pokémon games. Who could have expected the tuber uprising?

There’s some killer music here – I jammed out for about five minutes listening to the lock eyes theme that plays from the trainers at Sky Pillar.

And then the art. Oh man, the art. I love the environment design – lots of it is reused tilesets from Ruby & Sapphire, but there’s lots of neat little flourishes, like Pacifidlog’s coral growths, that change up the vibe* just so. Then we get entire new areas, like Zotpyre, featuring some straight-up gorgeous interiors. Even the trainer art is great: not only does the protagonist get a cute update to the classic fit, but each and every trainer class gets new male and female sprites, and they’re all bursting with character and fun poses.

*This even extends to the battle menu, with Pisces’ cute little floral banners on your health bars

And the Pokémon themselves? Great. There’s a few stinkers, don’t get me wrong, but by and large these designs rip. And they’re not all one style, either – we have plenty of badass Mons, sure, but also plenty that are cute, plenty that are silly, plenty that are graceful. There’s something for all tastes here, and the designs are elegant – a Pokémon like Maggorde doesn’t have much detail to it, but is packed with appeal and gets its design across perfectly. There’s a sort of effortless visual design that harkens back to older gens, rather than Game Freak's overstuffed modern designs. The cast of existing Pokémon is fairly slim, but hell, even those are shown love with gorgeous new sprites – Zigzagoon has never looked this cool.

And these are the things I want to focus on. I like Pokémon games as adventures, to allow me to explore new places and see new creatures, not to min-max battle encounters. But unfortunately, Pisces is catering exclusively to that type of player, and there are no options to change it. If you want to just experience all the great art and world design they did without having to reload every fight because a neutrally effective attack one-shot your Pokémon for some reason? Too bad. Pisces is not for you. The devs are vocal about the fact that they’re not interested in adding any accessibility or difficulty options, and everyone in their Discord will be more than happy to gatekeep you about it.

[oddygaul]

Arco

“I want to do this thing now, but my stupid parents won’t let me until I’m older!!” is one of the most tried-and-true tropes for children in storytelling, and usually they just make me think the kid is a little dummy. It can range from simple impatience – “Let me go play with the other kids in the forest!” – to straight-up suicidal – “Come on, dad, just let me go with you to the zombie murder island where you almost die every day trying to scavenge for food!”.

And I get it, that’s the whole point of the trope – kids don’t have a sense of how precious and fleeting their childhood is, they idolize their parents and want to get closer to them by emulating what they do, they haven’t yet internalized their own limitations, etc etc.

But Arco? I get Arco, man. You’re telling me you have magic rainbow capes that allow you to not only soar through the air like a bird, but also to fly back in time and look at real-life dinosaurs – aka the dream of every 10-year-old boy – and your 10-year-old boy isn’t allowed to go? That’s basically torture.

To be fair, though, I bet the real reason for the flying ban is more about the physiological harm. You think smoking weed as a teen before your brain is fully developed is bad for you? Wait til you find out about the developmental side effects of turning your face into 2D so the animators can smear it while you time travel...

these dumb mfs were one skyship away from stumbling into a Ghibli movie

Speaking of, I found the mixed 2D/3D animation to be handled fairly well. While the characters themselves were modeled, it seemed like the artists often hand-animated things like hair and cloth on top of them, which kept them from feeling too static. The coloring was well-done, too, keeping the characters well-integrated visually. Still, the faces were often way too stiff, and the rare 2D-animated reaction shots only served to highlight the gulf.

Gorgeous backgrounds, though.

Anyway, I thought Arco really stuck the landing with how dark it was willing to get in its final act. I was not expecting the twist with his family, and man, Mikki's final scene? That's gon traumatize some children, there is no doubt in my mind.

gonna tell my kids this was Death Stranding 3