The Radical Observer

Just call me Observer. This is a place where I post based on my interests like books and video games.

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I have been playing "Shiren the Wanderer" (an old roguelike game originally released on Super Famicom) on my smartphone for a long time and today is the first time I managed to reach the golden lost city leading to the legendary Golden Condor! I crossed the dungeons of The Three Trials before that few times but I usually ended up defeated due to strong monsters there and not thinking of using some items that would help me on the journey. This day I guess I was fortunate I managed to pass those dungeons. These are some of the things I did before and during the Three Trials dungeon until reaching the golden city:

It would be recommended to use weapons and shield that are higher than their current attack and defense power. At least 10 attack and 10 defense power are acceptable to defeat tough enemies. For example, if you have Katana which its starting attack power is 7, you need to increase it by using Heaven Scroll or forge it to the blacksmith in some villages until you get the attack power you desire. For shields like Bronze or Iron, use Earth Scroll on them until they get strong enough to protect yourself from the enemies. Don't forget to cover the weapons and shield using Chrome Scroll so that they won't get rusted and decrease power. Another way is to stock those in Warehouses and use scrolls to increase their power and receive protection for future use.

Stock at least few Light Scrolls. They will be useful at the Three Trials dungeon. The dungeons there have limited light.

In the first dungeon of Three Trials, there is a chance that the exit is located at the Monster House, a small area where there are lots of monsters and items there. Use Airslash or Slumber Scroll to take them down in an instant.

Stock some Blank Scrolls as well. There are at least few monsters that hinders the player to attack or protect from monsters. The Red Skeleton Wizard at the ravine is notorious to have an ability to shut Shiren's mouth leading him to stop using scrolls and eat edible items like riceballs and medicine. Type the word "Gen*cid*" (the * is censored for this post only) and throw it to the Red Skeleton Wizard. They will disappear and won't show up for the rest of the game.

Get some Back Pots. They help the player recover HP in full. They're helpful after being attack by enemies that give a lot of damage. They're available in the dungeon and shops at the village.

Having Far-Sight Brace is an advantage which will help you locate the items and monsters scattered in the dungeon. If you can't have one, Light Scroll is alternative.

Decoy, Paralyze and Buffoo Staff are useful to stop some tough enemies from attacking. Decoy is useful to make the enemy confused and you can attack it in that state but beware there is a chance it will attack. Buffoo Staff will turn targeted enemy into an edible meat. You can either eat it and use its ability or throw it towards to the enemy to make it weaker or stronger depending on your purpose.

When reaching the Golden City, you can check out its history through the tablets scattered there. IIRC, there is a rocky bridge after that place which will give you a chance to prepare yourself before facing the final boss.

I did encounter the final boss which looked like a giant spider. It's surrounded by some types of tough enemies like blue rhinos that have an ability to get rid of items. Unfortunately, I didn't take screenshots from that scene but you can check out the gameplay on Youtube to see it yourself. I knocked out some of the rhinos first using Airslash Scroll before the spider gets closer. Upon meeting the spider, I happen to have a Blank Scroll and wrote the word that would get rid of it an instant. I threw the scroll on that spider and it disappeared. I admit the fight felt anti-climatic but I didn't care. The game itself is tough already and it's a relief I finished it.

I saved the Golden Condor which turned out to be trapped in a cobweb for a long time. The condor offered Shiren a ride back home for free as a reward from saving it. The graphics of that creature look majestic and it's nice to see it paid off after all frustrations in playing the game many times.

As the condor became free in the skies, many villagers who witnessed that started to make a wish.

Shiren and his partner Koppa managed to reach the ground. The condor flew away and nobody knows where it went after that. The last scene ends with the silhouette of Shiren walking away and taking a journey once again.

Despite its difficulty and short length, "Shiren the Wanderer" managed to be a good game. After the main quest, many of the villagers congratulate Shiren for discovering the condor. As a reward of completing the game, two new sidequests are unlocked but I'm not sure if I'm going to play those. I'm interested in playing its sequels particularly the second one which is available on the Nintendo DS and the third one which is on PSP.

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Remembering that the Brontë sisters dislike spoiled, rich kids they created characters based on them in some of the novels then turn them either dead or miserable when they grow up.

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Toby Stephens (Gilbert) and Tara Fitzgerald (Helen) in "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" 1996 version.

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Currently playing this homebrew Game Boy Advanced version of "Rogue". It's a nice game even though the controls needs some time to get used to.

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Ella Bruccoleri (Mary) and Dónal Finn (Mr. Hayward) in "The Other Bennet Sister".

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Preview of Tojima Tanzaburo figure from SHFiguarts. This is based on the lead character from "Tojima Tanzaburo Wants To Be a Kamen Rider" series. It will be released on December 01, 2026. The pre-order of it starts on June 1, 2026.

Source: Tamashii Nations / Bandai Spirits Collectors Toy Department social media page.

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Ella Bruccoleri (Mary) and Dónal Finn (Mr. Hayward) in "The Other Bennet Sister".

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Ann Bell & Richard Leech in Jane Eyre (1963) dir. by Rex Tucker

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One of my favorite lines in "Jane Eyre" 2006 version.

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Colin Firth (Mr. Darcy) and Jennifer Ehle (Elizabeth) in "Pride and Prejudice" 1995 version.

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jane eyre is a book i like a lot but also have intense feelings about bc i don’t interpret Rochester as a ‘sweet good guy hiding behind an intimidating shell’ and i dislike adaptations and retellings which try to soften him or make him out to be an aggrieved victim of society. the entire point of the novel imo is that Jane, in grasping her autonomy and personhood, decides to put her personal happiness and passion over expectations of ‘perfect moral womanhood’.

she rejects the virtuous, religious suitor who wants to devote their lives to missionary work and chooses Rochester, the man who treats her like an intellectual equal and who shares her dark sense of humor and fascination with wild things.

Rochester is not a good, upright guy. While he should be commended for not consigning his wife to an asylum where she’d be tortured and abused, he keeps her shut up in a dark attic cell and freely admits he married her primarily for her money and that he never tried to understand her as a person even before her mental illness.

The loss of his hand and the burn scars inflicted on him during the climax are absolutely supposed to carry moral judgment. He lied to and manipulated Jane, imprisoned his wife (who he hates), and just because he comes to see Jane as an equal, it doesn’t mean he suddenly believes men and women should share the same rights and privileges. He is still very much a man of his time and culture. But the point is that Jane’s life is so narrow and so limited that the only real way for her to experience some joy and freedom is to embrace Rochester, even if he’s a bastard. He loves her and she loves him.

Being with him will probably not make her a better person, but it will bring her pleasure, and it will be her choice, not something coerced or demanded of her. It complicates the ending of the book. Rochester’s a beast. But Jane is no angel either, and only by accepting this does she find peace with herself.

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Mr. Earnshaw 🤝 Catherine Earnshaw

They have good intentions to help others like Heathcliff but not thinking about the consequences.

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I further break from the theme(s) of my blog by providing

A Defense of Gilbert Markham

It seems oddly common for people to say about Tenant of Wildfell Hall that while Gilbert might SEEM like a great guy worthy of Helen, ACTUALLY if you pay attention he's really a crappy person.

The thing is that Gilbert is the one who told us that. You don't need to pay attention- he informs us every time he says or even thinks something problematic and even explains exactly what negative trait made him be that way and what was so harmful about it. This isn't subtext, it's plain, blatant, explicit text.

Now, that doesn't mean that Gilbert is a saint. He does, in fact, hit Lawrence over the head with a stick and knock him off his horse, objectively an awful thing to do. I think it does mitigate things somewhat that Lawrence handled literally everything about his interactions with Gilbert horrendously and in the specific head-whacking incident refused to allow Gilbert to deescalate and ride away, but that doesn't actually justify violence, just explain why Gilbert reached that point. But we see Gilbert's whole process as he does it, realizes what he did, refuses to repent of it, changes his mind and tries to help, later apologizes... the whole book is an exercise in seeing a hot-headed young man grow up, and even by the end he hasn't entirely, but he's been learning.

The thing about Tenant is that it is basically the chronicle of a pampered (though pampered from the perspective of human relationships and NOT hard work, which is important) and clueless young man maturing, written with fifteen years or so of hindsight. (We will for these purposes ignore the exact framing device because it makes zero sense.) Anne Bronte is putting us inside the mind of a man who isn't a bad person but hasn't had much of an opportunity to become a good one either; ironically, we see echoes of their first extended conversation at his house in his own situation, in that (as he had advocated for) he DOES learn from his own experiences how to become a better person but in doing so hurts others enough so as to demonstrate that ideally, one should be taught to be better in the first place rather than gain it through trial and error.

But Gilbert has good bones, because he wants to learn and he wants to better himself. He also has, somehow, whether because of Helen's influence or not, managed to overcome his mother's terrible teaching-by-doing as far as spoiling the son at the expense of the daughter, and that being a model for a wife's treatment by her husband. She is disbelieving when her son says he wants to treat his wife well! That he has managed to figure out on his own, and it's that very ability to not just learn to be better but WANT to learn to keep improving himself to be the best he can be for those he loves that shows his value.

A significant part of the book's message is an examination of what men can do to women and what men, therefore, owe women. It is not anti-man or anti-marriage; Bronte, in telling this story, acknowledges that loving marriage is a good thing AND it gives men a power over women that they can, and must, use responsibly. If she didn't think that this was both true and possible, not only would Helen never have married Gilbert, but Hattersley would not have been able to redeem himself. To Bronte, the most important character trait a person can have is to be able to learn and change, with the best way being to be willing to learn and be better BEFORE being faced with the situation that forces you to learn from mistakes.

Gilbert makes a lot of mistakes throughout the book, pretty much from beginning to end, of various magnitudes. But the main thing we get from him is that he is open to growth. Despite his mother's pampering, when challenged by someone whose respect he wants (and who demands that respect from him, which Eliza, for example, never quite does), he rises to the challenge and is open to changing his views and bucking society's toxic norms. Even more than that, he respects her, not just as a woman but as a person. His pride is sometimes an obstacle, but especially by the end of the book he holds onto his pride not because he needs something OVER her but because he needs something to MATCH her.

If there is a subtext that needs to be read into Tenant, it's not "actually Gilbert sucks," it's "beneath all of Gilbert's retroactive self-mockery, what were the things about him that led Helen to love him and to see him as the kind of man who she has realized could make her happy?" And when you peel back those layers of self-assessment and self-analysis, all of which comes of course with an idealization of Helen to contrast it against, it becomes much clearer. Gilbert truly loves her, loves her son, is open to learn and grow and self-assess his behavior to improve. It's that very trait that leads to his own chronicle of the events setting off his more negative traits in such high relief.

This is why, incidentally, I can't STAND the 1996 adaptation. Setting aside how it takes a book with real moments of both comedy and insight and flattens it into misery porn, the ending is a slap in the face. The book is great as a portrait of Gilbert's growth, and while Toby Stephens is great casting for that book character he's given little to do to show it (and thus little to make Gilbert interesting or anything more than Not-Huntingdon), and instead we know everything about Helen from the start. The show is portrayed as HER journey, thus not only defanging the book's depiction of an ordinary young man's growth to become better and thus removing half the plot but also, ironically, casting Gilbert as someone who Helen needs to grow and heal enough to be able to love and accept by reversing the marriage bait-and-switch at the end. They cast the show as being about a woman's healing from a toxic marriage through the love of a better man, which is fine for what it is, but it's not Tenant! Helen has already healed, more or less, if by healed one means acquiring the understanding of the world that will structure the rest of her life. By the end of the diary that Gilbert has read, written before she ever meets him, she understands what she previously missed and what she needs now. Throughout the book she is consistent and Gilbert is the one who needs to grow and develop and meet her where she is, and its this ability to do so in him that proves to her that he can, if imperfect, meet the standards that she requires. By flipping this around and having Helen be the one worried that Gilbert is married, the story feels cheapened because the rest of the story doesn't at all bear it out and Gilbert isn't interesting enough on the screen to sustain it. I guess they saw themselves as flipping it to be "the book from Helen's side" but they'd have really needed to commit to it and they didn't bother.

The thing is that there can never really be a great faithful adaptation of Tenant- not because it is unadaptable, but because a really faithful adaptation, which would actually fit in very well in a time in which we talk so much about masculinity and what it means to be a man, wouldn't really fit the period drama mold, which is exactly what led to the issues with the 1996 adaptation. It's meant to be a female POV main character with the man who will love her if she will let him, not (especially by the end of Tenant) the opposite. Jane Eyre, of course, doesn't just fit the period drama mold but helped create it, and if Tenant in many ways feels like Anne Bronte repudiating the kind of story that made her sisters famous, then it's not surprising that an adaptation of the book would need to repudiate the conventional period drama structure.

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Playing "Torneko's Great Adventure: Mystery Dungeon" is fun and challenging at the same time. It has colorful graphics and the controls are fine but the gameplay is challenging. Being a roguelike type of game, it consists of navigating random generated dungeons and use whatever items you found to survive. The more level the player explores, the tougher enemies present. Dying can be frustrating as the game resets to first level and starts at the beginning. All of the items and money collected in previous gameplay are gone unless you have fee certain items where you can exit the dungeon and keep them. It takes a lot of replay to familiarize the dungeon and use items at the right moments. The goal of the game is to find a legendary treasure which located at the highest floor of the dungeon. That said, it's still a good game. The game can be played using Super Nintendo emulator and the Emglish translation is available.

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During the ending of "Tojima Tanzaburo Wants To Be a Kamen Rider" episode 13, there is an illustration where Tojima rides a bicycle with red and white swirls in the background. It turns out it was inspired or homage from an old "Kamen Rider" commercial where they sell snacks (bottom).

The snacks were produced by Calbee. The contents look like yellow flowers and each pack had a piece of card featuring characters from the show. The cards can be collected by buying more snacks and there was even an album to store them albeit it sold separately. You can watch the commercial here to see more about it. As for the bicycle, it seems an acceptable gag that Tojima couldn't afford to buy a motorbike or relieving his childhood memory from riding it like he saw in the commercial. Then again, a lot of anime and tokusatsu shows in the past used to sell bicycles for children as a part of merchandise even if that doen't make sense to the theme of the series. This one here is a sample of "Kamen Rider" themed bicycle for children.

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Happy to discover that Youtube has released "Trapp Family Story" anime background music collection. These music are not included on OST CDs for some reason and if they exist they were usually rare. One of its BG music which is prominently featured in the last episode of the anime is one of my favorites and I have been looking for it for a long time. This is what it sounds like:

The BG music collection of TFS is still available on Youtube. Check out the rest of it here for more.

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I finished watching "The Other Bennet Sister" and it's enjoyable. For being based on a fan-made novel, it managed to capture the tone and spirit of "Pride and Prejudice". It's a comfort to watch Mary discovering that she's more capable than what some people think about her and found her own happiness. I hope there will be more slice of life British period dramas soon.