A number of years ago, I reviewed the infamous Inheritance Cycle, aka the unfortunate punching bag of the fantasy genre due to sharing too many similarities with Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Earthsea, and probably a few others that I don't know. Having that god-awful movie adaptation doesn't help either (Seriously, what was 20th Century Fox thinking giving the project to the people that worked on Jurassic Park 3, aka the worst Jurassic film of that franchise??).
Despite the many, many similarities, that didn't stop me from loving these books. I genuinely loved the world and its characters, and despite having a very "Middle-Earth" setting, let's be honest what fantasy story didn't rip off Lord of the Rings, or at least was heavily influenced by it? It's the great grandfather of the genre after all.
These were all my opinions when I was a kid, and when I first reviewed the books of course. Cut to today, after hearing what kind of person J.K. Rowling was really like, and deciding to give the Harry Potter series the cold shoulder as a result, I was desperately looking for a new fantasy series to replace it that impacted me in a similar way. In the end, I chose the Inheritance Cycle as my replacement, and since I was going through a rough time when I made the choice, I decided to read the series again as I was in desperate need of comfort.
So, looking back at the series as an adult, do any of my original opinions hold up? Do I still love the Cycle, or am I indifferent to it?
I would have to say: While I've noticed a few more flaws within the story, my opinion really hasn't changed too much.
My ranking of the Inheritance Cycle:
1. Inheritance
I still consider Inheritance to be the best of the Cycle. Many questions are answered (not all of them, sadly), the conclusion to the story was epic (with some nice foreshadowing throughout the series that I never noticed until now), and it's easily the best written out of the series. I still consider it one of the best fantasy books I've read, and I still get teary eyed whenever I finish it.
My rating: 5/5
I don't give this rating lightly, or at least I don't try to anymore.
2. Eldest
Yes, there's not a whole lot of action in this book, it glorifies the elves to a painful degree, and there's the unfortunate fact that it's basically The Empire Strikes Back. The hero goes off to complete his training-senses his friends and allies are in danger-leaves in the middle of said training to help them-learns a terrible truth about his family after getting defeated in battle against a certain enemy.
Despite this, I enjoyed Eldest more than I did the first few times I read it. I liked the training Eragon went through, I loved learning more about the lore and history of the Dragon Riders, Roran's character arc was amazing, I loved the revelation of Oromis and Glaedr (when I first read this book as a kid, my jaw dropped when they appeared), and the big plot twist at the end during the Battle of the Burning Plains. Speaking of which, despite the similarities to The Empire Strikes Back, it was more subtle, better executed, and less obvious than it was in Eragon.
My rating: 4.5/5
3. Eragon
Yep, I changed my mind. The first book in the Inheritance Cycle is better than the third. I’ll get into why later.
I know some people will get mad for putting Eragon in third place, since many still consider it the best of the Cycle, but don’t get me wrong, I absolutely adore this book, and I’m still impressed that the author started writing it at the age of 15. There are a lot of details and character he put in that I never would have thought of at that age. Unfortunately his age really shows when it comes to the writing.
Out of all 4 books, the original is easily the weakest when it comes to the writing, and it shares all of the more obvious similarities from Lord of the Rings and the original Star Wars.
Despite this, however, I think the original book is a solid start to the Cycle, and I like Eragon's journey and his character development. In fact, I'm gonna say it: I like the Inheritance Cycle more than Star Wars. What? I just like the world and the lore more (I'll even say that I like Eragon's character development more than Luke's). I know this opinion is likely to get me killed, but what's wrong with liking another version of a similar story?
"Dragon Riders are just Jedi with dragons!" Did you hear yourself saying that? Jedi with their souls bonded to dragons, that is one of the most badass concepts I've ever heard!
"Saphira has no personality and is just a side-kick!" If you said that to her face, she would roast you alive. The books establish that the dragons are not just the Rider's "side-kicks." No, they are equals while also being eachother's opposites. More than just friends and family, they are soul-mates. Sure, Saphira's sassy, vain, and badass personality doesn't really shine until the sequels, but she was definitely her own character in the original book.
My rating: 4/5
4. Brisingr
After giving it some thought, I’ve decided that Brisingr is the weakest of the Inheritance Cycle. I used to think it was better than Eldest, but looking back at it then and now, yeah its definitely not as good as I remember.
Don't get me wrong, there is still a lot to love about this book (It's also the first in this series to not have any similarities to Star Wars, it's a miracle). From Eragon and Roran's final battle against the Ra'zac, the second confrontation against Murtagh and Thorn, the introduction of the Laughing Dead (that still gives me chills) to the revelation of the Eldunari and Eragon's father (I know some people don’t like who Eragon’s father is, but I personally love it), as I said, there is a lot to like from Brisingr, but unfortunately there's also a lot to dislike.
Out of all 4 books within the Cycle, Brisingr came off as the most slow and had the most filler out of the story. It was very important filler, but still filler none the less. Also, as it turns out, a lot of amazing moments that I thought were in Brisingr (like Saphira outwitting Thorn on her own), it turned out they were actually in Inheritance (another reason why that one is my favorite of the Cycle). My brain mixed the two together it seems.
There's also Roran. I'm sorry, but Roran is a complete Gary Stu in this book. People complain that Eragon is a Gary Stu (despite a few moments I can assure you he is not), but they don't bat an eye on Roran because "he's the normal human of the group, that makes him the best!" Yes, I'm glad that Roran is a normal guy who can't do magic, and that his main goal is to just survive the war, go home, re-build his farm, and raise a family with his wife on said farm.
The books establish this multiple times, but when you have him single-handedly kill nearly 200 soldiers, barely survive 50 lashes, and fight an Urgal (imagine a Lord of the Rings Orc crossed with a minotaur) right after with only his bare hands and win, then you lose me. I like Roran, I think he’s a great character (part of me still wishes he became a Rider, even though that would’ve ruined his life), but when you remind us over and over that he's a normal human, only to have him defy the law of physics multiple times, then you're trying too hard to make him badass. Thankfully the author fixes this a bit in Inheritance.
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And there you have it, my thoughts on The Inheritance Cycle renewed (just wait, I'll change it when I read the books again in the future). Is the Cycle one of the best fantasy series ever? Probably not, but it is memorable, and certainly one of the better ones I've read in recent memory. It is definitely a worthy successor to Harry Potter in my eyes, and I will always cherish it for giving me much needed warmth, comfort, and taking me away to another world I wish I lived in. If I were a Dragon Rider, my dragon (and sword) would be colored a blue-green teal, and she would be female with the name Adurna (dragons can be named after a word in the Ancient Language, right?).
Also, when reading this series, I highly recommend listening to music from Lord of the Rings, The Legend of Zelda, The Legend of Spyro, bits of How To Train Your Dragon, LAIR (the somewhat underrated PS3 game), and Malte Wegmann's original composition for the Cycle known as "The Inheritance Project" found on Youtube. The music really sets the mood at the right moments.
Finally, this series has an official theme song! Who knew.
Super Mario Sunshine is a weird game for a lot of different reasons. It was among some of the first game reviews I ever wrote for the internet, for one, all the way back in 2005. I was proud enough of that review that when it came time to relaunch TSSZ News in 2008, it was one of five archived reviews I transplanted on to the site. It was also a strange case where I became convinced it was a game I’d never play, originally. I was 23 years old, with no job, no money, and no prospects. I was desperate to play the game that was being sold as the sequel to Super Mario 64, but I could not envision a future where that would ever be possible.
Eventually, I reached my breaking point. Earlier that same year, somebody had linked me to something called “Quake Done Quick.” It was attached to a relatively new site, called the “Speed Demos Archive”, a hub for videos of people finishing games as fast as possible. The site was small, updated manually, and featured a list of roughly 100 games -- maybe less. This was before Youtube, so these were downloadable video files, usually in AVI or MPG format. And it was here that they had a Super Mario Sunshine speedrun. Even on my fledgling broadband internet, it took a considerable amount of time to download. But, with nothing more than two hours of raw, unedited, uncommentated gameplay footage, I watched a user named “Dragorn” play through the entire game (his old run is still viewable on the Internet Archive). Watching a speedrunner flip, spin, and trick his way across levels, I became convinced that Sunshine was incredible.
A few months later, I was surprised by my brother with $200 for Christmas, stuffed inside a greeting card. He said it was for “all the Christmases he missed” since moving out, years ago. Combined with other money I’d received in gifts, I headed to a Gamestop and purchased a Gamecube with my own (used) copy of Super Mario Sunshine. In my mind, it did not matter that I had spoiled the entire game for myself only three months earlier with the speedrun video. Watching someone else play is no substitute for a controller in your own hands. I needed to play it for myself.
In the modern context, Super Mario Sunshine is one of the games attached to the recently released Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection. Full disclosure: I will not be buying this collection, and I have not played the version of Super Mario Sunshine it includes. It’s not that these games are bad, but even from the outside looking in, the collection looks underwhelming. It’s full of basic, bare-bones ports of games that deserve more. But it does mean that these games have been on my mind, particularly Super Mario Sunshine, which I finished replaying, separately, a little more than one year ago. It was the first time I’d finished the game since that fateful Christmas of 2004, and it provided a refresh in perspective.
The truth of the matter is, brushing aside everything else about it, Super Mario Sunshine is an easy game to hate. Nintendo was trying a lot of new things with the Gamecube, struggling to figure out what could be done with the leap in horsepower over the Nintendo 64. Their pitch was a Mario that was subtly more serious and realistic. Sunshine is a game with a surprisingly large number of cinematics, and a considerable amount of narrative setup. It sounds like a joke, but it’s true: the game opens with Mario taking a long-deserved vacation on a tropical island, only to be arrested and wrongfully accused of crimes he did not commit. He is sentenced to community service, forced to clean the island of a paint-like substance its residents claim he has used to vandalize their resort town. This is accomplished with the F.L.U.D.D., a backpack-mounted squirt gun perfect for washing down walls and floors. It was the first manual labor he’d been shown doing since the NES version of Wrecking Crew in 1985.
It’s odd territory for Mario, but it leads to the game’s first real problem: Plot. Sunshine is not a game that’s packed with story -- there aren’t a lot of named characters, and there aren’t a lot of genuine story arcs to get hooked in to, but it’s way more than you got in most Mario games. Regardless, the influence of a narrative structure is definitely felt within its levels. One of the benefits of Super Mario 64 is that there was no set order to anything; you might drop in to a level with a specific goal in mind, only to accidentally stumble on to something else. You were encouraged to follow your curiosity, collecting stars more through natural exploration. Even though it’s not always obvious on the surface, the objectives in Super Mario Sunshine are following a specific plotline, which means flat, rigid linearity.
So you might reach an amusement park area, but you can’t go inside until you finish the mission where you open the front gates. Even once you re-enter the level for the next mission inside the amusement park, exploring its various rides will be a moot point, as the game will want you to focus on a specific goal instead. Want to ride the rollercoaster? Too bad, the story dictates it’s not available yet. Though you still have that go-anywhere, do-anything world design from Super Mario 64, the current mission is the only thing that’s ever active. Another example: at the beginning of the game, you open up the first stage -- Bianco Hills. Even though you have a whole village and a sizable lake area to explore, there’s little to do out there, because your mission is about reaching the bottom of the windmill. The second mission, again, doesn’t involve the village or the lake, but now asks you to reach the top of the same windmill in order to fight the game’s first boss, Petey Piranha. And so it goes: big zones to explore, but most of it useless as Sunshine slowly trickles out objectives one at a time, following a barely-visible narrative that drags everything down.
Nintendo had other intentions for the game, too. The company was known for taking its time with game releases -- Super Mario World released in 1990, and it took six years for Super Mario 64 to follow it up. Even once a game was announced, there were often months or even years of delays as the game got pushed back, and back, and back, as with Ocarina of Time. Similarly long waits happened for many of Nintendo’s other flagship franchises (Super Mario Kart, Super Metroid, etc.), and the peanut gallery was getting restless. With the release of the Gamecube, Nintendo made a vow to explore other avenues to release more games, more quickly.
The problem was, all of those delays are exactly what lead to Nintendo’s extremely high bar of quality. Rushing these games out the door meant cutting corners and finding easy ways to tack on extra play time, skipping necessary fine tuning. In The Wind Waker, this notoriously led to the last fourth of the game, wherein you must find and decode maps to dredge up half a dozen pieces of the magical Triforce. For most, this meant hours of sailing out to random, completely featureless areas in the middle of the open ocean hoping to find a single golden tortilla chip. “Tedious” is putting it kindly, but it saved Nintendo from having to delay the game too many times in order to add more in-depth content.
In Super Mario Sunshine, this manifested in a degree of repetition that is difficult to ignore. In both Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy, most mission objectives are unique. There are occasional repeated missions, like finding 8 red coins, but by and large it's things like rescuing a baby penguin, opening a pyramid, assaulting an airship, or finding your way through a gravity-bending maze. There's enough variety that you don't notice as much when you're asked to do yet another one of Galaxy's purple coin comets.
Sunshine still has unique goals like that, but they are much fewer and farther between. Instead, the bulk of the game is filled with doing the same four or five missions over, and over, and over again. Finding fruit to hatch Yoshi or hunting red coins can be fun occasionally, but Sunshine often makes you do this stuff multiple times per level. Most bosses also must be faced at least twice, sometimes up to three times, and very little changes from fight to fight. And then there are the races -- a man named Piantissimo is waiting for you in most stages, looking to race you to an arbitrary landmark, and every single level has one penultimate mission where you must chase down the hero's evil doppelganger, Shadow Mario. It’s padding, basically, and thanks to a tenuous grip on narrative, there’s few ways to skip the things you don’t want to do.
This isn't even touching on the game's blue coins. They're one of Sunshine's rarer collectibles, and ten blue coins can be traded at the shop for a single Shine Sprite (the main item central to the story). The majority of blue coins can be found by hosing down graffiti found around the island. Spray a circle-shaped pattern on one wall, and a blue coin pops out of another circle-shaped pattern on the opposite side of the level, which you must run to and collect before it disappears. Then, the opposite: spray down the second pattern, and another blue coin will appear back where the first graffiti used to be. In a game full of rerun objectives, this is the worst offender. Rarely are these blue coin graffiti spots interesting or challenging; they primarily exist to fill space and fluff up the Shine counter.
The level concepts themselves also suffer from this repetition. In any other Mario game, “tropical island” would be one theme among many other level types, like deserts, volcanoes and frozen lakes. Sunshine tries to stretch its one theme out to last an entire game, and in practical terms, this means that even after 18 years and two complete playthroughs (three, if you count the speedrun video), I still can’t remember most areas in any kind of specific detail. I remember a couple stage names, maybe a few environmental traits (like the hotel at sunset or the amusement park), but anything beyond that and it all starts blurring into homogeneous beaches, docks, and villages. Even the music -- beyond the iconic acoustic guitar of the Delfino Plaza hub world song, absolutely nothing about Super Mario Sunshine’s soundtrack stands out as memorable in the slightest. Every part of this game plays, looks and sounds like every other part in the worst way possible.
And yet, through some miracle, Super Mario Sunshine does not come out the other end being a bad game. It’s not necessarily good, either, mind you. But when I finally managed to get my hands on this game back in 2004, it made me angry. Super Mario 64 was a tough act to follow, and rather than build on those concepts, Sunshine felt like a massive regression. Nowadays, it’s easier to see the bigger picture. Super Mario Sunshine was a stop-gap as Nintendo slowly pushed Mario back to a more linear, level-based structure. Super Mario Galaxy was another step in this direction, doing away with the open worlds in favor of traditional, straight-forward level design, something that would later be perfected in Super Mario 3D Land and Super Mario 3D World.
That makes Sunshine more of a curious black sheep than anything else. It’s definitely not a game worth hating -- its biggest offense is simply being dull, and there are worse fates. For my replay, it became the sort of game I chipped away at, bit by bit, over the course of nearly three years. As it turns out, the best cure for repetition is to forget everything you were doing the last time you played. It’s even fitting on some level that a game about Mario taking a vacation is best served in lazy, slow, indifferent chunks. Make no mistake -- there are better, more polished, and more engaging platformers out there for you to play. It is in no way a stretch to call Super Mario Sunshine the worst 3D Mario game, but it speaks to the franchise’s high bar of quality that even the worst 3D Mario game really isn’t so bad.
Hey everybody!After finishing my reviews on the original seven seasons of Gilmore Girls, it’s time to also take a closer look at A Year in the Life which takes place several years after the original show has ended…
The Plot (as found on Rotten Tomatoes):
The Gilmore girls are back! Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel reprise their roles as Lorelai and Rory, the fast-talking, coffee-loving,…
Originally Posted Saturday, December 20, 201
Welcome, Mustardeers, to our first Hard Yellow Re-Review!
I've noticed that I've been rather harsh to a number of mustards I have reviewed in the past, including this hallmark of the contemporary mustard scene, French's Classic Yellow. This is the mustard you will see when you look up mustard on Google Images; it's the mustard you'll find at a barbeque, on a pretzel cart, or in a hot dog shop. This mustard is a reliable bastion of the Mustard faith.
Now, before I said the mustard was just okay. But now that I've received the mustard as a personal gift, I'm willing to go further and say it's really quite good. The vinegar to mustard ratio is not as large as I remember; while it still is more vinegary than Koop's, it's pretty formidable in the mustard flavor department.
I'd also like to talk about the shape of the bottle. Like, come on! This thing is a masterpiece of industrial design. The curvature of the bottle is optimal for squeezing; the cap is both small enough at the tip to avoid crusty mustardness, and wide enough at the bottom to allow easy squeezing; and it has a great iconic look, comparable to the classic Campbell's can as a classic icon.
All in all, I give this mustard 8 cutesy mustard bottles out of 10, for it's many strengths in the mustard category and it's superiority in the packaging one.
