Overall Rating 7.0 out of 10 - Nice show with thick late 90s early 2000s nostalgia
I recommend watching
It has been a while since I have reviewed anything. That is partly because this show is 49 episodes long, 4 seasons of most other shows.This blog is about Anime, Music and Video Games. I write reviews, analytical articles and some casual observations. I intend to instill good taste among the shit taste plebs. I also occasionally write about other topics that interest me. I am a writer and promoting my awesome book here, ask me about it.
Overall Rating 7.0 out of 10 - Nice show with thick late 90s early 2000s nostalgia
I recommend watching
It has been a while since I have reviewed anything. That is partly because this show is 49 episodes long, 4 seasons of most other shows.I was thinking recently that I do not like Blood Elves as much as I theoretically should. In theory Blood Elves are just my kind of people, they pursue increased knowledge and power, use arcane magic to make everyday life more comfortable and advanced, they are also hedonistic and like comforts and pleasure. That sound a lot more like me compared to nature loving, magic forbidding and ancients worshipping Night Elves.
Yet somehow in game itself Night Elves appeal to me more than Blood ones. I wonder why that is. Could it be that I do not like colour red, Blood Elves do overuse it to my taste, but there is more, I think.
After some thinking I concluded that Blood Elves architecture looks tad too small and somewhat plastic in game. It feels more like a playground for kids houses than one's people actually live in.
Also, Blood Elf women look to cold and hard compare to Night Elf ones. I like softer women.
Finally, there is indeed too much red and brown in Silvermoon, I do not like colour brown and only like red in limited amounts. Generally, there are too much colour saturation in Blood Elf towns.
Compared to that, Night Elf towns and areas look like there is perpetual twilight. I like sunsets, so that appeals to me.
Generally, Night Elves feel a lot more relaxed compared to rather terse Blood Elves. Night Elf areas have resort feel to them, particularly tavern building. Darnassus itself is somewhat oversaturated with treehouses but, smaller towns are much better in that regard, particularly the one in Darkshore. That ocean view is one of the kind. I like relaxed things and Night Elf areas give feel of tranquility and timelessness.
Also, while Night Elves are somewhat closer to nature, it's not the kind of real wilderness like in Un'Goro Crater, Feralas or north and east of Strangelthorn Vale. Ashenvale has paved roads and even streetlight (lamppost) trees to illuminate your path, similar to how high-class resort hotels do it in real life. It's all crafter magical and fairytale-ish experience rather than wilderness. I do not like wilderness but do like magical fairytale-sh experience.
That is not to say I do not like Blood Elves, their areas are better than Tauren ones for example. If I am to rank capitals in order of my aesthetic preference, then they will go: Exodar, Darnassus, Silvermoon, Ironforge, Undercity, Stormwind, Ogrimmar, Thunderbluff. Night Elves have better small towns, but best capital has to go to Draenei. As for favorite zones, then Ashenvale, Azshara, Desolace, Eastern Plaguelands, Westfall in that order. Least favorite has to be Un'Goro, followed by Redridge Mountains, Feralas, Wetlands and Dun Morogh.
Overall Rating 5.2 out of 10 - Poorly made movie loosely based on original series
I do not recommend watching.
I did not yet review the original Gundam Seed. I watched it a while ago long before I began blogging and had a mixed experience with it. In view of lack of good anime to watch recently I decided to revisit this franchise and watch a movie.
The movie did disappoint. Original war between Earth Forces and ZAFT ended and they are not all friends for some reason. Later I checked there is whole 50 extra episode second season of Gundam Seed, called Destiny, that possibly explains how that happened, but after watching this one, I do not want to watch it. What they showed about Durandal in this movie is enough to not want to watch the entire 50-episode slog where he is main antagonist.
Back to the movie, Kira married Lacus, they live unhappily together, each too busy with their own work and feel guilty for not having time for each other. Each so driven to achieve peace and blaming themselves for not being able to. Back in original both of them were much nicer and a lot more easygoing, they were just nice guys, now they are as heavy with guilt as lead dumbbells.
Antagonists are not any better. The asshole knights who measure a person value based on ability to fight with a sword despite piloting overengineered ginormous mechs that can destroy a city or two at a press of a button. Spoiler alert, they end up being so called accords, genetically engineered beings above coordinators, who want to create a caste society dictatorship and try to convince protagonists and viewers that it is the only way to peace. I will not spoil the rest of the plot as the Accord's trap one of the few redeeming points of the story, together with Lacus cooking ability.
Story begins with pathetic "strength is all that matter" message and ends with "love is strength" (almost Beatles era, all your need is love), yes that pathetic. I simplify here, but I cannot be bothered to elaborate on stupidity of screenwriters of this movie.
Broadly speaking most of the story is unappealing and unpleasant, middle movie plot twist is the only interesting part. Animation is not any better, characters look uglier than in the original Gundam that was released more than 20 years ago, how did you managed to fuck it up that much? Some backgrounds somewhat redeem it, but not that much. There is a lot of beams flying all over the screen during the fight scenes, trying to make them look pretty. Its picture over substance however, oversaturation makes it hard to follow who fights whom and where. Mech's designs do not help identifiability either. So is the fact that Shiin looks too much like Athrun. The whole action feels either rushed or cut too far. Athrun seems like teleporting between his own fight with Shura and protecting Kira from Orpheus. Some scenes in between were probably cut.
Speaking of characters, my favorite and most relatable character from the original, Rue Le Creuse (the masked guy from ZAFT), is not in this movie at all, a be it you see him occasionally in memory flashes. I do not remember if he died at the end of original or not. My second favorite character, Athran is in it, but he is different from how he was in the original, and not in the good way.
Finally, the overall plot. In the original I could sympathize with ZAFT. Humans engineered coordinators to be smarter than ordinary people yet denied them status and power they deserved, expecting them to all to be like Kira and serve humanity for no benefit of their own. It was only natural for coordinators to fight against the earth forces.
In this movie however, the accords are extremely unlikable, and their society is horribly totalitarian and oppressive. The never-ending obsession with peace, that all sides profess, does not make it any better. I felt that Gintama should satirise it. It's like when Gintoki and Hijikata were arguing about treatment of that elder in video game (ep 99).
Overall, this movie is a bad, it's full of unlikable characters and I do not recommend watching it.
It is no secret that Japan is very popular around the world. It's not just Japanese games and electronics, but other aspects of culture as well. Nowadays there are at least as many sushi restaurants as there are McDonalds or Pizzerias if not more.
To top it up there is also anime that people enjoy watching with subtitles despite American Hollywood can offer life action movies in many languages. Yet people around the world choose subtitled anime instead. There is supposedly large cultural barrier between Japan and the west, yet it does not stop fans.
A similar problem prevents people from enjoying cultural products from other countries. China, Russia or France are supposedly huge countries with long history of culture, yet they only enjoy very limited to non-existent interest around the world. A far cry to the interest Japan has.
However, why Japan wins the hearts of the globe, while everyone else misses by a longshot? What does Japan have that other countries do not?
A simple answer would be humble women; I wrote a separate article about why Western Men choose Asian women. In this article I will cover reasons not related to women.
Back in the past, Japanese heavily borrowed from Chinese. culture, technology, even writing system. Some Sinophiles might even say that everything originated in China and Japanese and other Asians simply copied it. That however will be shortsighted. While Japan indeed copied a lot from Chiese, not everything Japan has comes from China. For example, even if Kanji are from China, Hiragana and Katakana are not. The same with other things.
In copying and imitating good ideas from other cultures, Japan is remarkably similar to the Western civilization. Greeks borrowed from Egyptians, Romans from Greeks, barbarians who destroyed Rome, later grew to imitate it in many ways. Even at its pinnacle, West does not grow complacent and start thinking that everything great comes from us and there is nothing to learn elsewhere. That makes it much easier for western people to understand Japanese who think the same way, than say Chinese who think that everything good originated in China and everyone else is just a barbarian compared to us.
Blizzard used to say that attention to details is what differentiates them from the competitors and makes their games win over in the end. However, since Cataclysm this attention to details was somewhat lacking. In this article I will outline the details that made early WoW shine but were lost in later expansions.
I intended to write this article for a while now but sheer volume of what I wanted to cover was so large I kept postponing it to better think through on how to cover it all. WoW went from an all-time success story to a frustrating disaster. After several successful expansions there were many that turned fans away. Now WoW Classic exists in parallel with the Retail and arguably more popular than the latter.
However, shouldn't it be the other way around. Technology wise game improved, gameplay also improved. Retail looks crispier and plays smoother than it was at its launch. Why players, me included, prefer Classic?
There are several reasons.
Overall Rating 7.9 out of 10 - Nice deconstruction of the 2010s era.
I recommend watching if you understand literarily analysis and literary fiction.
For every proper literary fiction out there, there are at least three pretentious pseudo-intellectual imitations that put together a bunch of unrelated scenes and call it a movie. Thus, it's always nice to find something that actually has a meaning, like topic of this review.I was playing a lot of World of Warcraft recently and I have been thinking to write a lengthy article about what went wrong with "modern WoW" and why so many people prefer Classic. I have lots of ideas so it will be a long one.
However, before I could begin on WoW, I suddenly got a revelation of sorts about the general pattern here. WoW is not the only one, there is also Heroes of Might and Magic, that I already wrote on, Legacy of Kain, old Fallout, Diablo II, Doom and many-many more. Why gaming community so consistently reject sequels and keep asking for remakes and remasters of the original titles they fell in love with. Is it just nostalgia, or there is more to it than that.
There are many theories that fundamentally miss the mark. It's not, that games were harder. Neither it's the pixel art.
The real reason why gamers keep coming back to old titles is because old titles were smart games made by smart developers and were played and understood by equally smart audiences. Modern games are dumb entertainment made for normies and casuals. That is why old school gamers cannot find enjoyment in modern games and keep coming back to old titles.
Back in the days video games were seen as something nerdy, Mainstream people shunned both games and gamers. Gamers were somewhat of an outcast.
Nowadays video games are much more mainstream and socially acceptable, fashionable even. Game stores sell game merchandise and people wear clothes with game characters.
At first glance its good, finally the society have seen the light of gaming and embrace it wholeheartedly. Now we are no longer nerds and outcasts, we are the core and center, right?
Turns out not so simple.
Influx of the normies and casuals into gaming brought with it change to games themselves. Average normie is much less smart that average old school gamer. The do not even understand, much less appreciate complex narratives games like Max Payne or Legacy of Kain had to offer. The only entertainment they understand is basic and simple.
In order to appeal to normies and casuals, game developers started to dumb down their games, both in game mechanics and in narrative. Complex long stories give way for simple episodic content that even a 6-year-old kid can get.
From getting at precipice of philosophy and existentialism, games went on to be interactive Looney Tunes. After all everyone who can get Thus Spoke Zarathustra will get Looney Tunes, but hardly 0.00001% of those who get Looney Tunes will get Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
For dumb normies Thus Spoke Zarathustra is boring, as is Lord of the Rings, or Classic WoW. All these works require you to think to understand and appreciate them. Normies are either too stupid or too lazy to think.
Game developers do oblige. After all there are a lot more normies than old school gamers so there is a lot more money to be made from normies that from hardcore games.
Normies did not get any wiser and ascended to the level of enlightened games old school gamers enjoy. Instead, developers came down to the level of common pleb and dumbed down their products so that plebs may enjoy them.
Old school gamers did not turn mainstream. They simply went from being nerds because they play games to being nerd subset of the overall large pool of gamers.
Now normies shit on old titles that old school gamers hold dear, while most developers either cater to their views or go out of business.
Fundamentally this dissatisfaction with modern game industry is because games just stopped being a highly intellectual entertainment for highly intellectual people they used to be.
We are sick of being treated like idiots. We hate that our medium is being taken away from us and dumbed down for plebs. We are puzzled that playground that was once ours no longer feel this way.
Because of that old school gamers complain that new WoW is worse than Classic, modders keep refining HoMM III even when developers released 8th installment, well-made remasters fly of the shelfs and get huge critical acclaim and many more.
Many feel that things are not right but consistently fail to pin down the root cause of the problem. People like Ben Yahtzee Croshaw tries to express these feelings in his Fully and Semi Ramblomatic. He became very popular essentially complaining about modern game industry. His many videos about many individual aspects he finds issues with.
However, Yahtz and many others fail to see the forest for the trees.
We want our highly intellectual entertainment back.
Occasionally some developers oblige and do a remaster or even a true to core gameplay Doom 2016. However, for every good remaster that captures what people liked about the original, there is another that fucks everything up and earns record low scores on review sites.
Fundamentally however this is not a solution. What about new games that are as good as old ones were? Why cannot writers write as good as they used to? Is there a hidden censorship that prevents the same level of creativity? Even if there is money to be made by making games for filthy casuals, there are still robust old school community that wants more titles in the spirit of their beloved classics.
Possibly the answer is indeed that studios simply do not understand what made 90s games so popular. Because of that they do not understand what went wrong in 2010s and by extension have no idea how to fix it.
If studios really want to recapture the appeal of games of the past, they need to employ people like me as consultants and/or writers to make sure games they make can recover from the dark ages they plunged in 2010s.
Things I mention above are general observations. They do apply to every game, but each individual game also has other unique to itself issues that needs a dedicated article or even series of articles to fully explain. I plan to eventually cover other games like WoW, just like I covered HoMM III in a separate article.