• LEGIⓧN & THE ALIENIST

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    Based off of a Marvel Comics’ character, the 3-season television series Legion is a study in high-concept insanity. It takes guts to make something so deliberately incoherent, to essentially thread together one concept episode after another until you have a consistently inconsistent schizophrenic tapestry… that I can’t deny. Doesn’t mean it’s worth watching though.

    The Alienist is something quite a bit different. A Victorian era thriller with police procedural elements set in New York City, its first season mainly busies itself with highlighting police corruption and reminding people that prostitution is a gender-neutral profession. I’m not at all surprised that it had a middling reception (though I liked the first half or so), especially since the narrative basically falls apart once the focus shifts to ‘the west’.

    The second season, subtitled Angel of Darkness, puts a greater focus on Sara and women’s suffrage in general with the murder victims being babies this time rather than adolescents. The corruption elements here come across as excessive/overwhelming and the work as a whole almost feels less like a thriller and more like soapbox preaching. Meaning I can’t really recommend watching this series either.

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  • SHINCHOU YUUSHA ~Kono YUUSHA ga ORE TUEEE Kuse ni SHINCHOU Sugiru~ & Hataage! Kemono Michi

    Posted on by Offkorn 1 Comment

    Shinchou Yuusha is an interesting series in that you can clearly see it’s an amalgam of earlier works, yet the fusion is pulled off competently enough to result in a consistent whole. The reaction-based comedy is stylistically identical to Konosuba‘s, but in content it’s quite different with a much greater focus on JRPG parody than sex/ecchi. Meanwhile it also has a Goblin Slayer-like stoically single-minded main character and splashes of similar gory drama.

    The combination never comes across as forced, with the one seamlessly blending into the other.

    After that somewhat surprising success story, it seemed like a good idea to try another series (strike while the iron’s hot and all that). Which is where Hataage! Kemono Michi comes in. Also a comedic isekai with a… monomaniac central character the two seemed like they might complement one another. And despite this being more ecchi-centric they actually do. There’s no genre shifts here though; it’s pure comedy.

    As a sidenote: I didn’t realize these two aired at the same time when deciding what to watch after Shinchou Yuusha. It’s strange that shows with such a similar theme (and I’m not talking about them both being isekai) got scheduled in the same season.

    Continue reading → Post ID 8301

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    This entry was posted in 2019 - Autumn Anime Related and tagged

  • PROJECT POWER & JOHN WICK₃: PARABELLUM

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    Seeing the description for Project Power immediately brought to mind The Boys, and there are a few aesthetic similarities there. Overall though I’d have to say it’s a very different type of show which relies much too heavily on gimmicks/tropes; once the almost buddy-cop dynamic between the kid and other two leads is formed the level of believability just falls straight through the floor. It does however have some pretty cool visual effects.

    The third John Wick movie picks up immediately from where the last left off and… ultimately doesn’t really go anywhere over the course of its runtime. If you’ve seen the two previous movies, and I suggest doing so, then know that this continues amping up the ridiculousness level of the gun/fist/knife fights. Meaning that if the prequel was bordering on too much then this’ll likely be unwatchable (many of the fights end up with a strange dichotomy of being both laughably cartoonish and disconcertingly gory).

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  • DISHONORED2 & DEATH OF THE OUTSIDER

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    The sequel to Dishonored plays pretty much the same way while giving more freedom in the Chaos department. You’re no longer locked into the chaotic ending after killing a certain number of people, but instead based mainly on who you kill with quantity being very much secondary. There’s also a variety of endings depending on how you resolve the main missions.

    It’s meant to be played through at least twice, once as Emily and once as Corvo (and if you want all the achievements, those playthroughs will have a no power/power and high/low Chaos split). You don’t need to have played the prequel or its two DLC to follow what happens here, but those that have will benefit from quite a number of references (the Low Chaos outcomes are canon). For those that haven’t… just be aware that this is primarily a stealth-based game; the melee combat is pretty clunky and you’re not really meant to fight foes directly.

    The follow-up, Death of the Outsider, is more like a stand-alone DLC than a proper game. It’s roughly half the size with no collectibles aside from paintings, doesn’t feature a Chaos system, has automatic power upgrades/unlocks, and there are only two endings (wholly determined by your choice in the last mission). While it too treats the non-lethal path through its prequel as canon, oddly enough the lethal ending here comes across as far more natural than the non-lethal one. So while I can certainly recommend buying Dishonored 2 (assuming you like stealth FPP games) I have to suggest skipping Death of the Outsider unless it’s on sale for like $5.

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  • DISCO ELYSIUM & ARA FELL: Enhanced Edition

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    Ever since its release last year, I’ve heard pretty much nothing but good things about Disco Elysium. Yet, as with Tides of Numenera, despite buying it shortly after I had no intention of actually playing it. I’ve never been a fan of time limits after all and roleplaying a broke, middle-aged failure was not exactly high on my to-do list (and besides, the deluge of screenshots made playing effectively superfluous anyway since the gameplay is dialog and point/click-based).

    After playing for a bit last week I’ve come to the conclusion that all the praise is well-deserved and the screenshots are absolutely representative of the game. I’ve also confirmed that, despite that (and despite the time limit not being as important as it seemed at first), it’s just not the sort of game I enjoy playing. I like having active gameplay in my RPGs… even ones that end up 90% dialog. DE feels to me almost like an adventure game or visual novel.

    Moving on we come to Ara Fell, a throwback RPG Maker game whose setting brings to mind early Ys. I never played the original, but the itemization and leveling system was apparently (based on reading an early walkthrough) quite a bit different prior to this Enhanced Edition.

    While the innovative (for the genre) mana regen system is refreshing and the irreverent humor manages to avoid Cosmic Star Heroine extremes, like a lot of these games this one suffers pacing issues. The first three chapters are solid enough, but afterward you’ll soon run out of things to craft (making exploration mostly pointless) and the storyline quickly becomes infested with deus ex machina and questionable developments. Finishing it becomes a real chore. Is it worth the $15 non-sale price? Yeah, probably. Just keep your expectations low.

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  • WITCHBLADE & HOMELAND

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    The turn of the century TV adaptation of the comicbook series Witchblade begins with a movie. Being almost entirely an action-drama (there’s some supernatural mystery in there as well), it suffers rather severely from the fact that the action scenes are mostly ridiculous. More than anything they bring to mind a super sentai series… making it prohibitively difficult to take the drama seriously.

    Homeland is also a TV series, one which thankfully doesn’t appear to suffer from unintentional comedy (just frontloaded gratuitous nudity). The first season is a combination of thriller and familial drama which comes across something like “Hex: The Early Years”. On the face of things that shouldn’t have been much of a problem, but the early ‘fuck people’s privacy!’ theme is taken to Stalker-ish extremes and almost ends up a deal-killer.

    The second season is a continuation of the first, following a timeskip, which slows things down with more of a focus on secret-agenty behavior and personal trauma. The third picks up shortly after and amps up the personal drama quite a bit. At this juncture the re-occurring psychiatric issues subplot (and accompanying mental institution committals) becomes actively aggravating. It also happens to be the point the series starts focusing a hell of a lot more on Saul than Carrie.

    Season 4 is something of a soft reboot which makes the odd choice to replace the adultery-related drama with childcare drama only to almost immediately drop the topic completely, while also going well out of its way to shoehorn in more psychiatric issues. Seriously… what the fuck? And if that weren’t bad enough, the 5th season (picking up two years after S4’s conclusion) goes completely off the rails.

    It’s strange… the show makes so many odd choices and sends so many conflicting signals that it’s tough to get a read on it. The early seasons are both good and bad. Regardless, if you do decide to give it a chance, you should definitely stop watching at the end of S4 (if you can make it that far). Maybe go watch Jormungand after for the Hex/Bookman parallels.

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  • PSYCHO-PASS | Sinners of the System & Season 3

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    The three Sinners of the System movies are a mixed bag. Being theoretically set a few months after the first Psycho-Pass movie, in practice only the third actually functions like a sequel.

    The first is a side-story that completely overhauls Mika’s personality (for the better) and feels like it should be a prequel to the second season. It’s also not very good. The second is mostly a prequel flashback to the first season (framed by a few ‘modern day’ scenes set before the previous movie) focused on one of the S2 enforcers. This movie is quite good. And then there’s the 3rd movie, which…. Well, it’s sort of required watching if you plan to follow-up with Season 3, yet it comes across nothing like a Psycho-Pass work.

    That third season begins after a multi-year timeskip, and quite a number of things have changed: Mika underwent another personality overhaul, Japan has relaxed its isolationist stance, Sibyl is gearing up to reveal its presence to the masses, Akane is off the team, and there are three new enforcers and two new inspectors. The old team is still around, just in a notably different role. It’s surprisingly good (clearly meant to be a return to Season 1 sensibilities) but suffers both from a number of unexplained developments and having Arata be so ludicrously overpowered. It also ends on a cliffhanger…

    …resolved by a ‘movie’ follow-up. This bloated conclusion takes the concept of “homage” far too far. It apparently wanted to recapture the magic of the mid-series Season 1 climax, but instead stumbles time and again with both questionable action scenes and by just flat-out dragging things out for too long.

    In the end it’s tough to recommend watching any of these besides the 2nd SS movie: The first is a pointless sidestory, the third lacks any Psycho-Pass sensibility, S3 requires having seen that third SS movie, and First Inspector is just plain tedious.

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    This entry was posted in 2019 - Autumn 2019 - Winter 2020 - Winter Anime Related and tagged

  • TRUE DETECTIVE

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    I’ve heard quite a number of good things about True Detective‘s premiere season, and the first 4.5 episodes absolutely live up to the hype. However… once it abandons the past narrative to focus on a current day case, alluded to by the interview framing device, it deteriorates quite quickly. Genre-wise it’s a mix of thrillerish dramatic elements combined with familial/relationship drama and a bit of action here and there, all of which fit together remarkably well.

    The second season switches up the cast, location, and structure; no framing gimmicks here (though there is a time skip). The genre composition remains more or less the same while the character personalities/goals are quite different and it has more of an ensemble cast sort of thing going on. Overall I’d say this season ends up significantly better than the first. Oh sure it starts out shaky and a bit difficult to follow, which can be damning if compared directly to the first season’s beginning, but the connection between the pre- and post-timeskip plotlines is far stronger and the work as a whole is noticeably more consistent.

    The third season goes back to the style and structure of the first in pretty much every way (no, adding a second interview timeline does not count as an innovation), even directly referencing it. Why? Why would you retread old ground like this? Was all the criticism of the second season really so influential or did the creator simply run out of ideas? Just re-watch the first season rather than bother with this pointless rehash.

    In summary: The first is good, the second is great, and the third is a waste of time (unless you like shows featuring alzheimer’s sufferers I guess).

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  • COP CRAFT & Kyokou Suiri: In/Spectre

    Posted on by Offkorn 1 Comment

    After seeing a comment that made it sound like Red Data Girl, and noticing the rather large disconnect between the early (edgy) and current (goofy) promotional imagery, I decided to finally get around to watching In/Spectre… and I’m undecided on whether it was a mistake or not. While the beginning is enjoyable, the remaining two-thirds to 50% is for the most part pretty boring and/or distractingly implausible. Rather than an engaging mystery/thriller, exciting action series, or amusing romantic comedy it just ends up something like the second coming of Kyoukai no Kanata.

    Cop Craft on the other hand I didn’t have any particularly strong desire to see, but the ‘odd couple’ relationship angle seemed like it might complement the previous series. It did not. Rather, it reminded me rather acutely of why I mostly stopped watching Anime in the first place. While the series has a lot of ideas and messages to impart, some of them even pretty good, it never manages to sell any of them. Stuff is just sort of thrown at the wall and then forgotten an episode or two later.

    What’s interesting is that both of these series (despite their source material having been written 11 and 9 years ago, respectively) seem tailor-made for current events. In the former’s case you have the central theme of using lies and ‘questions’ to obfuscate and/or distract from the truth, while in the latter you have democracy being boiled down to ‘not choosing which one is good, just which one is better’ and corrupt police. So in the end these two series did end up complimenting one another… just not in the way I had expected.

    Continue reading → Post ID 8301

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    This entry was posted in 2019 - Summer 2020 - Winter 2023 - Winter Anime Related and tagged

  • Pathfinder: Kingmaker – Beneath the Stolen Lands

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    Since that first run through the stand-alone version of BtSL, I’ve played through the campaign once to get the Ironman achievement and then focused entirely on unlocking the Honest Looting, Memorable Moment, and Apocalypse achievements. None of which turned out to be very straightforward.

    The ‘Apocalypse Can Wait’ one is simple enough on paper… you just have to pray the random enemy/item generation works in your favor (I’m about to start the 20th run now and just have to kill the Captor/Captive one more time). ‘A Memorable Moment’ is a bit more complicated. I’m not sure of the exact requirements (like ‘Tricks of Time’ it apparently has an unmentioned perquisite), but it popped for me after dying to the Fallen Priestess when she was the last boss “blocking the path”.

    ‘Honest Looting’ caused some trouble at first since there’s apparently little to no useful information around regarding its requirements. As it turns out, it requires killing an exorbitant number of bosses/mini-bosses. At the start of this 20th run I’ve killed 77. You can check your own progress by extracting the player.json file from your save, opening it with a text editor, and searching for “vendor”.

    While playing on Normal difficulty my best was 60 floors (this was before I understood how the vendor inventories expanded), worst was 10 floors (damn elementals), and over the course of this odyssey I’ve experimented with quite a number of different character builds. Some notes:

    – Kineticist’s Kinetic Blade works with Vital Strike to bypass the Gather Power charge time (but doesn’t do extra damage)
    – Kinetic Blade doesn’t work with Attacks of Opportunity or Cleaving Finish (but does with Cleave)
    – Magus Spell Combat works with Flurry of Blows and Kinetic Blade
    – Sword Saint works with polymorph if you specialize in a relevant natural weapon
    – Sword Saint works with any Motherless Tiefling or Dragon Disciple build if you pick Bite as your weapon
    – Sensei’s Wisdom attack bonus works when armored
    – Sneak Attack ranged users are insanely good here thanks to the confined quarters (Grenadiers as well)
    – You can dual-wield throwing weapons with Two-Weapon Fighting for tons of attacks
    – There’s no need for a healer due to the abundance of potions
    – Browse the vendor stock before deciding on what team to use for a run
    – Try to avoid buff-intensive builds; yes you can rest frequently, but re-buffing every floor is time-consuming
    – Past the 30th floor golems (Greater Autumn & Golden) and Wild Hunt (Monarchs) become prohibitively annoying
    – Before the 30th floor never underestimate elmentals
    – Kill any Geokineticists you come across quickly
    – Stinking Cloud is a godsend against the Fallen Priestess and Wicked Chanter
    – Secret areas can spawn in a floor’s first room
    – It’s often possible to use Stealth to get through a floor with a solo character

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