Neil Gaiman - The Graveyard Book
312 pages
The temptation to just write 'It's Gaiman, so you know it's going to be good' is a strong one, but I did that already with American Gods, and I don't think I can get away with using it more than once. Damn you, conscience!
The Graveyard Book is, by Gaiman's own admission, a loose attempt at a modern day reinterpretation of The Jungle Book (the original Rudyard Kipling version, as opposed to the Disney version which people are more than likely more familiar with). The story opens, as all the best children's stories do, with a murder, a family killed by the man Jack. Only the youngest of the family, a toddler, manages to escape, wandering down to the local graveyard, where he is taken in and cared for by the local residents - in this case, the ghosts of the dead interred in the graveyard. He is named Nobody - Bod for short - given the Freedom of the Graveyard and, as he grows, learns how to haunt, fade from sight, and about the night that took his family from him.
For a children's book, Gaiman spares none of the punches, as expected. Gaiman's always been a fan of the G.K. Chesterton quote about how all children know about the monsters that wait in the dark, biding their time, and how it is the duty of the writer to tell them that while they do exist, they can also always be beaten. There are dark things out there. Evil things. But never doubt for a second that with a little cunning and bravery (always the most important characteristics in the fairy tales of old) anything can be overcome. Even a night-gaunt can be a friend in times of trouble if you know the right words. Never once though, does he talk down to the audience. The text is simplified just enough to let younger readers follow along, but still retains the typical wit and sophistication we've grown to expect from Neil.
The book is laid out in episodic, almost self-contained fashion, each chapter building on the last. The fact that each chapter's also the perfect length for bedtime reading probably isn't entirely unintentional. As the story grows, we follow Bod, from a toddler, to a teenager. As with every Gaiman story, it's the details and touches that make the book a pleasure to read; learning how to deal with 400 years worth of changing customs and manners through the various dead people buried in the graveyard; werewolves calling themselves the Hounds of God, believing that they are charged with destroying evil wherever it is found; ghouls, having lost their memories, naming themselves after the titles of famous rulers and leaders (not the names - the titles) making their home in a city of wrong angles... it all adds detail upon detail to an already engaging storyline that, at its heart, deals with the rewards and tragedies of growing up
Everything comes together neatly at the end, as you realise everything has been relevant and leading up to the finale. Every weapon in Chekhov's Arsenal is fired, and evil receives its just rewards. There are still mysteries left unresolved, but they're the best kind, the ones that make you wonder about the greater world and what else might be out there. It ends, once again, in classic Gaiman fashion, on a bittersweet note. Friends are lost and the world moves on, but it's never the end for the people left behind. Bod, like Mowgli before him, leaves the comfort of his home to rejoin the rest of the world, scared, but stronger for it. This, along with the lesson about defeating the monster above, is something every child - and more than a few adults - should learn to remember more often. Gaiman is the kind of storyteller we all wish we could've had as a child. If you know any, do them a favour: introduce them to this book. They'll thank you for it someday.
Tuesday, April 28
Friday, April 24
Robotech: The Macross Saga
36 22-minute episodes
Mention the name Macross to any decent old school anime fan and they'll probably be able to regale you with tales of the Itano Circus, the affectionate name for the show's trademark missile barrages, contrails filling the screen like so much silly string of death, and of songs so powerful, they could change the course of war. Mention the same name to a child of the 1980s... and they'll probably give you a blank stare that'd do a cow proud. Ask them about Robotech, on the other hand, and they'll probably launch into the same speech as the anime fan with as much enthusiasm and the same dewy-eyed middle-distance gaze.
Somehow, despite being both a long-term anime fan and having the misfortune to be born in the 1980s, I completely managed to miss this. I had a few large figures based on the Zentradi mecha, and I know I saw a few Minmay dolls in the early 90s, but the show was never shown on any British non-satalite TV channel. So while the toys were admittedly very cool, I had absolutely no connection to them beyond 'I dig giant robots'. So, when I saw the box set for the first arc of the Robotech series for £10, I figured it was probably worth picking up, if only for the sake of getting it.
A little background for those still unaware of the show: back in the 1980s, three (mostly) unrelated mech shows were edited together to make a larger show suitable for syndication on US TV, the end result being unlike anything else shown on kids TV at the time. Two of those shows - Southern Cross and Genesis Climber Mospeada - have been all but forgotten, but the third, Super Dimension Fortress Macross, has had a lasting appeal like few others, both in Japan and in the West, with regular updates every few years. The most recent series, Macross Frontier, was released in time to celebrate the original show's 25th anniversary. In Western terms, it's comparable to Transformers, a classic well-loved show that's never really gone away, as so many others have.
Note: the following is a review of Robotech, the rewritten and redubbed version of Macross. I would've reviewed the original, but there was no option on the discs to switch to the original version. Hell, there wasn't even any subtitles for the hearing impaired! So if mentions of 'Rick Hunter' or 'Protoculture' make you physically ill, you may wish to stop reading right about...
...now.
The story starts in the far of year of 1999. An alien battleship crashlands on Earth, and the governments of the world put aside their fighting to try and find out what it is, where it came from and if there's any neat tech that can be ganked from it. Ten years later, the original owners of the craft come looking for it, and are less than happy to see it's been appropriated by a lesser race. So in a First Contact manoeuvre that would do Kirk proud, they open fire on the ship and the city that has since sprung up around it. So, the Captain of the battleship, since renamed the SDF-1, does the smart thing and gets the fuck out of Dodgem activating the ship's as-yet untested warp engines. This gets them away from the immediate assault, but leaves them with two more problems: the first, is that they've accidentally transported the surrounding city with them, a human population to the tune of around 70,000 people. The second, and slightly more pressing issue, is that they've now ended up somewhere in the orbit of Pluto, facing the crew with a journey that will take them at least two years to make, all while under constant attack.
Picking any holes in Robotech feels almost needlessly cruel: yes, the animation's ropey at times, the dialogue's outright dumb and much of the characterisation boils down to 'I did it just 'cus' but when you consider the show's coming up on 30 years old, none of it's very surprising. We've been spoiled in recent years by more sophisticated artwork and storytelling - even your average weekly shonen series can routinely impress in both these days - so in those respects, there's no way in hell the show could even hope to compare. And that's before you consider that the show's a bastardisation of the original. With all in mind, it's hard to know where to start. So we'll start with probably the single most important character in the show: Minmay.
I hate her. Well, that's not true. I just really can't stand her. Minmay first meets Rick Hunter, the dashing male lead, after he almost demolishes her house with a Veritech, the show's transforming mech/fighter jet in the second episode, and I spent much of the remaining series wishing he had. After Macross City is rebuilt aboard the battleship, they hold a beauty contest to raise morale, with Minmay being the winner. She's swiftly catapulted to stardom, becoming an idol singer, then a psychological weapon against the zentradi. In this role, she excels, not just against the invading aliens, but also against the viewer, singing the most insidious earworms you'll encounter outside of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn. Her songs are terrible, but catchier than anything I've encountered in some time. And she brings them out at every opportunity, no matter how inappropriate the situation, and there are some doozies. We're told repeatedly that she's lovely and wonderful and is capable of making even her enemies switch sides, blah blah, but if she's anything, she's the epitome of flightiness, stringing Rick along for the better part of four years, only really telling him she loves him when Lisa Hayes, the other main female lead, decides she likes him.
Then again, Rick and Lisa aren't that much better. He's a hot-headed pilot pining after two women, both of whom spend most of their time pining after another man (and when you consider that one of them's related to the guy in question, that gets a whole lot squickier). She's an officious wench who falls for Minmay's cousin because he reminds her of her last boyfriend who died on a mission. We're meant to believe all three of these people are wonderful and brave and blah blah blah, but from what we're shown, Minmay's an airheaded attention-whoring Pollyanna, Lisa's an arrogant stuck-up bitch hung up on someone or another the entire length of the show, and Rick's an idiot savant (with a heavy emphasis on the idiot part) who's good at flying but not much else. Really, for a show that lists the power of love as one of it's major themes, it frankly sucks at it. The worst offender is the romance between Max and Miria: he beats her at piloting, then at an arcade game, so the feisty warrior chick does the only reasonable thing and tries to knife him. Max, never accused of being the quickest plane in the hangar, then tells her she's pretty and asks her to marry him, at which point she loses her will to fight, her knife and her personality in swift order.
And then we have the music, because I don't feel I've gotten across precisely how bad it is. Don't get me wrong, the idea of music being so powerful it can swing te tide of a war? I get it. Hell, I believe it. Not to the extent that it's shown in the show (well...) but the idea that a piece of music can change things dramatically? The only people who couldn't believe that are the terminally cynical or the utterly soulless. And, contrary to what you may have heard, I'm not quite all the way there on either count. So yes, the concept, I'm utterly behind, 300%. Just... why in the name of Clapton's time-distorting appendages would you pick those songs?! They're terrible! Sure the actual song played during the key battle is probably the best of the bunch, but the rest makes me want to hunt down the reanimated corpse of Keith Richards and ask him if he'd mind using his powers as a level 25 lich to flay the writer and composer of the songs alive and force them to wear a suit made of lemons for the rest of their unnatural pain-filled lives.
Finally, there's the pacing. I can only look at the show from the perspective that it's the first third of an ongoing series. In that respect, the fact that the show just peters out after the end of the war between the Zentradi and Earth is understandable: it's not the end, since there's another 40 or so episodes still to go. By itself, however, it looks like they're just trying to drag it out another 10 episodes to fulfil some kind of contractual obligation. Nothing much of any consequence happens, beyond the last two major villains getting drunk, riding a mech into battle like a pony, then deciding to kamikaze the SDF-1. I hope the original series ended a little better than that, because it's sad watching any show flounder like that for so long.
So there you have it: a show that's a relic of it's time, incapable of standing proudly with its descendants, outclassed and outpaced by them at every turn.
And yet...
And yet, somehow, I couldn't stop myself from watching. Really. There have been a multitude of shows I've never been able to get past the first few episodes - sometimes barely even making it past the opening credits for some reason - that I have little doubt are probably better in every possible way. Why should it be that I get nowhere with them, yet I sit and finish all six discs of this over the course of a week? It's not because I actually paid for these discs, as anyone who knows my DVD buying habits can attest. And it's not because I was desperate to find something to do for this article: my original plan was to watch the first two seasons of Transformers Animated, something I'm about 6 episodes away from finishing. As ropey as the animation is, they took the smart decision to save the budget for the fight scenes, with the end result being stylish acrobatic dogfights, even if they do play fast and loose with the laws of physics all the freakin' time. The mech designs have never been bettered, as timeless and as classical as any Gundam, and the scope of the story, leaving aside the spotty execution, is still remarkable. Can you imagine watching this as a kid, getting to the episodes where the Zentradi directly attack the Earth, and seeing them wipe out 95% of the surface - and life! - on the planet in one go? With shots of people and cities being vaporised for good measure to boot! I think, when you get down to it, that's probably my main problem with the show - I came to it at the wrong time. As a kid, it would've fulfilled every craving I had for a cartoon - a series with continuity, where changes actually happen from one episode to another, where people actually die. Since the days of Babylon 5, these things aren't just common, they're virtually mandatory - networks won't even look at your show if you don't have some kind of year by year plan in mind. But back then, the only kind of shows that had any real continuity were soap operas, so seeing this in a cartoon? Mind blowing.
So there you really have it: A show that's probably better in its native language, but it doesn't matter because I'm just really bitter about being unable to watch it when I was a kid who would've enjoyed it infinitely more.
Hey, at least I'm honest about it.
36 22-minute episodes
Mention the name Macross to any decent old school anime fan and they'll probably be able to regale you with tales of the Itano Circus, the affectionate name for the show's trademark missile barrages, contrails filling the screen like so much silly string of death, and of songs so powerful, they could change the course of war. Mention the same name to a child of the 1980s... and they'll probably give you a blank stare that'd do a cow proud. Ask them about Robotech, on the other hand, and they'll probably launch into the same speech as the anime fan with as much enthusiasm and the same dewy-eyed middle-distance gaze.
Somehow, despite being both a long-term anime fan and having the misfortune to be born in the 1980s, I completely managed to miss this. I had a few large figures based on the Zentradi mecha, and I know I saw a few Minmay dolls in the early 90s, but the show was never shown on any British non-satalite TV channel. So while the toys were admittedly very cool, I had absolutely no connection to them beyond 'I dig giant robots'. So, when I saw the box set for the first arc of the Robotech series for £10, I figured it was probably worth picking up, if only for the sake of getting it.
A little background for those still unaware of the show: back in the 1980s, three (mostly) unrelated mech shows were edited together to make a larger show suitable for syndication on US TV, the end result being unlike anything else shown on kids TV at the time. Two of those shows - Southern Cross and Genesis Climber Mospeada - have been all but forgotten, but the third, Super Dimension Fortress Macross, has had a lasting appeal like few others, both in Japan and in the West, with regular updates every few years. The most recent series, Macross Frontier, was released in time to celebrate the original show's 25th anniversary. In Western terms, it's comparable to Transformers, a classic well-loved show that's never really gone away, as so many others have.
Note: the following is a review of Robotech, the rewritten and redubbed version of Macross. I would've reviewed the original, but there was no option on the discs to switch to the original version. Hell, there wasn't even any subtitles for the hearing impaired! So if mentions of 'Rick Hunter' or 'Protoculture' make you physically ill, you may wish to stop reading right about...
...now.
The story starts in the far of year of 1999. An alien battleship crashlands on Earth, and the governments of the world put aside their fighting to try and find out what it is, where it came from and if there's any neat tech that can be ganked from it. Ten years later, the original owners of the craft come looking for it, and are less than happy to see it's been appropriated by a lesser race. So in a First Contact manoeuvre that would do Kirk proud, they open fire on the ship and the city that has since sprung up around it. So, the Captain of the battleship, since renamed the SDF-1, does the smart thing and gets the fuck out of Dodgem activating the ship's as-yet untested warp engines. This gets them away from the immediate assault, but leaves them with two more problems: the first, is that they've accidentally transported the surrounding city with them, a human population to the tune of around 70,000 people. The second, and slightly more pressing issue, is that they've now ended up somewhere in the orbit of Pluto, facing the crew with a journey that will take them at least two years to make, all while under constant attack.
Picking any holes in Robotech feels almost needlessly cruel: yes, the animation's ropey at times, the dialogue's outright dumb and much of the characterisation boils down to 'I did it just 'cus' but when you consider the show's coming up on 30 years old, none of it's very surprising. We've been spoiled in recent years by more sophisticated artwork and storytelling - even your average weekly shonen series can routinely impress in both these days - so in those respects, there's no way in hell the show could even hope to compare. And that's before you consider that the show's a bastardisation of the original. With all in mind, it's hard to know where to start. So we'll start with probably the single most important character in the show: Minmay.
I hate her. Well, that's not true. I just really can't stand her. Minmay first meets Rick Hunter, the dashing male lead, after he almost demolishes her house with a Veritech, the show's transforming mech/fighter jet in the second episode, and I spent much of the remaining series wishing he had. After Macross City is rebuilt aboard the battleship, they hold a beauty contest to raise morale, with Minmay being the winner. She's swiftly catapulted to stardom, becoming an idol singer, then a psychological weapon against the zentradi. In this role, she excels, not just against the invading aliens, but also against the viewer, singing the most insidious earworms you'll encounter outside of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn. Her songs are terrible, but catchier than anything I've encountered in some time. And she brings them out at every opportunity, no matter how inappropriate the situation, and there are some doozies. We're told repeatedly that she's lovely and wonderful and is capable of making even her enemies switch sides, blah blah, but if she's anything, she's the epitome of flightiness, stringing Rick along for the better part of four years, only really telling him she loves him when Lisa Hayes, the other main female lead, decides she likes him.
Then again, Rick and Lisa aren't that much better. He's a hot-headed pilot pining after two women, both of whom spend most of their time pining after another man (and when you consider that one of them's related to the guy in question, that gets a whole lot squickier). She's an officious wench who falls for Minmay's cousin because he reminds her of her last boyfriend who died on a mission. We're meant to believe all three of these people are wonderful and brave and blah blah blah, but from what we're shown, Minmay's an airheaded attention-whoring Pollyanna, Lisa's an arrogant stuck-up bitch hung up on someone or another the entire length of the show, and Rick's an idiot savant (with a heavy emphasis on the idiot part) who's good at flying but not much else. Really, for a show that lists the power of love as one of it's major themes, it frankly sucks at it. The worst offender is the romance between Max and Miria: he beats her at piloting, then at an arcade game, so the feisty warrior chick does the only reasonable thing and tries to knife him. Max, never accused of being the quickest plane in the hangar, then tells her she's pretty and asks her to marry him, at which point she loses her will to fight, her knife and her personality in swift order.
And then we have the music, because I don't feel I've gotten across precisely how bad it is. Don't get me wrong, the idea of music being so powerful it can swing te tide of a war? I get it. Hell, I believe it. Not to the extent that it's shown in the show (well...) but the idea that a piece of music can change things dramatically? The only people who couldn't believe that are the terminally cynical or the utterly soulless. And, contrary to what you may have heard, I'm not quite all the way there on either count. So yes, the concept, I'm utterly behind, 300%. Just... why in the name of Clapton's time-distorting appendages would you pick those songs?! They're terrible! Sure the actual song played during the key battle is probably the best of the bunch, but the rest makes me want to hunt down the reanimated corpse of Keith Richards and ask him if he'd mind using his powers as a level 25 lich to flay the writer and composer of the songs alive and force them to wear a suit made of lemons for the rest of their unnatural pain-filled lives.
Finally, there's the pacing. I can only look at the show from the perspective that it's the first third of an ongoing series. In that respect, the fact that the show just peters out after the end of the war between the Zentradi and Earth is understandable: it's not the end, since there's another 40 or so episodes still to go. By itself, however, it looks like they're just trying to drag it out another 10 episodes to fulfil some kind of contractual obligation. Nothing much of any consequence happens, beyond the last two major villains getting drunk, riding a mech into battle like a pony, then deciding to kamikaze the SDF-1. I hope the original series ended a little better than that, because it's sad watching any show flounder like that for so long.
So there you have it: a show that's a relic of it's time, incapable of standing proudly with its descendants, outclassed and outpaced by them at every turn.
And yet...
And yet, somehow, I couldn't stop myself from watching. Really. There have been a multitude of shows I've never been able to get past the first few episodes - sometimes barely even making it past the opening credits for some reason - that I have little doubt are probably better in every possible way. Why should it be that I get nowhere with them, yet I sit and finish all six discs of this over the course of a week? It's not because I actually paid for these discs, as anyone who knows my DVD buying habits can attest. And it's not because I was desperate to find something to do for this article: my original plan was to watch the first two seasons of Transformers Animated, something I'm about 6 episodes away from finishing. As ropey as the animation is, they took the smart decision to save the budget for the fight scenes, with the end result being stylish acrobatic dogfights, even if they do play fast and loose with the laws of physics all the freakin' time. The mech designs have never been bettered, as timeless and as classical as any Gundam, and the scope of the story, leaving aside the spotty execution, is still remarkable. Can you imagine watching this as a kid, getting to the episodes where the Zentradi directly attack the Earth, and seeing them wipe out 95% of the surface - and life! - on the planet in one go? With shots of people and cities being vaporised for good measure to boot! I think, when you get down to it, that's probably my main problem with the show - I came to it at the wrong time. As a kid, it would've fulfilled every craving I had for a cartoon - a series with continuity, where changes actually happen from one episode to another, where people actually die. Since the days of Babylon 5, these things aren't just common, they're virtually mandatory - networks won't even look at your show if you don't have some kind of year by year plan in mind. But back then, the only kind of shows that had any real continuity were soap operas, so seeing this in a cartoon? Mind blowing.
So there you really have it: A show that's probably better in its native language, but it doesn't matter because I'm just really bitter about being unable to watch it when I was a kid who would've enjoyed it infinitely more.
Hey, at least I'm honest about it.
Wednesday, April 22
Monday, April 20
Shoot Em Up
93 Minutes
When Shoot Em Up was released in cinemas, it was to - at best - lukewarm reviews. 'It's too shallow and brutal' they said. 'Too many gunfights, too much violence, no depth whatsoever and an utter dearth of meaningful characterisation. Just action, action, action from one end to the other, 3/10.'
Never did it seem to occur to anyone that that was precisely the point.
The movie opens with Clive Owen, a man with a face hewn from finest teak, sitting on a bench. He looks mean and moody, the most dangerous hobo ever to stir his tea with a carrot. His name - of course - is Smith. When he sees a pregnant woman being chased by a man with a gun, he finds himself drawn into a conspiracy involving a powerful anti-gun lobbying senator, a baby farm and a firearms manufacturer. And yes, this is about as simple as things ever get.
This is a movie that thrives on the Rule Of Cool - it doesn't matter how idiotic or improbable (or outright impossible) it would be in real life, if it sounds cool, it's gonna work. So we have gun factory deathtraps that would require a ludicrous amount of luck and/or planning to set up; giving birth in under five minutes while under (and returning) heavy gunfire, then shooting the umbilical cord in lieu of cutting it; and, lest we forget, killing several people with carrots. And again, these are the least convoluted moments in the entire movie, it gets worse! It's somehow fitting that the end features the slowest quickdraw contest ever seen in cinema.
Shoot Em Up is really little more than an extended love letter to the action movie genre. Clive Owen delivers a suitably pithy one liner after every massacre, while Monica Bellucci plays... well... Monica Bellucci, this time as a lactating prostitute. Standout of the show is Paul Giamatti, better known for his role in the criminally never-picked-up pilot for Mike Mignola's Amazing Screw-On Head (around these here parts at least) who is, by turns, a complete bastard and the most understanding boss ever. There is a vague attempt to give the characters some depth, which either works well (Giamatti's dealings with his family) or really, really badly (Bellucci's revelation before the obligatory 'passionate pants-on hugging' scene). How much more fun (and in keeping with the spirit of the movie) would it have been for the subplot surrounding Smith's background to have ended with him saying 'By the way, that guy? Not me!"
Shoot Em Up really is a brainless action movie - as far as the plot goes - with enough violence to make even the most jaded 80s action hero smile, and enough firepower to leave a Tetragrammaton Cleric walking funny for a week, if he was capable of feeling anything. When it comes to the inventiveness and originality in its action sequences, you'd be hard pressed to find anything smarter.
93 Minutes
When Shoot Em Up was released in cinemas, it was to - at best - lukewarm reviews. 'It's too shallow and brutal' they said. 'Too many gunfights, too much violence, no depth whatsoever and an utter dearth of meaningful characterisation. Just action, action, action from one end to the other, 3/10.'
Never did it seem to occur to anyone that that was precisely the point.
The movie opens with Clive Owen, a man with a face hewn from finest teak, sitting on a bench. He looks mean and moody, the most dangerous hobo ever to stir his tea with a carrot. His name - of course - is Smith. When he sees a pregnant woman being chased by a man with a gun, he finds himself drawn into a conspiracy involving a powerful anti-gun lobbying senator, a baby farm and a firearms manufacturer. And yes, this is about as simple as things ever get.
This is a movie that thrives on the Rule Of Cool - it doesn't matter how idiotic or improbable (or outright impossible) it would be in real life, if it sounds cool, it's gonna work. So we have gun factory deathtraps that would require a ludicrous amount of luck and/or planning to set up; giving birth in under five minutes while under (and returning) heavy gunfire, then shooting the umbilical cord in lieu of cutting it; and, lest we forget, killing several people with carrots. And again, these are the least convoluted moments in the entire movie, it gets worse! It's somehow fitting that the end features the slowest quickdraw contest ever seen in cinema.
Shoot Em Up is really little more than an extended love letter to the action movie genre. Clive Owen delivers a suitably pithy one liner after every massacre, while Monica Bellucci plays... well... Monica Bellucci, this time as a lactating prostitute. Standout of the show is Paul Giamatti, better known for his role in the criminally never-picked-up pilot for Mike Mignola's Amazing Screw-On Head (around these here parts at least) who is, by turns, a complete bastard and the most understanding boss ever. There is a vague attempt to give the characters some depth, which either works well (Giamatti's dealings with his family) or really, really badly (Bellucci's revelation before the obligatory 'passionate pants-on hugging' scene). How much more fun (and in keeping with the spirit of the movie) would it have been for the subplot surrounding Smith's background to have ended with him saying 'By the way, that guy? Not me!"
Shoot Em Up really is a brainless action movie - as far as the plot goes - with enough violence to make even the most jaded 80s action hero smile, and enough firepower to leave a Tetragrammaton Cleric walking funny for a week, if he was capable of feeling anything. When it comes to the inventiveness and originality in its action sequences, you'd be hard pressed to find anything smarter.
Thursday, April 16
Monday, April 13
Rengoku II: Stairway to H.E.A.V.E.N.
PSP
14:52 Hours
I don't do it on purpose y'know. It's not like I actually go out of my way to track down really obscure games. I just sit and think 'I'm bored of all these cod-Tolkein RPGs set in the same pseudo-medieval realms. Why can't I find something in a more modern or futuristic setting?' Then, ten minutes later, I'm playing Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, and finding myself utterly addicted to a franchise that's offering me everything I've ever wanted in an RPG. It's not just role-playing games either. I go out looking for an FPS - arguably the most mainstream genre today, outside of sports - and walk back with two Russian games, one based loosely on a classic of impressionist cinema, the other one of the most crushingly depressing games you'll ever play. It's not deliberate, it's just that, more and more, I find myself having to venture off the beaten track to find games that scratch the gaming itches I'm afflicted with.
Take Rengoku II. The original, Rengoku: Tower of Purgatory was a launch title for the PSP. It sucked. The graphics were tiny and pathetic, the stages consisted of boxes with uninspired textures, the combat, while hiding a few good ideas, was laughable at best and with a name that literally translates to Purgatory: Tower of Purgatory, owner of the most redundant title since Manos: The Hands of Fate. Sure, the ideas were great, the story was fantastic, and the music was solid, but the execution was abysmal. In a better game, they would've been something special. Thankfully, someone at Hudsonsoft agreed and gave us Rengoku II, an infinite improvement on the original that delivers everything the first game promised, but failed to deliver.
I tried explaining the story to a friend of mine recently. Didn't go down too well.
Friend: So, tell me about this game.
Me: Okay, there's these combat androids inside this tower. They're relics of a war long since ended, but they're functionally immortal, so they can't be destroyed. So, mankind, in its infinite wisdom, puts them in these towers to endlessly fight for their amusement. Except mankind, by this point, is pretty much extinct. With me so far?
Friend: I think so...
Me: Good good. So, the droids are made of this kind of malliable resin called Elixier Skin, that lets them mold their limbs into weapons, like swords, revolvers, railguns, flamethrowers and the like. And when they're defeated, they simply melt down, only to reform some time later.
Friend: Uh-huh...
Me: Now, when the game opens, the main character, Gram, is showing signs of self-awareness. Which is unusual, because the droids - they're called ADAM units, by the way, did I mention that? - aren't supposed to have any real memories or anything. Yet every time he's defeating one of the floor guardians in the tower, he's recovering memories. So he climbs the tower trying to work out who he is, and why he knows the guardians so well. Also, the whole thing's based loosely on The Divine Comedy.
Friend: The band?
Me: No, the classical poem. All the levels are named after the various circles of Hell, there's a chick named Beatrice and a guy named Dante shows up on occasion, and some of the bosses have names similar to characters in it.
Friend: But there's robots.
Me: Well, obviously it's not a direct adaptation. That would, admittedly, be cool, but no, it's just influenced by it in terms of references and maybe atmosphere.
Friend: Meep-! *sound of a water balloon exploding quietly*
Me: What was that?
Friend: Either my brain or my suspension of disbelief, I'm afraid to look.
The story, as weird as it is, makes a lot more sense in-game, thankfully, rapidly turning from a quest for identity into nothing less than one of the most twisted love stories this side of Twilight. It's scant, drip-fed between chapters, but fantastic stuff that really deserves to be developed further. I'd kill for an expansion on the story alone, but sadly, no novels or manga were ever released alongside it in Japan.
As for the game itself, it's simple, but effective. In each floor, there is a map. In each map, there are several challenge rooms containing harder than normal enemies. Clear all the challenge rooms to open up the way to the next boss, kill the moss, move onto the next level, repeat. There's no out of place puzzles, barring a few one-way doors, no forced stealth sections, and absolutely no fetch quests or escort missions, just walk into a room, wipe out everything, then move on to the next. It's a distillation of the action genre as a whole, and something we could do with more of these days. After all, if the action is fun and polished enough to begin with, do you really need to break it up by shoehorning in elements that don't belong?
The combat is frantic. Imagine playing Devil May Cry 3 on fast forward, in the middle of a caffeine rush, while a relentlessly booming techno-industrial metal soundtrack pulverises your eardrums into sawdust. Things start off slow, giving you a chance to get your bearings on the first few stages. There, you'll only fight one reasonably weak enemy at a time. Though it's not long before you're taking on several at once, dodging and rolling desperately, waiting for an opportunity to slice the enemy from hell to breakfast. Though, crucially, you never feel overwhelmed. It's tough, make no mistake, but never to the point of frustration or where you're crying foul. This is because, in one of my favourite aspects of the game, anything the enemy can do, you can do as well.
Gram starts the game naked. In simple terms, this means you have no weapons equipped. First goal of the game is to rectify this post haste. Beating an enemy droid makes them drop one of two things. The first is Elixir Skin. This is used to increase your health, defence, and so on. The other thing they may drop is their equipment. Every enemy in the game, with the exception of the bosses, is made of several random pieces of equipment, and you can take and equip all of it. Not all at the same time, obviously, and the item they drop, if they even drop one, is chosen at random, but its possible to assemble a pretty formidable arsenal fairly swiftly.
Weapons can be equipped on the arms, head, torso or legs. Some weapons have restrictions on their placement - heavy weapons are often restricted to the torso, shields can only be placed on the arms, and legs are restricted mainly to defensive equipment such as speed and evasion boosters - but aside from such restrictions, there's nothing from stopping you assembling the deathbot of your dreams. Head-mounted revolver, a chainsaw on each arm and a Gatling gun sticking out your chest? You can do it. Dual-vibroblades twinned with a railgun and flamethrower? Works remarkably well. There's 300 different weapons, broken down into about 40 different types, with about four or five different levels of power for each class. The more powerful the weapon, the more likely it has additional effects: extra attacks, stun damage, knock down, launching the enemy for air combos, all are things to take into consideration when outfitting your robot.
As if that wasn't enough, weapons can also be powered up further through repeated use. Weapons have limited ammo/usage before being rendered unusable. Attacking with them repeatedly can increase their ammo count, raise the number of times special features are triggered, and lower the heat generated by their use. Y'see, every weapon raises the temperature of the body part its equipped to. If the temperature gets too high, it's rendered unusable until it cools down. Certain weapons, such as napalm grenades and heat swords, can further raise your temperature as well if successfully attacked by them. Of course, this works both ways, so there's nothing to stop you busting out a relatively weak flamethrower and leaving your foes unable to shoot, strike or even dodge properly.
To further sweeten an already impressive deal, the presentation is superb. While the first game featured such stunning locales as 'warehouse with dirt floor', 'slightly different warehouse with dirt floor' and 'shiny warehouse with shiny dirt floor', the programmers wisely decided a little more variation was in order. So while the game starts off in a shiny (though more graphically interesting) warehouse, it's not long before you're thrown into blast furnaces, industrial forest-like areas, cyber-gothic castles and an idyllic domed garden, filled with ponds and waterfalls in stark contrast to the havoc you've wrought over the last few stages, the whole thing feeling like the videogame adaptation of BLAME! we've always wanted, but never gotten. The weapon designs are similarly outstanding, just the right side of wrong, organic in ways that chainsaws and shotguns really shouldn't be. You wouldn't think they could successfully implement the body horror aesthetic in a game featuring virtually no humans whatsoever, but somehow, they found a way. The designs are reminiscent of the Guyver in many ways, and it's easy to cobble together the biomechanical monstrosity you've always wanted, and it helps that many of the weapons are already insectile to begin with. The fact that you can change your character's colour on the fly is a nice touch, the end result being that, before the end of the first stage, I'd accidentally put together a teal droid with swords for arms, an oddly familiar-looking chestplate and legs, and a wicked blade sprouting out of the top of my head. As I said, completely unintentional, but the moment of realisation was so worth it.
And finally, we have the music. As mentioned, its all fierce electronic beats, the perfect accompaniment to the tale of a droid trapped in an endlessly repeating hell. The second stage music is worthy of note, a dark piece that I can't get enough of, as is the challenge room music, a theme oddly reminiscent of Breed by Nirvana. Crowning moment has to be the final boss battle theme, a driving remix of the opening title theme. It's a damn shame that the OST seems unavailable anywhere online, as it's easily one of the best I've heard in a while.
Upon it's release, Rengoku II pretty much tanked. Perhaps the first game was still fresh in the memories of those that reviewed it, but somehow, the game managed to slip under the radars of virtually everyone out there. It's sad, because this is truely a game worthy of greater acclaim. It's Armoured Core-levels of customization, as reimagined by Tsutomu Nihei, with a soundtrack by Alec Empire, back off his meds, but more than that, it's the single biggest improvement to a series I've ever seen in my life.
There's a third game, End of the Century, supposedly on the way for the PS3. Hopefully, with this one, the series will finally receive the respect and admiration it deserved in this instalment.
PSP
14:52 Hours
I don't do it on purpose y'know. It's not like I actually go out of my way to track down really obscure games. I just sit and think 'I'm bored of all these cod-Tolkein RPGs set in the same pseudo-medieval realms. Why can't I find something in a more modern or futuristic setting?' Then, ten minutes later, I'm playing Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, and finding myself utterly addicted to a franchise that's offering me everything I've ever wanted in an RPG. It's not just role-playing games either. I go out looking for an FPS - arguably the most mainstream genre today, outside of sports - and walk back with two Russian games, one based loosely on a classic of impressionist cinema, the other one of the most crushingly depressing games you'll ever play. It's not deliberate, it's just that, more and more, I find myself having to venture off the beaten track to find games that scratch the gaming itches I'm afflicted with.
Take Rengoku II. The original, Rengoku: Tower of Purgatory was a launch title for the PSP. It sucked. The graphics were tiny and pathetic, the stages consisted of boxes with uninspired textures, the combat, while hiding a few good ideas, was laughable at best and with a name that literally translates to Purgatory: Tower of Purgatory, owner of the most redundant title since Manos: The Hands of Fate. Sure, the ideas were great, the story was fantastic, and the music was solid, but the execution was abysmal. In a better game, they would've been something special. Thankfully, someone at Hudsonsoft agreed and gave us Rengoku II, an infinite improvement on the original that delivers everything the first game promised, but failed to deliver.
I tried explaining the story to a friend of mine recently. Didn't go down too well.
Friend: So, tell me about this game.
Me: Okay, there's these combat androids inside this tower. They're relics of a war long since ended, but they're functionally immortal, so they can't be destroyed. So, mankind, in its infinite wisdom, puts them in these towers to endlessly fight for their amusement. Except mankind, by this point, is pretty much extinct. With me so far?
Friend: I think so...
Me: Good good. So, the droids are made of this kind of malliable resin called Elixier Skin, that lets them mold their limbs into weapons, like swords, revolvers, railguns, flamethrowers and the like. And when they're defeated, they simply melt down, only to reform some time later.
Friend: Uh-huh...
Me: Now, when the game opens, the main character, Gram, is showing signs of self-awareness. Which is unusual, because the droids - they're called ADAM units, by the way, did I mention that? - aren't supposed to have any real memories or anything. Yet every time he's defeating one of the floor guardians in the tower, he's recovering memories. So he climbs the tower trying to work out who he is, and why he knows the guardians so well. Also, the whole thing's based loosely on The Divine Comedy.
Friend: The band?
Me: No, the classical poem. All the levels are named after the various circles of Hell, there's a chick named Beatrice and a guy named Dante shows up on occasion, and some of the bosses have names similar to characters in it.
Friend: But there's robots.
Me: Well, obviously it's not a direct adaptation. That would, admittedly, be cool, but no, it's just influenced by it in terms of references and maybe atmosphere.
Friend: Meep-! *sound of a water balloon exploding quietly*
Me: What was that?
Friend: Either my brain or my suspension of disbelief, I'm afraid to look.
The story, as weird as it is, makes a lot more sense in-game, thankfully, rapidly turning from a quest for identity into nothing less than one of the most twisted love stories this side of Twilight. It's scant, drip-fed between chapters, but fantastic stuff that really deserves to be developed further. I'd kill for an expansion on the story alone, but sadly, no novels or manga were ever released alongside it in Japan.
As for the game itself, it's simple, but effective. In each floor, there is a map. In each map, there are several challenge rooms containing harder than normal enemies. Clear all the challenge rooms to open up the way to the next boss, kill the moss, move onto the next level, repeat. There's no out of place puzzles, barring a few one-way doors, no forced stealth sections, and absolutely no fetch quests or escort missions, just walk into a room, wipe out everything, then move on to the next. It's a distillation of the action genre as a whole, and something we could do with more of these days. After all, if the action is fun and polished enough to begin with, do you really need to break it up by shoehorning in elements that don't belong?
The combat is frantic. Imagine playing Devil May Cry 3 on fast forward, in the middle of a caffeine rush, while a relentlessly booming techno-industrial metal soundtrack pulverises your eardrums into sawdust. Things start off slow, giving you a chance to get your bearings on the first few stages. There, you'll only fight one reasonably weak enemy at a time. Though it's not long before you're taking on several at once, dodging and rolling desperately, waiting for an opportunity to slice the enemy from hell to breakfast. Though, crucially, you never feel overwhelmed. It's tough, make no mistake, but never to the point of frustration or where you're crying foul. This is because, in one of my favourite aspects of the game, anything the enemy can do, you can do as well.
Gram starts the game naked. In simple terms, this means you have no weapons equipped. First goal of the game is to rectify this post haste. Beating an enemy droid makes them drop one of two things. The first is Elixir Skin. This is used to increase your health, defence, and so on. The other thing they may drop is their equipment. Every enemy in the game, with the exception of the bosses, is made of several random pieces of equipment, and you can take and equip all of it. Not all at the same time, obviously, and the item they drop, if they even drop one, is chosen at random, but its possible to assemble a pretty formidable arsenal fairly swiftly.
Weapons can be equipped on the arms, head, torso or legs. Some weapons have restrictions on their placement - heavy weapons are often restricted to the torso, shields can only be placed on the arms, and legs are restricted mainly to defensive equipment such as speed and evasion boosters - but aside from such restrictions, there's nothing from stopping you assembling the deathbot of your dreams. Head-mounted revolver, a chainsaw on each arm and a Gatling gun sticking out your chest? You can do it. Dual-vibroblades twinned with a railgun and flamethrower? Works remarkably well. There's 300 different weapons, broken down into about 40 different types, with about four or five different levels of power for each class. The more powerful the weapon, the more likely it has additional effects: extra attacks, stun damage, knock down, launching the enemy for air combos, all are things to take into consideration when outfitting your robot.
As if that wasn't enough, weapons can also be powered up further through repeated use. Weapons have limited ammo/usage before being rendered unusable. Attacking with them repeatedly can increase their ammo count, raise the number of times special features are triggered, and lower the heat generated by their use. Y'see, every weapon raises the temperature of the body part its equipped to. If the temperature gets too high, it's rendered unusable until it cools down. Certain weapons, such as napalm grenades and heat swords, can further raise your temperature as well if successfully attacked by them. Of course, this works both ways, so there's nothing to stop you busting out a relatively weak flamethrower and leaving your foes unable to shoot, strike or even dodge properly.
To further sweeten an already impressive deal, the presentation is superb. While the first game featured such stunning locales as 'warehouse with dirt floor', 'slightly different warehouse with dirt floor' and 'shiny warehouse with shiny dirt floor', the programmers wisely decided a little more variation was in order. So while the game starts off in a shiny (though more graphically interesting) warehouse, it's not long before you're thrown into blast furnaces, industrial forest-like areas, cyber-gothic castles and an idyllic domed garden, filled with ponds and waterfalls in stark contrast to the havoc you've wrought over the last few stages, the whole thing feeling like the videogame adaptation of BLAME! we've always wanted, but never gotten. The weapon designs are similarly outstanding, just the right side of wrong, organic in ways that chainsaws and shotguns really shouldn't be. You wouldn't think they could successfully implement the body horror aesthetic in a game featuring virtually no humans whatsoever, but somehow, they found a way. The designs are reminiscent of the Guyver in many ways, and it's easy to cobble together the biomechanical monstrosity you've always wanted, and it helps that many of the weapons are already insectile to begin with. The fact that you can change your character's colour on the fly is a nice touch, the end result being that, before the end of the first stage, I'd accidentally put together a teal droid with swords for arms, an oddly familiar-looking chestplate and legs, and a wicked blade sprouting out of the top of my head. As I said, completely unintentional, but the moment of realisation was so worth it.
And finally, we have the music. As mentioned, its all fierce electronic beats, the perfect accompaniment to the tale of a droid trapped in an endlessly repeating hell. The second stage music is worthy of note, a dark piece that I can't get enough of, as is the challenge room music, a theme oddly reminiscent of Breed by Nirvana. Crowning moment has to be the final boss battle theme, a driving remix of the opening title theme. It's a damn shame that the OST seems unavailable anywhere online, as it's easily one of the best I've heard in a while.
Upon it's release, Rengoku II pretty much tanked. Perhaps the first game was still fresh in the memories of those that reviewed it, but somehow, the game managed to slip under the radars of virtually everyone out there. It's sad, because this is truely a game worthy of greater acclaim. It's Armoured Core-levels of customization, as reimagined by Tsutomu Nihei, with a soundtrack by Alec Empire, back off his meds, but more than that, it's the single biggest improvement to a series I've ever seen in my life.
There's a third game, End of the Century, supposedly on the way for the PS3. Hopefully, with this one, the series will finally receive the respect and admiration it deserved in this instalment.
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