3/5/23-3/11-23
Phantasy Star Portable
Every now and then I go back to an older video game and I’m surprised to see how well it holds up, sometimes still being ahead of its time. Phantasy Star Portable is not one of those games. I remember having a good time with hit when it originally came out for the PSP, but I was also a big weeb who loved everything anime and manga at the time, so maybe take all that with a grain of salt. I’ll say the one big advantage about playing it this time around was that I could map the d-pad to the right stick, so at least I started it out on the right foot.
To break it down a bit: PSP is a spin-off of Phantasy Star Universe, the successor to the much more well-loved Phantasy Star Online, both of which are MMOs. As such, a good deal of the systems and settings were brought in straight from PSU. There are items you can’t ever sell, but can only trade with other players, and you can’t ever completely pause the game. Again, this is something that might make sense in a game you can only play online, but when it’s implemented in a game that’s primarily single player, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Of course, there is also an ad-hoc multiplayer mode to I, and these design decisions make more sense when you’re playing multiplayer. Of course, playing on an emulated device nearly fourteen years after its release means that multi-player is totally out of the question. So I’m just stuck with all these items I can’t use or get rid of and I have to plan as much as I can beforehand on each mission. It’s not a huge problem, but these sorts of minor annoyances pile up and become a detriment to the game.
While I can forgive the heavy emphasis on multiplayer. There are certain things that just seem odd and confusing. While ther are usually infoboxes and tutorials for whenever a new mechanic is introduced, there’s a whole lot more that just isn’t. There are different classes you can play as, and can chagne them at will at a certain point, but how you level up your character class and what that actually does isn’t obvious. A similar problem happens with the upgrade systems. As much as you can upgrade items multiple times, it becomes obvious after a while that you can’t keep your favorite weapon from the beginning to the end of the series unless you really love to waste time on killing enemies. I want to keep the rose whip, dammit!
Even if these things were fixed or addressed, it doesn't make the core gameplay any better. The action is pretty brain-dead, again, very obviously carried over from PSU’s MMO design. It makes sense that PSU had simple combat, most of an MMO is playing these games with other people online, and grinding is a big part of that. But when you’re making a stand-alone game, I found it hard to keep myself engaged with the game. You can attack, you can heal, and that’s about it. You can’t dodge, parry, nor block any incoming attack. I wasn’t expecting a Devil May Cry game, but I would’ve like at least a little more depth than what I got. The one innovation that it does make is a timing-based hits: if you hit a follow-up attack at the exact right time, you can get a damage bonus on your next hit, making combos ending with special moves pretty powerful. This sounds fine in theory, but in implementation, it was often difficult to get the timing down right for every weapon, and (I admit this might be a problem with emulation, but) there were often dropped inputs when I was trying to pull off a combo, not only depriving me of a DPS bonus, but completely halting my combo, and leaving me open to attack. The only way to know when to attack is watching the animation finish, or to use the baffling timing circle on a screen that emits outward and doesn’t meet up with anything. If you had a circle going inward towards another circle, I would understand the rhythm, bu this doesn’t work nearly as well.
It doesn’t help that the areas constantly fluctuate from being far too closed-off and narrow, —making it easy to get cornered and overwhelmed— to wide, way-too-open areas where it’s difficult to tell where to go next. It’d be easier if there were a quick way to bring up the map, but as it stands I found myself accidentally backtracking into a loading screens several times. No matter how many times I repeated a mission, I still found myself getting lost. And, again, as a game that models itself after an MMO, I was revisiting areas and story missions to grind my XP up. The Mission-based structure of it all belies its repetitiveness more than an open world ever would. Sure, it’s kind of a pain to have to keep going into tartarus to kill enemies, but it doesn’t feel nearly as closed off as these missions would. A good game would at least five you a decent story to help keep players invested in the game. That is not what they’ve done here.
The story in PSP is abysmal. You’re part of the space-FBI that’s investigating local fauna mutating into dangerous creatures and uncovering who is responsible for it. Really though, PSP is about the character of Vivienne, a newly-created CAST (a robot person and one of the four different races to choose from), who has the latest technology and is special because she can be more emotional. Or something. This idea doesn’t hold much water as you’ll meet various CAST characters throughout the game who seem to have fully-developed personalities and emotions, so how is Vivienne special? At any rate, it’s up to the player character to help develop Vivienne’s personality correctly. Basically, every now and then you’ll get a conversation option. I have no idea if your response have any impact on the story, but I’m going to say it absolutely doesn’t. Most of the time Vivienne will say something racist and you’ll have to tell her to stop being racist. It’s not a complicated story, and it’s something that’s been told hundreds of times before, both much more well-done, and much worse. It’s outstandingly stupid for a few reasons, but I think the fact the writers didn’t bother considering that the player would choose to be anything other than human is a flagrant error on their part. Why is Vivienne talking so openly about how surprised she is by what Beasts can be like when I’ve playing as one for at least an hour or two beforehand? None of it really makes sense, and the brief character scenes between missions didn’t do anything to help endear me to the story or the characters. I found myself speeding the game up to get through it (thank god for emulation).
Again, the big problem is that, more than anything else, this is a game of its time and place, and it was never designed to be played more than a few years out from its release date. It’s hard to be mad at it, per se, but it certainly isn’t something to be lauded.
Cunk on Earth
If you’ve ever watched Charlie Brooker’s “wipe” series of television specials (which, if you live in a America, there’s no reason you would have unless you’re a complete freak (like me)), you’ll not only likely be disappointed by his hit TV series Black Mirror, but you’ll also be familiar with Philomena Cunk. To catch people up, Cunk is a character played by Diane Morgan who serves as a parody of empty-headed celebrity TV presenters and often appeared in talking head segments on Brooker’s various series which eventually led to her getting a few spin-off shows, Cunk on Earth being the latest.
This time, Cunk is determined to summarize the entire history of humankind in only six episodes by summarizing things inaccurately and talking to different experts in a given field. What makes this work is that Morgan not only plays Cunk as a bit of a moron, but one that’s certain she already knows everything. It’s not just posing stupid questions, but actually telling the experts that they’re wrong about something because of something her mate Paul told her. Even when she’s proven definitively wrong in a way that’s embarrassing, Morgan just plays it off as if she’s still an expert and just keep going.
It’s rarely ridiculous enough to be a Borat interview, but you can tell that at some points the experts actually pissed off by her confident and incorrect assertions and ignorance while still desperately trying to not let on how upset they really are. Others are more than willing to play along with what she’s doing and it leads to fun moments where an expert in medieval literature seriously considers whether or not Acid Jazz is better than the concept of the written word as a whole and a cold war expert comparing the conflict to Street Fighter II.
It’s not incredible, but it’s still a good deal of fun and I guarantee that you’ll learn a lot. Especially about the song “Pump Up the Jam” by Technotronic.
Crows Are White
Ugh. This could’ve been a lot more interesting than it was.
We’re told at the outset that this is setting out to document some of the practices of the Tendai Buddhist monks, and in particular, is looking to interview Kamahori, a monk who is in the middle of a the Kaihogyo trial, an intense seven years of walking around 30 km a night around Mt. Hiei which will end in him being considered a Buddha (which oddly the narrator, Ahsem Nadeem, keeps referring to it as being a living Buddha, which betrays a deep misunderstanding and ignorance of the tenants of Buddhism). Early into the film, Ahsem Nadeem (the director) starts to ask questions like “Do you have any regrets?” and “Have you ever fallen in love?” to the monks which immediately had my eyes rolling. I was suspicious from the start where his narration is about what a great liar he is. This seems like a set-up for a good ol’-fashioned F for Fake-’em-up, but alas, it never gets close to being that interesting.
Pretty quickly, things go off the rails as Nadeem is ejected from the temple after leaving his cellphone’s ringer on during an intense ritual prayer (he has the default iPhone ringtone, who does that?). He then turns the camera back on himself and admits that the reason he came to Mt. Hiei is because he is engaged to a woman in Los Angeles who is not Muslim and doesn’t know how to to dell his devout parents living back in Ireland. This is when we learn the movie is really about Nadeem trying to square the circle about his faith in Islam and having to hide is his wife of three years from his parents.
This is something that could be an interesting opportunity for drama, but Nadeem makes a huge mistake and overestimates just how interesting he actually is as a person. As much as Nadeem has inserted himself into his documentary, other than the basic facts of his life, I couldn’t tell you a thing about him. Nadeem doesn’t bother trying to make the viewer invested in him at all. Why do we want Nadeem to succeed? It would make his wife happy and take stress off his life, sure, but why should I care? Do you really expect me to be so invested in the concept of “true love” to be interested in what happens? I guess so. His wife is barely a character in the film, only ever showing up to express how frustrated she is with her husband. Oddly, no other people in Nadeem’s life aside from his parents and wife feature into this personal narrative. He has a few sisters, where are they? What would they think? What about his friends? What about his wife’s family? Doesn’t matter, it’s all about him.
Luckily these boring parts are broken up a bit by Nadeem’s adventures with Ryushin, a low-ranking monk who does calligraphy at the temple. Nadeem finds Ryushin fascinating because he’s a monk who loves heavy metal (at one point they go to a Slayer concert together), deserts, and aspires to be a sheep farmer in New Zealand. This monk is both devoted to his religion, but lives a modern life and has interests and hobbies! How scandalous? Again, this would’ve been more novel if it wasn’t something I already knew about. I lived in Japan in my senior year of high school, and even the people who had been there before have stories about monks with cellphones or luxury cars or what have you. Generally speaking most of them live modern lives. That being said, Ryushin is definitely the best part of the movie. He’s funny, charming, and likable. I wanted to see him succeed, and was generally interested in him as a person.
But like I said, the movie is not about Ryushin, it’s about our director’s inability to tell his parents that his wife is going to hell. The movie drags on like nothing else when this starts being brought up, and it never gets interesting. There are long stretches that focus on him and his wife, and there’s a three-year gap between his first visit to Japan and the follow-up. Even the actual confession, while it is somewhat tense, isn’t nearly the big dramatic revelation it’s built up to be. While it doesn’t quite go the way you might expect initially, it gets to that point at the end. It really feels like Nadeem is just kind of an idiot, and could’ve easily avoided this if he bothered telling his parents about his relationship in the first place.
It’s a huge frustration of a movie. You can tell that Nadeem is has a some talent; there are some beautiful shots in the movie and Ryushin is a great character. But the whole thing is let down by the insistence on focusing the movie back on himself and losing the focus that he could’ve had.
Dream on Leon
A short about a dog
dreaming. But not about anything interesting. As someone who doesn’t’
care about dogs, this wasn’t for me.
Stained Skin
Two women work at some sort of factory working with cloth, and while their circumstances are never explicitly stated, the story that one of the women tells the other one is a clear stand-in for their present circumstances. They’re never harshly disciplined, nor do they seem to be doing hard labor, but it seems clear that neither of them are able to leave the factory. The story within the story is told with some beautiful animation, and refreshingly, doesn’t have nearly the definitive end that these things tend to have. Giving the audience closure is cowardice.
High Noon on the Waterfront
Here’s a fun fact that’s left out of this short: Elia Kazan was a fucking snake. Ostensibly this is the stories of both Elia Kazan and Carl Foreman during the McCarthy hearing, told through their own films: High Noon and On the Waterfront respectively. Except, no, that’s not what it is at all. It’s Edward Norton and John Tuturo doing narration as both Foreman and Kazan occasionally intercut with clips from either film. Kazan talks about how much he hated the communists and defending why he named names, whereas Foreman more laments the cowardice of Hollywood capitulating to the red scare. This all serves to say “Hey, weren’t both sides equally bad?” This infuriates me. The idea that Elia Kazan being called a rat (correct) while still having a career in Hollywood while Foreman almost ending his career are both of equal consequential measure is just absurd. This is more than anything a monument to both-sidesism and it’s repulsive for being that.
The Originals
The second I saw the logo for The New Yorker I knew I wouldn’t like this. So, a couple of hipsters who used to live in Brooklyn went back to interview their old-school Italian landlord and his childhood friends and animated it and… well, that’s it. It’s all about how great it was to grow up in Brooklyn and how things have sure changed (young people are RUDE and only care about freakin’ MINECRAFT). It’s kind of cute, but not terribly interesting. Only in New York, baby!
Adjustments
An elementary school-aged boy is ostracized for being girly by his schoolmates and his father, but then he decides to live as a girl at the very end and that’s it. It’s not bad, necessarily, but it’s pretty simple, and another film about transness that focuses entirely on how much our main character suffers. Also, after living deciding to live openly as a girl, we don’t see how it affects any of our main character’s relationships. It feels oddly incomplete. I guess there’s the added novelty of it being set in Iran, but even then it doesn’t’ really change my feelings towards it. It’s technically well-made, I’ll give it that.
An Irish Goodbye
This was alright. It’s about two brothers in Ireland who are dealing with their mother’s recent death: Turlough, who lives in London and Lorcan, who has stayed in the Irish countryside on the family farm, and has Downs Syndrome. Turlough is set to go back to London and Lorcan is going supposed to go live with their aunt, but Lorcan insists on doing all the things on their mother’s bucket list using her urn before Turlough can leave. It can be funny, it can be a little heartwarming, and it’s not too whimsical to be unenjoyable. Completely fine short.
Homesick by MATRiXXMAN
Good stuff.
Thank You for Letting Me Be Myself by Omar S
Lovely!
V by Cro-Magnon
Weird and jazzy. I think I’m coming to the realization that I may sort of like jazz. At least this is electronic, so I’m entirely gone yet.
Alien by Larry Heard
Got some real Tangerine Dreams vibes off this, in a good way.
My La(te)st Album by Alexander Robotnick
In a weird way it feels like a throwback to early electronic music (I could swear I heard a Moog in there somewhere), but it’s much more clashy and weird than that would be. I love it.
TB Resuscitation by Hardfloor
White Light by Groove Armada
United Acid Emirates by Ceephax Acid Crew
Has a wonderful Sega Genesis feeling to the whole thing. Loved it.
Evolver by The Grid
The Journey Man by Goldie
This was a lot more smooooooth than I was expecting. If I was some kind of asshole, I would call it R&Breakbeat. Pretty good jungle stuff, and pretty chill.
Decksandrumsandrockandroll 20th Anniversary by The Propellerheads
Did you ever why the 90s were like that? Well, here’s an answer. Lots of 60s and 70s inspired grooves that seem like updated spy music, especially “History Repeating” which features Shirley Bassey.
Goodbye Country (Hello Nightclub) by Groove Armada
Flat Beat by Mr. Oizo
How does Flat Eric have such a nice office?
Endtroducing… by DJ Shadow
Great!
Existenzmaxumum – EP by Datassette
Good stuff! Again, sounds sort Sega gensis-y in a good way.