A Tribute To Satoru Iwata

One of the great microchip alchemists of our time is dead. No. More than that. Satoru Iwata might have started as a tinkering programmer, weaving vast formulas and concepts throughout various experiences over the history of Nintendo. Then something else happened entirely. He became a businessman, the President. The face of this company that launched a thousand words about alchemy and Valya and destruction, a second-in-command to Lady Capitalism. Here, as Jim Sterling put it, was a man in charge of one of the most popular and powerful video game companies on this planet... and yet he was not afraid to have a little fun. To wear Luigi hats, to hold bananas on camera, to have a dancing Muppet of himself made in his absence. He was a fun man who livened up Nintendo Directs or E3 announcements... and his legacy will live on. Not just in the company that he helmed to massive profits, but in the games he worked on. Let's take stock in some of them, in tribute of him. Here are the ways in which Satoru Iwata, a tinkerer from Japan who I never met, changed my life for the better.

ARCANA

My cheat sheet says Iwata was a "technical advisor" on this one. I suppose that means that, as a HAL Laboratory employee, he oversaw other programmers and helped them crunch out difficult programming tricks. Arcana, then, is HAL's take on a dungeon crawler. It's very linear and it has its problems, but it was my first real introduction to the genre. Having a guide book with all the maps certainly helped, too. It isn't perfect, but I love it. I was going to suggest it for the next SnS Plays, which is where I also got the idea of playing The Final Fantasy Legend. Maybe we can still do it.

KIRBY'S ADVENTURE

Iwata produced this one, and a slew of other Kirby games. Kirby as a series just exudes charm... but this one? This is the finest moment that the NES had in its post-SNES days. It's beautiful, innovative, technically impressive... and then it also had to inspire the old Nintendo blog, huh? This, combined with two people getting engaged, are what really sent me tumbling into the Gonzo Age of the Nintendo blog, with the Goddess Valya lighting up the world with her grace. I paid tribute to the one source of inspiration in those engaged kids, and now that Iwata is gone, I am only now just paying tribute to another. Maybe, in some distant land in a 1993 long past, he came up with that cool spinning Butter Building trick. I'd like to believe that.

DONKEY KONG COUNTRY SERIES

Well, now I pay my proper respects. This is getting into Super Nintendo Project territory, but this is no magical exorcism. This is gratitude to a ghost. The Donkey Kong Country games were a cornerstone of my childhood. My SNES was packed in with the first game, and I remember Christmas morning... being WOWED by the amazing graphics being played on my television screen. After staring at Bayou Billy and Simon's Quest for five years, it was like looking at the face of God. It took me a week to beat it. That's nothing compared to what happened when the sequel came out. Donkey Kong Country 2 is a contender for my absolute favorite game of all time. Something about its platforming, its clever use of stage hazards, and its collectables being plentiful but not overwhelming sold me on it. Totally and completely. The third one... well, it's my least favorite. It's the start of Rareware being more obsessed with collecting all the things, and I never liked Kiddy Kong. Still, I had fun, and I got everything in that game in a pre-Internet world. Those three games are a solid series with its ups and downs, and Iwata was right there at the end of them all. Executive Producer. Thank you.

EARTHBOUND/POKEMON GOLD AND SILVER

The soul of Earthbound is the result of Shigesato Itoi. The chassis, the machine code body that the soul pilots? Iwata and friends. I have also lumped in Pokemon Gold/Silver here, because both of these are examples of how Iwata was a goddamned wizard when it came to programming. Legends say he worked out most of the kinks in Earthbound, and made the game actually work... to say nothing of Gold and Silver. Their big surprise claim to fame, the revisitation of the lands of Pokemon Red and Blue? That would not have been possible without Iwata coming in and creating elaborate compression algorithms. He made Johto compact, code-wise, so that Kanto could be slotted in. One of the secret joys of my childhood, and one of the hidden joys discovered via my days as a teenage ROM fiend. Iwata, behind the code of both. Wow.

I think that's all I need to say. Certainly, according to this page, he tinkered and worked on so many other things. Hell, he's even credited for working on the Famicom Mini port of Ghosts n Goblins. The man's even involved in one of my favorite hard game series. Dare I say that Iwata is a Nintendo god in his own modest way? He is the secret history, his name in the credits of many of Nintendo's greats. The threads of fate cross between Kirby, between Donkey Kong, between Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem and Star Fox and Mother and Yoshi. I could go on forever about all of the games he's worked on that have touched me personally... but it's here I leave Satoru Iwata to rest. In 55 years of life on planet Earth, you helped create computer video games that resonate with a billion video game players across the world. I can't thank you enough for it. I suppose I'll close by talking about Mother, since Shigesato Itoi posted a lovely farewell to you. Satoru Iwata did not work on Mother... but just a few weeks before he died, it finally arrived on our shores. Earthbound Beginnings exists now. I close with two things. Lyrics from Catherine Warwick... and this image of a rainbow over Nintendo HQ in Kyoto.

'Cause I still believe in miracles,
I swear I've seen a few.
And the time will surely come
When you can see my point of view.
I believe in second chances,
And that's why I believe in you!

Rest in peace, Mr. Iwata.

Ten Years Ago: Tales Of Symphonia

(Hi! This has nothing to do with NES, sorry! Instead it's me being an old nostalgic fart and thinking about things that happened ten years ago. Please enjoy me remembering old Gamecube RPGs. Thanks.)

I never got to beat Tales of Symphonia.

We are casting the net back quite a ways here. Wikipedia, which did not exist back in the time I'm thinking of, says that Tales of Symphonia came out over here in July 2004. I would have been on the Summer Works Program, doing odd jobs for my town council. Cutting down overgrowth around playgrounds on hot summer days, planting the first seeds of what would eventually become my NaNoWriMo winning empire. And, oh yes, playing multiplayer Gamecube games with my pals. There was Super Smash Bros Melee, which I always got creamed at but still enjoyed. Then came the glut of FPS games, which... I was even more terrible at. Those three other pals I played with, the crew, they were all army cadets. One of 'em even did join the army. They knew their way around the militaristic. I did not, and as such my soldier or my British secret agent was frequently headshotted. That's fine. I had yet to discover my latent talent as a Hard Game Beater, a Beast In The Shape Of A Man. That was fine. What I ended up becoming good at, or had the most fun with, rather, was Tales of Symphonia.

It would have been the end of my Summer Works when I first heard about it. That lovely lady who captivated my late nights on dial-up Internet mentioned it. Said it was awesome, as I recall. Who knows, it's ten years ago. The saga of me and that lovely lady spread on through the rest of 2004, but that has nary a lick to do with Symphonia. The holidays approach. I return on Christmas break, and now my friends have Symphonia. I see the final boss battle, without context. A translucent winged boy attempts to murder a party of four as they battle, a kinetic frenzy of rhythm, positioning, and panache. Game looks pretty cool. Matt made a good purchase here. It's not the last good purchase he'll make, either. Meanwhile, bad decisions have left me mighty high and stranded for most of 2005. Ding dong, the new year approaches and I am banished to the dark reaches of small-town Newfoundland. This is oddly cyclic, as the end of 2005 will lead to much the same thing. Again, that saga has naught to do with Tales. The upshot? Lots of time to spend playing video games with my pals, after their own school times are said and done. Most of it is spent on the weekends. The same fun times. Smash Bros. Shooter games. Card games, who could forget those? Then comes the decision to replay Tales of Symphonia, with the four of us. That's the exciting bit. It is an RPG where multiple folks can join in, a souped-up Secret of Mana for the Gamecube age. The PS2 may have a billion Japanese RPGs, but here and now? The Gamecube gets its best one.

I take my character selection. Matt is the leader, Lloyd Irving with his dual blades. Blazey takes on summoner Sheena. I forgot who our third pal took, but I went with Genis. The small child who casts the spells that makes the peoples fall down. I blame Brian Clevinger and his comics for turning me into a mage-lover when it comes to these sorts of games. Hurling all sorts of things arcane and elemental at your foes. What's not to like? I took to my role well. While the others rushed in, melee ready and hacking away with their Sonic Thrusts and Demon Fangs, I stood back. I charged and concentrated, and then unleashed my power. The rest of it, the out of battle exploration and plot twists and whatnot, I only watched unfold. The leader piloted Lloyd through all of that. I was only needed for battle, and I assisted in battle well. I liked this role. I liked being a support. I enjoyed watching the tale, and was eager to beat the game.

It never happened. Matt made another good purchase in the spring of 2005. Resident Evil 4. Another achievement for the Gamecube, sure. I remember watching the opening cutscene with them all. Everyone was amazed at how good it looked, but I scoffed that it was just pre-rendered. Then the game started, and it looked the same. You were playing a game that looked that good. Holy shit. We petrified poor Blazey. I got him to shoot the lake. Matt got him with the Regenetators. It was a game they all flocked to, and I loved to see...but it wasn't Tales of Symphonia. We never picked up our file again, and now it is lost to time. As good as Resident Evil 4 is, I am inclined to resent it a little for taking away the climax to the RPG for me. Ten years ago, we were playing a lovely little RPG that I enjoyed playing a passive role in. Survival horror came and took it away. What a shame.

If we look further ahead into the future, we see some fun things. Blazey getting me a copy of Resident Evil 4 for my birthday, once I owned my very own Gamecube. On a later visit to his new home, he spied a copy of Tales of Symphonia for 15 bucks. He snagged it first. I was inclined to be a bit envious at him for this, but only for a while. Matt returned home for Christmas, having sold all of his Gamecube collection for new hi-fidelity Xbox 360 things. All but one. "Merry Christmas", he said to me, handing me Tales of Symphonia. The same copy that we had played all those years ago, and now I own it. Tragically, though, I still have not beaten it. My passive magic skills are naught in single player. I lack the know-how to use Lloyd properly. The end of the game still eludes me. I eventually did get a sort of catharsis, however. Summer 2012. Over three weeks, the three of us were back again. On the Playstation 3 we went non-stop, playing Tales of Graces F. Me as Pascal, a lady with fabulous hair and magic power for days. We did it. We actually beat the damned thing. It was glorious, and it was fantastic... but it still wasn't Tales of Symphonia.

Maybe someday, I will get to beat it.

Sexy Fun With The Socks Make People Sexy Sockscast!

Before I started this blog space, I wrote plenty of words for a site called Socks Make People Sexy. During its heyday of regular guest-contributated content, I submitted god knows how many amateur wafflings about old video games and whatnot. For those who haven't seen those raw writings of mine, here you go. Not counting the multiple things I've written on their forums, some of which I've cross-posted over here. Others I haven't! That's not important right now. What is important is Socks Make People Sexy, curated by a lovely lady named Polly. She's run the site out of pocket for ten years now, and recently she began a biweekly podcast where her and two other regular SMPS members talk about video games they've played and other fun things they've partaken in! Sometimes they have guests on the "hamper seat", so to speak... and I got my chance to do so around two months ago. Sockscast Episode 14, with 3 hours or so of me with Polly and pals talkin' up video games.  It was an incredible time, to say the least.

Just last night, to celebrate 10 years of SMPS, Polly and friends hosted a live version of the Sockscast! 7 hours straight of podcasting, swapping in various guests for a half hour or so each to talk up whatever they liked and join in on the festivities. You can find the massive 7 hour audio files right over here.  I show up at around the 90 minute mark or so in part 1, and talk about my own history with the site while getting somewhat praised for writing esoteric Nintendo god mythology over here. Point is, the SMPS was an important turning point for me writing words on the Internet, and I cannot thank Polly enough for her grace in... gracing her own blogspace with my unfettered and unpolished words about how Mega Man 6 isn't all that good.

Here's to 10 more years of Sockscast, and here's to the Pitchfork that's prodded me about this blog that's really made me want to get back to writing for it.

The Super Nintendo Project

If you look up top at the header, you'll see the name Phil Sandifer. Phil is the very nice and smart man who started this Nintendo Project. He then put it on the back burner in favor of writing about Doctor Who, and then a magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, but also a lot of Game of Thrones or something? Hey, I can't harsh him for putting Nintendo game blogging on the back seat. I'm guilty of the same. Anyway, thanks to his Patreon, he's started something new which I feel obligated to link on this space since it's related to the mission statement of this place; The Super Nintendo Project.

His first entry is, of course, on Super Mario World. Rather than go through alphabetically, he's taking an approach that has snapshots of the history of the console and landmark games. This is smart because then he doesn't have to talk about 45 baseball and golf games. What's also notable is that, on social media and whatnot, he repeatedly describes the Super Nintendo Project as "a magical ritual to destroy Gamergate". Which, you know, I'm really curious to see how that pans out. In fact, I'm throwing whatever arcane power this cultivated blog space has into that bit of alchemical nonsense. Mr. Sandifer, you may consider the full power of Valya, Peko The Destructor, the Dread Beast GREED, Pure Platforming, and any other magical property I brought into being during my time on this blog to be part of your ritual. Use their power wisely, and boost the energies of your own liminal space.

For the rest of you, you can read the first post of the Super Nintendo Project right here. I do have a thing planned to write that is not about Nintendo games, but we'll see whenever I get around to it. Enjoy the ritual, and please begin your social justice paganist chanting now. 

Obscure Alchemy For Queen And Country (Rock Boshers DX: Director's Cut)

(It's the full disclosure fairy, again! The computer game I am about to write about was given to me by the #GamesMatter Twitter account. I got a game, and in exchange I get to write about how I liked it and whatnot. Really, I would have written about this game anyway. Because I had a thing or two to say, as you'll see. Let's get into it!)

You know something? NES nostalgia pieces may have run their course. It's odd of me to say that, considering the fact that this is the bloody Nintendo Project Resumed, but one gets tired of the same old same old. That being said, amazing things have been done with NES nostalgia. Amazing things, but also dark forces. I said as much when I talked about Shovel Knight way back when, but loving tributes to old video games are a sort of alchemy. You can get a perfect Philosopher's Stone like Shovel Knight, which expands and improves upon the formulae perfected over the life of a little grey toaster box... or the putrefaction that was the Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures. That one's a shambling homunculus, a Hyde prone to violent outbursts... and yet it gets away with it. SO REWARDING AND SO NINTENDO HARD, JUST LIKE THE GOOD OLD DAYS. Absolutely not, but this is not our intent. Our intent is to zoom the lens out, and ponder something. Why have we let the Nintendo  alchemists overwhelm this field of electronic equivalent exchange? Where are the Genesis madmen with their volatile blast processing vials? The patrons of the Master System and Game Gear, the little system that could? Show me some love for your Wonderswans, your Neo Geo Pockets, your Commodore 64s. Off the top of my head, there are two of these unconventional alchemical love letters to the obscure systems. The first is La-Mulana, a wildly successful homage to the MSX days in its original form. The re-release I have just replaces all the MSX tapes with laptop programs. Something has been lost. The second is what I finished playing a few days ago; Rock Boshers DX, from an alchemy outfit called Tikipod. Their goal? Bring back the ZX Spectrum.

In the 1980s, Japan was a hazy island that the video gaming children knew little about. In 1983 it produced a red and black box that became a grey box when it came to North America and took us all by storm. We know this song well. Over on another hazy island, one called the United Kingdom... a different sort of beast emerged. The ZX Spectrum, a decidedly low-tech but affordable computer machine. Seven colors, the minimum of graphics and sound, but with a "do-it-yourself" mentality that took the island by storm. One need only witness a program like Manic Miner to see the oddity of the Spectrum. The shrill and harsh digitized classical music, the simplistic platforming, the unforgiving nature... hell, England ate it up. I don't know why, seeing as I was not around for this, but it was a scene. The ZX Spectrum was popular, and it grew its following. Rareware, the fellows who would entertain my childhood and frustrate my adulthood, got their start on this thing. The Spectrum happened, and 30 years later Tikipod here have capitalized on it. Their alchemy, much like Shovel Knight's, takes the base and expands on it. At over 100 megabytes, it easily dwarfs an average Spectrum game. The point is that they did their best to remain faithful. It looks and sounds like a Spectrum game, even if I was playing it on a handheld that would have blown my mind 15 years ago, let alone 30. They take the formulae, and work with every trick in their playbook to make a fantastic evolution; the next new Spectrum game. Then they go further, and make things oddly fitting. It all begins with a faux Spectrum loading screen, but once that's done the real magic begins. The true power emerges, and here we are. It is 2015 and 1983 at once, and we are playing Rock Boshers DX.

At its core, Rock Boshers DX is a twin stick shooter. One moves with an analog stick, and fires in another. This created a problem, I must admit, on my Vita. The itty bitty analog sticks meant that shooting right or diagonally right was difficult. In the heat of the moment, this caused misfires and frustrations. Were I playing on PC, I get the feeling that this would be less of an issue... but I cast my lot with the Vita, and this is what I got. Let us focus more on what Rock Boshers is. It is a double 80's nostalgia piece. There is the obvious nostalgia for the 1980s and the Spectrum, but the game's setting is no less than the 1880s. You play as Queen Victoria, on a steampunk adventure to Mars to blast at turrets, tanks, and zombies in order to stop a man in a top hat from taking over the British Empire with his absolute power. So, we're at the very heart of alchemy itself, then. The iconography of the Victorian era, with its playable character as the namesake of that era, no less! These are the stakes we play for, and we play a difficult but mostly fair game. The action is fast-paced but also dangerous. Death can come quickly, and often. Still, one learns how to work. Shoot and move. Run in laps. Bait out homing missiles and equip new weapons to survive. Oh, and don't forget to take a break for tea and scones. They'll unlock things.

Of course, in the end, we cannot escape the gravity of those NES alchemists. I just learned about this. The Steam version has an option to play it in 8-bit console style mode. The NES formulas snuck into the brew somewhere down the line. Not on the Vita, as far as I can tell... and to be honest, I prefer it that way. We've had enough NES nostalgia, as I've said. There are steps in the alternate directions, beyond Rock Boshers DX. La-Mulana in its original form invokes the MSX. Games like John Thyer's Fugitive pull forth power from the original Game Boy. Daniel Linssen's Roguelight is a shade of red away from being a Game Boy game played on the Game Boy Color, in default palette. This is good, but I wish to see more. Invoke the Master System and Game Gear. Invoke the Neo Geo Pocket, the Wonderswan, the Commodore. Invoke everything obscure and unique that you can. Rock Boshers DX can be the first step to a larger world of reimagining nostalgia, if we allow it to be. We can observe the history of these consoles, find what made their core games tick, and then advance them for the modern age. It's 2015 and we have that power... so why not do it? Queen Victoria can. Why don't we?

Metroid Other M: I'm Authorizing Use Of The Gameplay Beam

(I'm sorry, kind of. Also this is your spoiler warning. There are spoilers for this video game. You hath been warned.)

I'm going to do it. I'm going to talk about Metroid: Other M. Not in the way you might expect, though. I have no titanic wall of words to take down every single facet of what I think the game did wrong. Someone's done that for me. I don't need to look at the story of the game and mock it without relent. Someone's done that for me, too. It's been almost five years. The thing's been torn apart in analysis, re-assembled, and then shredded again. There's almost nothing new to add, except this here post which is a preamble to a point I wanted to make. A point that I discovered only last week and now feel terribly clever about, enough so to bother writing about this video game that I played four and a half goddamned years ago and won't shut up about to my friends online. It's not my fault this time, someone else brought it up and told me about a video this other guy did. This dude called Moviebob defended the game, kind of. In two videos. One here and then a rebuttal here. I watched them because even though I keep harping on this game for all it did wrong, it's good to look at the other side of critical analysis sometimes. I don't think this fellow made a very good defense of Other M, though. He made a case for one or two points, but the problem with Other M is that it's flawed on just about every level. You can't just rebuke the claims about Samus Aran having no characterization and then go "okay I'm done, game's good, stop hating". There is so much more wrong with it, and those other things I linked delve very well into them. This? This is just a preamble to one of my bullshit mythical ideology clashes I write so much about.

All you folks out there who like Other M, who thought it was fine, who have to deal with their darling being hated on every day by assholes like me? I understand, okay? In the first place, I'm a critical booster of Zelda 2, a Nintendo game which gets its fair share of hate for being too different. Other M changes things up a lot from something like Super Metroid, and it can be seen as too different too. I think the best way to illustrate the clashing ideologies thesis this entire writeup is about is to just come out and say it; I liked Other M. I was having a general good time with it, up to a certain point. Then it just lost me, and then I read the critical analyses against it and the game really lost me. As I was playing it, I fell back on the usual defense for the game. The story, I felt, was a total miss in its presentation. You know all the usual beats. Monotone Samus. THE BABY. The blandness of Adam's squad, minus Anthony. I was ignoring that, for the most part, because of the usual defense. Hey, that gameplay sure is neat! Flippin' around, blastin' monsters, jumpin' on their heads and SHOOTIN' EM IN THE HEAD YEAH YEAH HOW COOL IS THAT? There were a few niggling issues, of course. The weird pointy thing you had to do for missiles. Those godawful "highlight the pixel" segments. It wasn't perfect, but it was kind of fun. If the game stayed on that level, I could have been fine with it.

The moment Other M's story actually got a positive reaction out of me came when the Deleter (yes, I'm groaning too) tried to kill Samus with a forklift. Ignoring the clunky name for a second... holy shit. I was stoked. Something interesting was happening. We had a traitor on board the Bottle Ship, and he was actively out for our blood! He was bumping off the bland squaddies too, but still! I was excited, do you understand? This was new and cool and I wanted to know who it was and have this amazing confrontation. The game let me down here, and it let me down in a way I almost didn't even realize until it was over. James Pierce, the Deleter, sent by the Galactic Federation to clean up the mess on the Bottle Ship fuss-free. This plot point I was so psyched up about, and the fucker dies offscreen. As it turns out, this became a trend in the endgame of Other M, and it's the point I want to make. Other M is a game about two clashing ideologies; Gameplay and Narrative. The reason why it fell flat for me, personally? Instead of the two complimenting each other, the endgame of Other M sees Narrative brutally beating the everloving shit out of Gameplay, and winning out at Gameplay's expense. In the name of Narrative, several parts of Gameplay are actively taken away from you, and in my opinion they sour the whole thing. Really, we should have seen it coming. The game already proved that Gameplay and Narrative don't play friendly in this world, and that was all thanks to the authorization mechanic.

Okay, look, it's been harped on so goddamned much already that I'm beating a dead horse when I criticize it at this point, but I'll say this; the authorization mechanic almost works. I get it. You want a reason for Samus to not start with all her cool toys, and earn them via progression as you go along. You come up with this in-universe thing where she willingly puts herself under Adam's command, and he advises her on when to use her weaponry. Hell, you even covered yourselves by adding in a line about how you shouldn't be firing off Power Bombs willy-nilly because there might be survivors and you could fucking atomize them, OKAY! That's good, that's justification. I can buy that, I really can. The problem is that you then restricted all of the movement and defense-based powers of Samus's Power Suit, but without coming up with any narrative explanation. Narrative just decks Gameplay in the face, takes away the Varia Suit and the Space Jump and who knows what else, and holds it over Gameplay's head. The main sticking point for many was that bit where Samus ran through the damaging fire area, burning alive until Adam was like "hey yo turn on that Varia Suit". That Moviebob fellow states that there's no difference between this sequence of events, and something like Super Metroid where you run through the burny area until you just find the magic heat-resistant suit. Bullshit! The difference is narrative! This is a game about narrative, and Samus just sort of runs in there for no explained reason! You could pull any justification out of your ass for this. The suit's malfunctioning because of the end of Super Metroid. The Deleter fucked with temperature control and you have to go in there and risk your life to turn it back before the station boils. I came up with those in two seconds, and Yoshio Sakamoto was making money off of this. There could have been a narrative reason that played nice with the gameplay. Instead it just happens, gameplay be damned.

That's nothing compared to the brutal assault the Narrative makes near the end of the game. It took away movement abilities for the sake of fiddling with the Gameplay. Now it just straight up takes away the Gameplay's potential. Any and every possible exciting climactic gameplay moment that Other M could have had in its third act is taken away from the player to serve the narrative. Let's start with Ridley. I'm not going to talk about the bit where Samus has a panic attack over seeing him again. After Anthony bites it, she gets to fight Ridley in a cool battle. She does not defeat him here, though. He flies off deeper into the space station. Keep that in mind. We already mentioned the Deleter, and how the exciting confrontation with him is removed by him dying offscreen to MB. The same thing happens to Ridley. He dies offscreen to the Metroid Queen. You are actively denied any revenge against him for killing Anthony, because the narrative takes him away from you before that can happen. There is no catharsis. How about Sector Zero? An entire section of gameplay, a part of the space station brimming with Metroids, possibly reminiscent of Tourian? The narrative strikes back in the cruelest way possible. Adam Malkovich, the poster boy for this game's story, literally shoots Samus Aran, the player avatar, in the back. Then, still in the narrative form of cutscene, he sacrifices himself. In doing so, the narrative takes away the climactic final area of the game from you. Samus, still stuck in her cutscene form, can do nothing but cry and thank Adam for this. The narrative fucking hates you, man. Next comes the Metroid Queen, and in a stroke of luck you actually get to fight the godforsaken thing. Even though it comes out of nowhere. What should be a cool fight gets all sorts of fucked up near the end, when you have to do the old Metroid 2 trick of morph balling into its mouth. Then you use a Power Bomb. You know. Those things that you haven't been allowed to use for the entire game, thanks to narrative. Those things that the narrative doesn't even tell you TO use, so you just die six times until you figure it out. Jesus Christ. After all of that, then is the confrontation with MB. You only get to point at her. The final enemy of the game is in your sights, you have her targeted, you're ready to fire, and WHAM! Narrative double-decker dropkicks you in the face and lets the cutscene take over! Game over, haha, thanks for the 50 bucks now go WATCH THE THEATER MODE YOU CLOD.

I have a hard time thinking of any other game where the plot actively hates you playing it this much. That's what it feels like. They developed the plot first, then fit the game around it as an afterthought. So much of what could have been an exciting game is just stolen from you by the narrative, for the sake of drama and monotone voice acting that most people don't give two shits about because they bought this game to shoot monsters. Here's something for all y'all to mull over; would Other M have been better if they developed it as a CG movie, like Advent Children or Resident Evil Degeneration? If they just used the time they would have spent coding a game on making more cutscenes to bridge the gaps between the ones we already have? Would there really be a difference? You wouldn't be able to play it, sure, but I've made the case that Sakamoto doesn't want you to play this. If he did, he wouldn't have compromised so much of the bloody gameplay in the name of story. This is why Other M flopped for me. It took a game that was kind of fun but had a dumb story, and then totally doubled down on that dumb story to the detriment of the game part. Which, you know, is why people plopped down their money for Other M in the first place. They wanted a game, a game that played hand in hand with narrative. Not something that goes and kicks the game part in the balls out of sheer spite.

Alright. I think I'm done harping on Other M. That is, until that goddamned madman makes good on his threat and gives me his copy in July. The very copy he lent me, the very copy I played to form these opinions. The Silver Nemesis returns, I suppose. For now, until some other nonsense comes along, I think I got out all my dirty laundry about Other M. If you liked it, I almost understand.

Book Review- The Very Soil: An Unauthorized Critical Study Of Puella Magi Madoka Magica

(And here it is, the very special thing! Many moons ago, a very nice person suggested that I do a collaboration with a fellow called Froborr. What became of that was some tandem waffling about Mega Pony, a My Little Pony/Mega Man fangame. It turned out very well, and you can read the second half here.  The first part of it is hosted on his blogspace, and you can hit that up as well. Anyway, while I must confess that I'm indifferent on the subject of ponies, what really grabbed my interest when it came to Froborr was his Very Soil series, which was a critical look at a favorite anime of mine; Puella Magi Madoka Magica. I love that show to death and I was super stoked to read about it. Which I did. Now Froborr, otherwise known as Jed Blue, has put out an entire book of his insights into the inner workings of Madoka Magica, and what follows is me talking about it for a bit. Thank you very much for the review copy, sir, and for anyone else interested in his work, check out his new and spiffy-looking webspace. He's currently just started a project that's going to look at the DC animated universe. All of it. It's good enough for me to be giving him two bucks a month for it on Patreon.

...If that ain't enough full disclosure for all y'all, I don't know what is. On with the show.)

If there ever were a poster child for brevity, Puella Magi Madoka Magica might be it. Twelve 22-minute episodes and three feature films, and yet the entire thing is packed with everything a growing anime fan could want out of a show. Colorful and imaginative imagery. Characters you give a crap about. Things spiraling out of control down into a deep and dark pit of despair. I watched this show in 2012 or so, and deliberately limited myself to only one episode a night. It's fantastic, and it's fantastic in ways I find difficult to describe with just broad strokes. More than that, however, is the fact that deeper meanings glimmer beneath the surface of the Madoka pond. There are madmen thematic divers who delve into these depths, searching for the lost treasure of the postmodern armadas. Fresh from his bathysphere right now is Jed Blue, and this is the gold he unearthed within the sunken ship. This is The Very Soil.

On paper (which is one of the ways you can get it!), The Very Soil is an unauthorized critical study of Madoka Magica, originally posted over on Jed Blue's blogspace. As Madoka Magica is in my top 5 of Japanese cartoons, I readily absorbed every word, and delightfully did so again for this new version. Beyond the analysis of the twelve main episodes, there's also several chapters that poke and prod in various directions at the third feature film, Rebellion. (The previous two being more recaps of the television series.) In addition to that, the book's got a handful of extra essays, most of them dealing with spinoff manga. There is an extra chapter about Rebellion, and more analysis of that is always good as it's a very... challenging film, I found.

What gets analyzed here, precisely? Anything and everything. Madoka Magica is already a very rich series, and the book dives right in, unveiling every hidden theme it can. Things you might not have thought of, but get explored in great detail. The Buddhist nature of cycles, and how the show's time travelling character deals with this. Faustian analysis, and issues of bodily consent involving the magical girls and Kyubey. The show's third episode and third-to-last episode being mirrors of each other, which fundamentally change the show by way of miniature narrative collapse. Themes of putrefaction and decay. At its heart, it is a book that enriches the experience of Madoka Magica, and makes one think about it in new and exciting ways. If nothing else, it helped me to make sense of what the hell might be happening in Rebellion.

This is the treasure pulled from the depths; the critical analysis gold. If you are at all fond of Madoka Magica, then you definitely should give this book the old read-through. It is a mighty fine companion piece that delves deep into what makes this masterpiece of a Japanese cartoon tick, and then delves deeper than that into things one might not even consider. Most of all though, it's a book about people. Because, as Jed Blue reminds us in the introduction, all stories are about people. If you have never seen Puella Magi Madoka Magica, then you really had ought to view it at some point. It's fantastic and well worth your time. If you have seen Madoka Magica, then you'd find this book to be well worth your time also.

(The Very Soil can be purchased from Smashwords in e-book form here, or from Createspace in paperback here.