To Blog 2

Well, another month down, it's a good time to reassess what I'm doing here. I had no specific plans or goals in mind when I started this blog, because, in general, I don't ever enter into anything with a conscious plan in mind. I don't believe in plans. Or method. Or structure. Though if you operate by plans or method or structure, I don't believe there's anything wrong with that either. I've never been one to insist on a "right way" to do something. I will admit there are plenty of wrong ways to do things, but it's the results alone that tell the difference; I make no judgments on how one gets there. Me, I like to fancy myself a trier, by which I mean, not that I try lots of different things, but that I learn almost exclusively through personal trial and error.

Up to now, I've just been throwing up as much as I can as quickly as I can, hoping to figure out along the way what identity will emerge for the blog and what kinds of content work best for me and for my readers. So far, it's hard to tell what works for my readers, since they're imaginary, and, as for me, well, nothing is really working.

I have basically three kinds of content: 1) personal stories, 2) news stories from elsewhere that I want to share while also responding to, and 3) responses to pop culture entertainment that I'm consuming. The lines between them sometimes blur, and I try to bring something of my own life or personality to anything I write, but clearly the third kind of content has emerged as the bread and butter of the blog, only without the reliable income that that colloquialism is supposed to signify. Games and movies become my go-to because they provide an endless and easy supply of topics for writing about, for when I don't have anything arising organically out of my day to discuss (which, most of the time, I won't). I also imagine that, for the reader, they make for more interesting topics than my day. But those posts also typify the issue with my blog as a whole: I don't have very much substantial or original to say.

What exactly does it serve for me to spend a post discussing the third or fourth season of a TV series, which is not even its current season? If there's any recommendation to be made, it would have been made in a post on the first season. Who would even read a post concerning a later season of a show they're not watching? Or if they are watching it, then they wouldn't need the recommendation anyway. But am I writing reviews here, or merely sorting out my own thoughts on the material by putting them into writing? Do I avoid spoilers (because you never know who might be reading), or do I just say whatever I want to say (even if spoiler talk is usually associated with plot summary, which really doesn't serve anything)? Or what if I realize, halfway into composing my post, that there isn't anything I truly want to say about the topic, but I don't have any backup topic to turn to? Then it becomes an exercise in stringing together banalities to meet my self-imposed deadline, which is not interesting for anyone to read. Or, worse yet, when I don't have any thoughtful points to make but still feel like I should say something, the surest sign that I'm in trouble is that I'll start speaking in dramatic yet vague decrees, as though bestowed with biblical authority, about a work's surpassing quality. Which is exactly the tone of writing that I myself loathe in sports editorials, where, week after week, some jackass will take LeBron James's most recent performance in a meaningless regular-season game and conclude from it that he is (and shall henceforth forever be!) a greater or lesser player than Michael Jordan. Furthermore, journalism, criticism, analysis—truthfully, those have never been my area. As a wannabe writer, I always took more naturally to fiction and narrative (probably why my commentaries are always threatening to degenerate into plot summaries).

On those self-imposed deadlines, it's simply an unfortunate reality that, although the content tends to suffer when I begin to write out of obligation rather than passion, obligation has proven the more reliable engine for productivity, without which it would be too easy for me to descend into lethargy. Even so, I don't expect I'll keep updating daily. For the first two weeks or so, I was just trying to get as much content up as quickly as I could, partly so that, in the event anyone I knew ever found my site by Googling me, there would be enough innocuous crap on my blog that, after skimming through a few of my hopefully merely banal posts, they would see that it would not be worth their time to delve further into the archives, and so they would never stumble upon the really bad stuff. Afterward, even as the daily updates continued, I kept promising myself that I would never force it. But I was inspired upon reading that Shigesato Itoi, creator of EarthBound, has managed to post new writing on his website every day for over fifteen years, and I thought, for once in my life, I really ought to try, by which I mean, not that I should sample, but that I should make an honest effort. And what I've come to realize is that it's actually quite hard to keep up, especially as this is not my full-time job, but rather something I do in my free time alongside having a full-time job. Besides, who wants to read my daily updates talking about things I have nothing to say about anyway?

Finally, a lot of my writing is me responding to the media and entertainment that I consume, and so, in a way, it's like a dialogue. Except that, after I say my thing, the thing I'm responding to doesn't respond back to my thing, so, actually, it's not a dialogue at all. Really, it's me getting on a soapbox, speaking by myself and to myself, which is also not something I normally do. I'm actually much better at dismantling other people's arguments than presenting my own. The latter usually leads to me making those vague, dramatic statements. My point is that this blog is, in essence, one big, running monologue. Which is maybe not out of the ordinary for a blog, but I don't find it interesting. I don't find my voice in monologue to be interesting. Now, as this is a one-man operation, and I obviously don't have other voices writing for me, I'm actually considering inventing some other characters for me to post as, just to mix things up. Well, it's something to try, anyway. It may fail spectacularly (or, more likely, uneventfully). Or if not that, there will be other changes, in any case, gradually.

"Not Your Kind of People" (Garbage, Not Your Kind of People, 2012)

One of the funnier outcomes of the release of the new Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain trailer has been the reaction to the song used, with people complimenting its effectiveness, wondering who the artist is, asking where they can get it, and insisting that Konami's use of it is somehow much more respectable than EA "selling out" by featuring Rihanna (from Jay Z's "Run This Town") in the Battlefield 4 ad.

First of all, the song is identified in the trailer (near the end), along with the artist and album. Second, the artist is Garbage—not exactly some obscure indie band. Third, you can find the song anywhere; it's the title track off their latest album, Not Your Kind of People, released just last year.

Here's a live performance uploaded to YouTube by Blair039:

http://youtu.be/oUnVnR56d3M

And here's the band discussing some of the background to its composition:

http://youtu.be/-R-ftLrdYEo

Of course, even for a multi-platinum band like Garbage, the sudden upsurge in song downloads that comes along with being featured in a Metal Gear trailer does not go unnoticed.



If you really want to see the "power of Kojima" at work, look up Joan Baez's "Here's to You" (featured in the Ground Zeroes trailer) on YouTube, and observe in wonderment and shame that the user comments for almost every upload (which, some million views ago, probably consisted of just a few notes of old-folk appreciation for Joan Baez, with the occasional anarchic outburst mixed in) are now completely dominated by fools brought there by the Metal Gear hype train.

No more David Hayter in Metal Gear?

I've been trying to avoid Metal Gear Solid V previews and trailers until I can get around to playing Peace Walker, but I do want to comment on the news that Kojima Productions has apparently decided to replace David Hayter as the voice of Snake/Big Boss. Both Hideo Kojima and Hayter himself have confirmed that it is true (and the character's voice in the demo footage certainly sounds nothing like Hayter), with Kojima officially responding, “What we’re trying to accomplish here is recreate the Metal Gear series. It’s a new type of Metal Gear game, and we wanted to have this reflected in the voice actor as well.”

Were the new game an actual reboot, set in a different timeline and developed by a different team, I would understand them maybe wanting to go in a different direction. But it is abundantly clear from the latest trailer that, as far as the story and characters, this is the furthest thing from a fresh start. It sounds more like Konami and Kojima mean to refresh Metal Gear's image to potentially reach a new and larger market. They recognize that, even as gaming is becoming bigger, there are fewer and fewer titles able to compete in the triple-A space. Perhaps they figure part of claiming their seat at the table involves hiring a bigger name (or at least a more professional, less hammy performer) to take on their game's lead role.

Is it possible that a different actor could step into Snake's shoes and turn in a better performance? Sure, but that's also so not the point. For anyone who has been a fan of this series outside Japan, David Hayter is Snake, whether Solid or Naked. I remember attending an Anime Expo some years ago, where Hayter participated in a Q&A session as a guest of honor. This was at a time when people still believed that a live-action Metal Gear movie was going to happen, and one audience member asked who Hayter's choice would have been for the role of Solid Snake. The question was met with a loud chorus of boos from the rest of the audience, and rightly so. Don't ask the man to name his own more highly paid replacement. Even if not intended as such, the question was kind of a slap in the face to the actor whose performances had defined the character for most of us, and who was clearly passionate about the work (as evidenced by his mere presence at Anime Expo) and personally attached to the role in a way that few actors in video games would ever deign to be. Likewise, whatever Kojima and Konami's reasons now, to not even have approached Hayter is kind of a jerk move and a slap in the face not only to Hayter but the longtime fans as well.

Unfortunately, I don't get the sense that Kojima really knows or cares that much about the English-language versions of his games, so of course he wouldn't have Hayter's back on this. As a producer, he obviously wants to reach as large a market as possible, while, as a creator, Kojima has his own man in Japan, Akio Otsuka, who is his Snake (and who will return as Snake in the Japanese version, poking further holes in Kojima's stated reason that they're going for something new).

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (Kerry Conran, 2004)

I loved Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow back when I first saw it years ago. Watching it again more recently, I still liked it but found it a bit too thin and goofy to rate, in my opinion, as one of the all-time great film adventures. Innocent and exuberant are surely what it was going for, but I have to admit, my attention drifted at times during the action sequences. The movie still looks great, but there's a lack of weight and consequence, which makes it hard to care about anything that happens. It's basically a children's movie, whimsical and devoid of cynicism. I'll probably watch it again someday in a different mood and come back around to embracing those very qualities.

This time, what I enjoyed more were the performances and the banter between the two main characters. Jude Law has never struck me as a viable action star. I find him too mild and dapper to root for with any vigor (perhaps why he's most prominently seen these days playing instead the straight man sidekick to a cartoon character in those awful Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movies), but his coolness and charm work for the role of "Sky Captain" Joe Sullivan. He's a bit like Indiana Jones, but with more dignity and less irony.

Gwyneth Paltrow, despite being one of the great thespians of her generation, hasn't had very many major starring roles since winning her Academy Award for Shakespeare in Love (1998). These days, she's best known for playing the love interest to a cartoon character in the Iron Man movies, and, let's be honest, anybody (or even nobody) could play that role and it wouldn't greatly affect how those movies are received, either critically or commercially. Still, she's never one to phone in a performance. In Sky Captain too, as Polly Perkins, newshound and Joe's old flame, Paltrow's is rather a thankless supporting role—not to Jude Law but certainly to the special effects and retro-futurist aesthetic—but she manages to imbue the archetypal Katharine Hepburn-esque character with enough fun and magnetism to elevate her scenes, instead of merely serving them.

The two play well off one another and also off the overall silliness of the situations they find themselves in. In my favorite scene of the two, they are locked in what is basically a closet full of dynamite. As a lit fuse threatens to blow the cache and our heroes with it, Joe's only bright idea is to light another stick of dynamite and use it to blow the door first. In this tiny room, he grabs the unimpressed Polly to take cover behind a box, which, the characters and viewers realize at the same time, is also full of dynamite. "Oh great, we're safe," Polly dryly remarks.

Angelina Jolie, despite getting equal space on the poster (as well as dominating the Google image search results for "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow"), has a much smaller part, though it's one of those efficiently badass "and" roles that, had a few things worked out differently for the film, probably would have stolen the show and been the popular favorite among fans. She plays the eye-patched Franky Cook, commander of a flying aircraft carrier, a character curiously similar to Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D., although Franky is probably more effective in Sky Captain than Fury has been in all of the Marvel movies so far. Had Sky Captain been an actual vintage serial like those it draws inspiration from, one can easily imagine that Franky would have gotten her own feature episodes.

In fact, watching the movie, I sometimes got the sense that Conran had a lot more material that he was either saving for a sequel, or else had taken out in order to keep things simple. At least, I kind of expected them to journey to more places and see more sights. Nothing that comes later in the movie manages to top, for me, the early image of a parade of giant robots on a march of destruction through the city.

Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies (Nintendo DS) (Level-5, Square Enix, 2009)

Five years after the release of Dragon Quest VIII for the PS2, Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies was, in many ways, yet more of that same old familiar Dragon Quest, never known for being a series to take risks. Combat was still simplistic and based around text menus, progression was still kind of a grind, and you still couldn't save outside town. Also, carrying on the artistic identity of the iconic series were the returning key creative talents—creator and scenario writer Yuji Horii, character and monster designer Akira Toriyama, and composer Koichi Sugiyama. Indeed, I think these three men are all more critical to the perpetuation of Dragon Quest than any other creators in the game industry are to any other series. Then again, maybe a Dragon Quest installment without one or more of these guys wouldn't be so far-fetched, because Dragon Quest IX actually did introduce some changes to the series that, prior to that, would have been unthinkable.

First of all, Dragon Quest IX was a handheld game, whereas every previous numbered installment had been released on whatever had been the most popular home console of the time. But the way people played games had changed since Dragon Quest VIII, and the Nintendo DS was now the most ubiquitous platform, so it actually made a lot of business sense to move it there, even if it could not but be perceived as a demotion any time a long-running console game series moved to handheld as its new home. (I mean, could you imagine Nintendo ever announcing its next mainline Zelda or Mario as exclusive to handheld?) The visuals were going to be a step back from the last game, but, otherwise, there was nothing that Dragon Quest IX needed that it couldn't get out of the DS. The next big change was the elimination of random encounters, which, by that point, were rarely found in any remotely modern RPG. So that was not exactly groundbreaking but was more like Dragon Quest arriving way late to the party, but, on the bright side, at least it finally showed up. Square Enix's real gamble, however, was turning Dragon Quest into a multiplayer cooperative game. Can you think of any other comparably venerable series (again, think Zelda or Mario) shifting focus to co-op, after over two decades of established single-player gameplay? How would it even work? What would it mean to be multiplayer, if combat was still turn-based? How would it be any different from just passing the controller around while playing Dragon Quest VIII?

As it turned out, it worked really well. Playing Dragon Quest IX with my siblings, after having completed some fifty console RPGs all on my own, I realized at last that adventuring is something best enjoyed with company. It's just more fun when you have companions alongside you, sharing in the sights, sounds, and experiences, as you journey out into that unexplored fantasy world. You can point things out to one another, plan out routes and destinations together, or maybe split up to explore a town separately, then reconvene to share gathered intel. And it all feels a tad more real, as though going on an actual trip together.

As for the turn-based combat, it was a lot like old Dragon Quest. It still boiled down to selecting "Attack" from the menu for about 90 percent of your actions. The one wrinkle that the more recent games introduced was the "Tension" system, which encouraged players to spend a character's turn "focusing" to raise the potency of their next action. Stack a couple consecutive Tension boosts, and, after four boosts, their next attack will be far stronger than the sum of four non-boosted attacks combined would have been. In multiplayer in Dragon Quest IX, players further had the option to boost an ally's tension instead of their own, so that a character could potentially max out their tension after a single round. When I played, our party's strategy against every boss was to have everyone boost and buff the biggest bruiser in our group, then have that character unleash their strongest attack (usually the double-slashing Falcon Slash, while equipped with the double-slashing Über Falcon Blade, for a total of four slashes). There weren't very many enemies who could stand up to that, and, consequently, it almost felt like being on the other side of one of those classic Bahamut battles from Final Fantasy, in that we were basically counting down to our one big attack, and, unless the enemy could defeat or interrupt us before that moment came, the fight would be ours.

Dragon Quest IX may have been the first Dragon Quest I actually enjoyed playing, but Yuji Horii's storytelling was something I had already come to appreciate immensely during the course of my playing through Dragon Quest VIII. Dragon Quest IX's story was more like a series of loosely tied-together episodes. The player took on the role of a guardian angel, helping wandering spirits come to peace after having met tragic ends. These were nearly all measured and poignant tales that sidestepped the cheap melodrama of most of its JRPG peers. My favorite was the Zere Rocks episode, a haunting and compelling portrait of the depths of a man's loneliness and heartache. The fairly unassuming town of Zere was an early stop in the game, and it wasn't until much later, in a completely different part of the world, that we came across a sign at the base of a mountain that read "Zere Rocks." My siblings and I didn't know what to make of it at first, but, as we climbed the mountain and, along the way, came across cryptic notes left by some sculptor, it gradually became clear that this had not been the work of a happy man. What we found at the summit was nothing less than a complete stone replica of the entire town of Zere and its residents, all sculpted by the one man, who had moved away but evidently never moved past having had his heart broken by the love of his life from his hometown.

Maybe the multiplayer adventuring was old hat to MMORPG players. And everything else about the game held fast to the series' roots. Yet its quality blend of co-op questing, accessible and addictive gameplay, and brilliant storytelling was unique, and Dragon Quest IX remains a one-of-a-kind high point among RPGs I've played.

What's Martian Manhunter's deal?

Although the Young Justice cartoon was not part of the Bruce Timm DC animated universe that began with Batman: The Animated Series, it was interesting, watching it, to observe how the storytelling in DC's cartoons has evolved along a similar trajectory as it did in the comics.

Batman was made up of mostly standalone stories, and it was self-contained, with scarcely any hint of a larger "superhero universe." Superman: The Animated Series, simply by virtue of existing in the same universe as Batman (as well as featuring appearances by Flash, Green Lantern, and others), began to change that. It was, in my opinion, a thematically simpler work, but it offered greater action and a stronger regular supporting cast for its hero to have meaningful relationships with, both in and out of costume. It traded the occasionally thought-provoking short stories of Batman for superpowered action and light character-driven drama. Years later, the final entry in the metaseries, Justice League Unlimited, was heavy on references to events and characters from almost every work that had come before. That was really not a show you could walk into with no prior knowledge and expect to make sense of. But, from another point of view, it was extra rewarding for those hardcore fans, who had been watching since the beginning and could still keep track of it all, to think that there might actually have been a payoff to their committing so many years of fictional cartoon events to heart and to memory.

Young Justice placed a similarly heavy emphasis on attention to continuity, with almost every hero and villain working some angle that would take the better part of a season to fully emerge. Moreover, even though it didn't share continuity with any previous series and was ostensibly a self-contained new show, it also didn't bother to explain who anybody was, outside of the original core team, despite it featuring at least as many characters as Justice League Unlimited. It pretty much assumed that, if you were watching the show, you already knew what Martian Manhunter's deal was, even though I'd wager that most people, unless they read comics or have seen Justice League, would have no idea who Martian Manhunter is.

I suppose it would be a waste of everyone's time to tell and retell every minor character's origin story with each reboot. On the other hand, this approach does leave potential new viewers somewhat out in the cold, and it's exactly that kind of mentality that has led superhero comics to become so indecipherably mired in continuity that DC has to perform periodic cullings on its fictional history.

Another thing that has kind of gone away, both in the comics and now the cartoons, is the non-superhero guest character. In Young Justice, there weren't very many non-superhero (or villain) characters, period. With a very few halfhearted exceptions, the heroes only seemed to have other masked heroes for friends and lovers. It had become a story about a society of demigods, with no part for ordinary civilians (like, um, the viewers) to play, except as frail and useless children in need of saving.

In the comics, these are trends that have resulted in a readership of, over the decades, an increasingly more insular and older subculture of geeks—people who prefer fantasy to reality and would rather follow fictional characters' lives than live their own. The cartoons, though trending in that direction, thankfully aren't quite there yet (and they've also managed to avoid the distastefully graphic violence that has seeped into even mainstream comic titles), and, for that, I actually should probably be grateful to the executive suits for reminding the writers that these shows are primarily for kids and teens, not for comic book nerds who have studied decades of superhero lore.

Young Justice (TV) (2010–2013)

It's not always satisfying being a faithful viewer of American cartoons. Very rarely do shows end on their own terms. More often is it the case that some suit will pull the plug upon determining that additional episodes will not result in additional toy tie-in sales. So it was for Teen Titans (2003-2006) and Legion of Super Heroes (2006-2008), and so it is now for Young Justice.

Created by Greg Weisman (creator of the cult favorite Gargoyles) and Brandon Vietti (director of the highly competent Batman: Under the Red Hood), Young Justice cranked up the best aspects of Teen Titans—the arc-based structure and character-driven melodrama—but did away with the slapstick humor and frenetic anime-influenced look, opting instead for a more mature tone and realistic art style. In other words, it was a more straightforward adaptation of the Teen Titans comics. Although focusing on DC's teenage heroes/sidekicks, it was, in some ways, the most grown-up DC cartoon yet, with a surprisingly heavy emphasis on characters hooking up. My favorite, almost kind of racy line was delivered by the teen archer Artemis, at one point finding herself without her trusty bow: "I feel naked, and not in a fun way." (Season 1, Episode 14 "Revelation")

From the second half of season 1 on, the show also went big—appearances by just about everybody who's anybody in the DC universe, a five-year time-skip that changed everything, and some staggering attention to continuity, with tons of twists and turns that, more often than not, the show would have to spell out through explanatory dialogue, knowing that the callbacks might otherwise go over a lot of weekly viewers' heads. More than any superhero show before it, it really conveyed a sense of a "superhero universe," beyond just the core team and its mission. Major names like Batman and Superman could be presences on the show without having to appear in person all the time, but when they did get involved, they would fit right in with the regular characters and just feel like an established part of the world.

Admittedly, the rapidly ballooning roster of characters meant that less and less time could be devoted to exploring any individual character in depth, and the end of the second season (and, as it turned out, the series) was rather anticlimactic. Still, the show was really a lot of fun, and I'm sorry to see it unceremoniously cancelled. For me, it struck almost the perfect balance between the intimacy of Teen Titans and the scale of Justice League Unlimited. And, maybe I just read into it what I wanted to, but I could have sworn there was even an homage to my favorite superhero comic of all time, Brian K. Vaughan's Runaways.