Nintendo's E3 Misadventures Part 2

Okay, so Mario Tennis: Ultimate Smash on the WeYou  got mixed reactions but the important thing is that many people expressed displeasure with it which is totally understandable to me. It’s another fucking Mario Tennis game. Even if you insert Mario characters, how much enjoyment can you derive from literally just hitting a ball back and forth? Not a full price stand alone title. Not something to announce on the big stage in E3.

Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival for the WeeOoo was announced and for a very brief moment: Animal Crossing fans were on cloud nine. Moment’s later, they crashed through the Earth’s crust and into the seventh circle of hell. The game is not a new proper AC game. It’s an AC multiplayer Mario Party like game with only a mind-numbing board game and no minigames to offer. It also requires the purchasing of amiibos to play.

So what are amiibos? You’ve undoubtedly already seen them shitting up real estate in Gamestop and the electronics section of your local big box store. They’re those little plastic figurines of popular Nintendo characters that came out shortly after Smash 4 that can also be scanned with you're tablet controller to unlock various compatible game content. Back then, I tried for the longest time to figure out what exactly they were for. They just seemed so ill conceived with no solid focus. When they came out, they were sold as an unlockable AI companion in Smash that you could train with and which learns from you. So like something extremely trivial that should have been included in the game. “No, no,” cry the Nintendo slaves, “It’s okay that it unlocks trivial shit because it’s mostly just a nice figurine of your favorite characters for your shelf.” But why have game content that's only unlockable by a stupid $13 Happy Meal toy? “It’s just a bonus that comes with the figurine because Nintendo loves us,” argues the Nintendo zealot. Again, why have game content that's only locked on disk by a stupid $13 Happy Meal toy? Why have it in video games at all? What does it add to the experience to chop up a game into pieces which are then sold separately for obscene markup when you add it all together? If I want a video game, I'll buy a video game. If I want a toy, I'll buy a toy. I don't want to buy a toy if I want a video game. They don't need to be arbitrarily paired.

Nintendo didn't even fucking know what amiibos did when they made them. They just kind of did this extremely esoteric thing but they were mostly just figurines. But it didn’t really matter what they did because Nintendo characters being a masturbatory fetish for thirty-something manchildren meant that they flew off of the shelves like guns before a second amendment repeal. They were a blown out of proportion massive hit for no other reason than NINTENDO CHARACTERS! The vast majority of Nintendo characters aren’t well written and have no personalities to speak of which means they are liked not because of who they are but merely because of which game they represent. Or maybe they just like how they look. Amiibos were so popular that scalpers started buying them up and reselling them to FUCKING IMBECILES for enormous markup. This combined with Nintendo’s artificial scarcity / limited runs made it extremely difficult for brainless Nintendo consumers to get their hands on them without spending a small fortune. This should honestly be considered as exploitation of the mentally ill.

This is like the Beanie Babies cancer epidemic 2.0. The scalping thing wouldn’t be so pervasive if A: the dumbass consumers refused to buy from scalpers, thereby not sustaining demand and making scalping not profitable and B: Nintendo stepped in and actually took action in order to get more amiibos to their fans. Since both the company and the end user are morons, nothing has changed and it just seems to be spiraling out of control with amiibos' ever-growing ubiquity.

Amiibos’ popularity helped them grow their demonic roots into more and more games, slowly becoming increasingly “important” with unlocking more content in each new title. Then E3 2015 comes. Please note the word “Amiibo” is actually in the title of this game. The game has actually become a showcase for plastic figurines. You absolutely need the physical amiibo characters in order to unlock them from the game disk and play the game. The game is useless without them. (From my perspective, it’s still a shitty, useless game no matter how you serve it up.) You buy the game and then you buy the ability to play it by purchasing stupid toys. AMIIBOS SHOULD BE MERCHANDISE AND NOT VIDEO GAMES. That slippery slope of more and more video game content getting locked behind amiibos that you Nintendo kool aid drinkers were so quick to dismiss as baseless naysaying has become manifest and reared its ugly head. I hope you’re fucking happy. You dug your grave. You people voted for Hubert Humphrey and you bought amiibos! You encouraged scalpers. You encouraged Nintendo to entertain this asinine and quite frankly irrelevant and highly detrimental practice for video games. If I still gave a shit about Nintendo, I would be so fucking pissed at you. Instead I'll just express my disgust and disappointment with you as a fellow human being.

The spurned hatred of this game by fans compacted with it only being on the WiiU and its requirement for purchasing amiibos that will be commercially unavailable from being scalped like a motherfucker, means this will be the lowest selling video game in recent memory.

The amiibo thing was an issue here but the biggest problem was that big AC fans that have been waiting patiently for a new real installment, only saw Nintendo giving them the finger while blowing raspberries. Oh, you want a new Animal Crossing game? Here, have the shittiest board game imaginable locked behind a $30+ paywall. Hahaha! To be fair though, I don’t think Nintendo did it on purpose. They are too fucking oblivious to make an informed decision based on anything physically happening outside of the walls of their headquarters that isn’t based on ROI feedback. They're basically just making games alone in a cave and then handing them out through a slot in a door.

The other event that proved to be severely inflammatory was the showing of Metroid Prime: Federation Force and some sort of blaster ball soccer drivel. They’re for the 3DS and feature little deformed chibi Federation guys who look like Playskool toys. From the outside looking in, it’s just the same innocuous shovelware spinoff stuff shit out by Nintendo on a monthly basis. Nothing of note here. But Prime fans who haven't seen a Prime game in eight years, because it's been finalized as a self-contained trilogy, and would be elated with a surprise new installment or just a Prime-like game, weren't emotionally prepared to see this. It’s actually been five years since the last Metroid title, period which I believe was the infamously despised Other M, so everyone was already bitter and starved to see a new kickass Metroid game. This was not what they were waiting for. This offering communicated to fans that Nintendo doesn’t give a fuck about what they want and instead of just making the tried and true real game they’ve been waiting for, spent time and many resources developing something they never asked for and then slapped the name Metroid Prime on it, similarly to the AC Amiibo garbage. There is actually a petition to get this game cancelled. The coldest reality is that there will be no real Metroid on the U either and the wait continues.

Watch this guy’s face the very second “Metroid Prime” flies up on screen in the E3 trailer. That’s the look of a man who has died inside.

Some might argue that these fans are whiny, entitled little bitches and Nintendo should have the freedom to piss their own money away on their infantile fantasy ventures but it’s been EIGHT YEARS or at least FIVE YEARS after a shitty game. You don't seem to have any issues creating a new DS iteration every couple of months. Is that where all of your manpower is being siphoned to? There is no excuse to not hear these people and throw them a fucking bone in that time. Like it or not, Nintendo, like all businesses, is in a position where they can’t just do whatever the hell they want with their IPs and have everyone be happy with it. If they want to survive as a business, they have to know what their fanatical consumers want and produce it for them instead of hanging them out to dry, or worse, taunting them purposefully or in a ludicrously unintentional manner. In the eyes of a fan, they just performed a silly ventriloquist act with Prime’s corpse. Leaving it alone in its casket would have been preferable. Imagine if Valve Announced Half-Life 3 and then added that it was going to be a Space Invaders clone where you shoot headcrabs only for Android and iOS. You don’t do that shit. Nintendo CAN continue with it’s own moronic, waste of time and resources, projects but only within franchises that receive adequate attention with proper games. You want to keep pulling that stupid shit, give them a substantial game to chew on first and they'll be a lot more receptive. Or just don't call it "Metroid" but ESPECIALLY not "Metroid Prime."

If you look up the E3 trailers for Federation Force and Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival, you’ll see that they both have about an 80% disapproval rating. Tennis is about 50/50. That’s incredible. It’s almost like people actually stopped for a minute and thought about it. Wait a minute. They’re not even trying. They’re just slapping established franchise names on minigames. They’re not going to give us anything substantial for the WiiU.

Apparently some big titles will be held until Nintendo’s next Console codenamed the “NX” which, knowing Nintendo, will likely end up being called something about as tactful as the “Nintendo Piipii Pu.” Kind of ominously, Zelda U was never mentioned which probably just means that it's out of the release time-frame scope which they were talking within but still, that would have been something meaningful to people. Intelligent people are questioning this apparent abandonment of the WiiU by Nintendo. Idiots are sucking their thumbs and rocking back and forth in the corner, chanting, “The NX is coming. The NX is coming. Everything is fine. The games are coming on the NX. I am fully prepared to invest in another Nintendo console.”

The backlash happening now is the result of a long buildup of silent suffering and waiting and hoping that Nintendo will momentarily cease jerking themselves off for two minutes and pull through this time and fans have finally snapped. Nintendo doesn’t know what time period they are in. They don’t know what the video game market is like. They don’t know what current trends are. They don’t know who their customers are. They don’t know why people like their games. They don’t know what their fans want. They don’t stand up to help them when they are victimized while trying to obtain their products... until very recently when they upped production. They’re at a crossroads now. They lost core gamers when they made the Wii. They lost the casual gamers from that when mobile games became big. They failed to establish relevance with the next generation of gamers and the next one after that. The people they have now in their console market, whether they know it or not, are mostly older die hard fans of their older franchises that linger mostly because of that mental photo of the joy that they experienced with those characters when they were young and here you are, denying them that. If you do anything to drive off those people, who do you have left, Nintendo? Not even scalpers.     

Nintendo's E3 Misadventures Part 1

I don’t really care about current events involving video games or even current video games to a large extent. If you hadn’t noticed, this place isn’t exactly a hotbed of up to the minute news and reviews and that’s exactly how I like it. The only reason I pay attention to E3 at all is because I enjoy watching a bunch of out of touch suits fumble around as they try to connect with gamers in a meaningful way that will get them interested in their products, in the same way a bird might try to sell bird nests to some fish. To put it matter-of-factly, I like watching them fail. I don’t even care who it is failing. Every year delivers something substantially stupid or some royal screw-up. Last year, Microsoft stole the show by announcing that they wanted to rape everyone within a ten yard radius of an Xbox One. This year, they relinquished their title of Most Fucked E3 Presentation to Nintendo.  

First a list of one thing that I liked from each console just to soften the blow.

Sony: The Last Guardian… even though that bird aye aye thing is really ugly.

Microsoft: Rare Replay… but then I see Banjo & Kazooie’s Nuts & Bolts model on the cover, ALERT: FOREIGN CONTAMINANT

Nintendo: Star Fox: Zero… Amazing! I can’t believe the N64 is getting a new game!

I don’t want to believe that I purposefully victimize Nintendo but they make it so damn easy and to be honest, with all the garbage they’ve pulled as of late, they deserve it. Their long record of incompetent business decisions and failure to adapt to the real game industry somehow never seems to phase them. They’re like Inspector Gadget or Mr. fucking Magoo. They keep doing stupid shit, completely oblivious to their environment and they continue to survive on sporadic bursts of dumb luck and even dumber consumers. Not this time. This is where the pendulum finally swings back. Mr. Magoo just got hit by a truck.

Everything seemed to be going fine or at least mediocre for Nintendo until what was expected to be their big presentation on the final day of E3. Ryu is in Super Smash Bros. 4 for some reason. Are people still talking about that shit? How long has that game been out now? The addition of a character to an already decent sized roster will never be something worthy of hype or even an E3 announcement, especially when it’s just another fighting game character you’ve already played as in seven different Streetfighter titles.

Anyway, Nintendo spent an inordinately long time talking about Yoshi’s Wooly World which is a game that is coming out in like a week and everyone is already well aware of so basically they just pissed away 10 minutes of E3 prime time. A big focus for them seems to be connectivity with amiibos here, which I will talk about in detail later. They are seriously touting the feature of unlocking shitty little character costumes for Yoshi with Amiibos as a primary component of the game. I’m not just throwing that word around either. A lot of the costumes really do look shitty. Humanoid characters don’t translate very well to Yoshi’s ugly bulbous frame. 

They end up putting the face on his nose in some cases. For the Mario costume, he gets this stupid ass mustache wrapping around his nose and a face reminiscent of an FAS victim. With the Samus costume, her visor goes on his nose which is nowhere near Yoshi’s eyes. Then he has an armored diaper for some reason. 

What the hell is the point of this? If you’re going to make a character inspired costume, then do it and actually think about what you’re doing. This looks bad and it makes no sense so don’t do it or it comes across as trying to shoehorn unnecessary shit into the game, which is exactly what it is. Many of these don’t look like designed costumes adapted to Yoshi. It looks more like you shrink wrapped a picture of a character around Yoshi and then called it good however it ended up. Try putting a little bit of fucking effort into it.

And on a side note the current character model for Yoshi looks terrible. His face is literally made up of primitive geometric volumes stuck together. It appears as extremely lazy design because it looks like there was no finessing or second draft or maybe that you had technical limitations that only allowed you to render basic forms. If you remove his eyes, his nose is bigger than his fucking head.

They also talked about Skylanders with Amiibos which is just gilding the lily. Oh, Nintendo. You’re so naive. For some reason you still believe that it’s 1994 and children are interested in your home consoles and don’t prefer things like Call of Duty and Halo. In reality you’re making products for a nonexistent child demographic that are actually being consumed by thirty-year-old men which is disturbingly similar to the MLP brony phenomenon.

Nintendo also talked about Mario Maker which is a game where you can create your own Mario levels using a variety of old school Mario assets. You can also play user created content. It’s kind of like Little Big Planet but with no professionally built story mode and like a fifth of the creative possibilities and honestly doesn’t look as fun. But I’m betting building stuff is going to be a hell of a lot easier with the tablet controller. It’s interesting but not enough to be a full priced stand alone game. The only playable content as far as I know is going to be user created which is always going to be 99% shit in any community. Oh and don’t forget the amiibo connectivity!

They didn’t say anything about the new Fatal Frame game which I believe is getting localized in the States. Last E3, I complained that they should be utilizing their rights to the franchise with the capabilities of their ill used tablet controller. They actually did it… in Japan. I don’t know anything about it or whether they integrated it well with the tablet but hey, it’s theoretically a step in the right direction.

Those are the things I recall that probably only I took issue with. Many Nintendo fans would lap that shit up, no questions asked like usual. But now we move on to the powder keg. These are the things that were so atrocious and despicable, so sacrilegious and demoralizing, that they actually snapped some fans, (the one’s intelligent enough to retain their independent thought,) out of their ether-like nostalgia haze long enough to express disdain for something with a Nintendo label on it.

Final Fantasy Tactics: TWotL

This game. Let me tell you about this game and how it has a monopoly on bullshit. 

Final Fantasy Tactics is the second turn based strategy game in the Final Fantasy franchise… I think. I really can’t be expected to keep straight however many hundreds of FF games there are at this point in time. Of all the franchises to have the word “final” in them, it has to be this one.

The plot is a Final Fantasy plot. Really, what more do you need? You know how it goes. The game is in isometric perspective on a square/cube grid where you move your characters around spaces like on a chess board and then tell them to take an action. Depending on what kind of battle you’re in, objectives range from beat this one person to win, beat all of them to win and/or don’t kill this guy or you lose. There are random battles but unless you’re grinding, you’ll mostly be in story related battles.

There are many branching class options for characters to train as, some of them more useful than others. Seriously now, when do white mages become useful? They're just fucking cannon fodder. They'll likely be oneshot killed five turns into a scenario because they're so physically weak. The stuff that they can do is theoretically useful but completely unfeasible in practice because they’re so severely impotent. After a certain amount of time played in the game, their healing abilities aren't worth shit because they don't increase in power at a reasonable rate with the character’s level. If I was playing a conventional FF title, this would be comparable to being stuck using the weak small potions after thirty hours in. As for using buffs and status ailment healing spells, pick one of the following issues that will negate anything you try: it missed, you are immediately targeted and killed before casting, it was blocked, your teammates had to break up and move out of the area of effect before casting, it missed, your teammates are standing on tiles with 1% inclines or other minuscule differences that disrupt the spell's area of effect, it missed or it missed. You cart out your white mage to a battle in order to level them up but then all their spells fail or they spend the whole battle unconscious, so they never gain any experience. Unlike many JRPGs, characters don’t get any experience whatsoever from standing in the background with their thumb up their ass. A character has to successfully cast a spell or hit someone in order to get EXP. I have to send my white mage off on errands to get any. It’s like when you have a shit pokemon. You dump your metapod or abra off at the sitter and say bye. See you when you’re not shit. Only a white mage is never not shit. Mine knows most of his spells but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re all inert when handled by an incompetent waif.

Through your quest, you can meet some people in scenarios and let them join your team. Some can be permanent while others are temporary. Now let’s take a moment to recognize how shitty Rafa is. Rafa and her brother are optional characters that are skyseekers who cast spells but the spells are odd because they have a “random” aspect to them. The first couple of times she appears in a battle, she’s not in your party and you’re supposed to protect her from enemies. This is difficult because she is the stupidest AI in the game and possibly contender for all time, dethroning Natalya from Goldeneye. On top of being reckless, almost to the degree of suicidal, she casts her spells with no regard to the safety of nearby allies. She will include you in the area of effect. She doesn’t care. Back to the “random” spells, they all have a 2 tile radius area of effect, (so a little Swiss Cross or plus sign formation of five tiles.) When you cast it, it does an elemental attack “randomly” between 1-9 times on “random” tiles within that space. It almost never actually does anything. Usually you just get one or two attacks on blank tiles. It’s so shitty so often that it seems to defy statistical reasoning. One time I had three enemies clustered together at close range so I cast it on them. Then I was gobsmacked when the spell hit a total of seven times solely in the two empty tiles, hitting absolutely no one; not even once. That is not fucking random. That is bullshit. If it doesn’t work in that scenario, what scenario does it work in? I actually did a calculation to find out the mathematical odds of missing a 60% shot seven times in a row. There’s, a .016% chance of it happening. It’s statistically insignificant for this scenario...

You know, I saw a perfect baseball game once. I’ve only been to maybe fifteen to twenty MLB games in my life (and a couple of spring training games.) Most of them were to see the Giants. Two or three were to see the A’s. It was complete happenstance that I was there at the Coliseum the day Dallas Braden pitched a perfect game against the Rays. I went with a group of six and not one of them an A’s fan, a mix of Giants, Dodgers and Red Sox people but we just wanted to see cheap close baseball on Mother’s Day and we got way more than we expected. Sadly, there was hardly anyone else in the park to see it. A couple of years later, I traveled down to the Bay Area to see a Giants game in AT&T Park. I was staying in a hotel in the North Bay with my wife, planning to go to the game the next day. That night on TV we watched Matt Cain pitch a perfect game against the Astros in AT&T. Damn! We were one day off. We could have been there. I ended up seeing Barry Zito pitch his signature blowout the next day… Yippee. (I say “signature blowout” even though it wasn’t that bad and he did suspiciously phenomenal that season. If I went back in time before that and told someone that Zito will start the World Series Opener and beat Verlander, they’d think I was nuts.) In well over a century of Major League Baseball, there have only been 23 perfect games and I was lucky enough to see one of them. When I think about how I almost saw two perfect games, it blows my mind. What are the odds of seeing two perfect games in your life? Apparently a lot fucking better than seeing Rafa hit an enemy.

Pretty much all battles in the game feel incredibly scripted because the AI is so robotic and calculating. There is no sort of random factor aside from spells and attacks missing or critical hits and counter attacks. The computer makes the best possible move every single time. Every battle is like Bobby Fischer versus Deep Blue. You make a move. The computer analyzes hundreds of stats and variables, going through flowcharts and algorithms in order to determine the most annoying response. I find this incredibly obnoxious for three reasons. First, the AI comes off as a pedantic tryhard. Second, it’s unrealistic. People, (which is who I’m supposedly fighting a lot of the time,) are not robots. Sometimes they are inefficient or make mistakes. And third, it’s able to do things that not even the player can do. You know what I have to do to make a good move? I have to look at the turn list to see who gets to move in the next five or so turns. I need to know how many turns my action will take. I have to see how far I can move. I have to check my attack range. I have to check what job classes I have equipped. I have to check which skills I’ve actually learned and can use right now. I need to survey the terrain I’m on or am going to. I need to make sure I have a clear line of sight of my target. I need to be aware of whatever threats are in the area such as nearby enemies and their walking and attack ranges. I need to know where and when not to cluster my guys together. I need to be aware of rendering magic spells or other actions that I or an enemy already cast in the area that I’m moving to or away from. I need to figure out which way to face after performing whatever action, to best protect the character. I need to be aware if my character will be in the way of my other characters when they move.

When I tell my dragoon to use jump, I don’t know how many turns it will take for him to come back down and attack. It doesn’t say. I have to just hope that the enemy will still be there when he does. When I move a character toward an enemy to use a ranged attack, I don’t know if the enemy will be in range. The two things it tells you are the walking range of your current location and the attack range of your current location. If you want to know the attack range you’ll have at the tile you’re moving to, then you have to fucking manually count tiles like an asshole to make sure you can reach your enemy from that spot. And even if you do that and don’t make any mistakes, you can still move to the spot and find that the enemy is out of range because of slight elevation differences in the tiles. There’s no undo button for moving, so you basically just wasted a turn. Can I get black magic spells with infinite range? No. Can I get summoners with infinite range and huge areas of effect that conveniently pinpoint only enemies and not allies in that area? No. Can I get archers with infinite range. Can I get an equipment rend attack that does some damage so that when the rend inevitably fails (because I’m the one that performed it,) I didn’t just waste a turn? No. Can the AI have/do/know that? It sure as fuck can. It can have it up and down the line all fucking day. There is most definitely a glass ceiling or a player skill cap. You will never be as good as them.

The first battle that I got stuck on and had to consult a walkthrough for was the second boss fight with Wiegraf. The first fight was fun because I wagered that I might just have enough power to take him if I went right at him with no regard for my well being or other enemies and I beat him with only one, (almost dead,) character left. When the second boss fight ocurs, you are one on one with him with the main character because you apparently told the rest of your party to wait out in the hall and scratch their asses. One on one in a turn based game always feels awkward. Is this supposed to be an actual battle? Because it feels like we’re a couple of prissy dandies mincing around daintily in a slap fight. When a fight only has two people, it becomes painfully reduced to a one-dimensional affair: attack, attack, heal, attack, attack, heal, attack, attack, heal, attack, attack, heal, attack, attack, heal. It’s so fucking boring and mind numbingly stupid. And it’s only exacerbated further when Wheat Grass literally blocks and counters half of your attacks. It’s also obvious that this is just jerking off before he inevitably transforms, so what’s the point? Beating him like this doesn’t achieve anything. It’s just busywork. This is one of my most hated Final Fantasy institutions. I HATE transforming bosses. Cut the bullshit and just give me the real deal so we can get this show on the road. Don’t fuck around.

This game also has one of the worst bugs I’ve ever seen in a game. And when I say that, I’m talking about glitches that affect your ability to play the game and not just aesthetics or immersion breaking problems. This one is up there with the unpassable QTE in the PC version of Dead Space 2. If you leave three characters at the sitter- er… send them to do errands, I mean, you typically come back to the same tavern where you took the job after X number of days have passed and collect your rewards and your teammates. However if your teammates happen to be on an errand or uncollected when you progress to the next chapter in the story, the job disappears and the characters become inaccessible. You can not go back to the tavern and recall them or otherwise get them back. THEY ARE FUCKING GONE FOREVER. Not only are they gone, but their spots in your roster remain full and you are not allowed to dismiss them. So your twenty-four slot roster essentially just got downsized to a twenty-one slot roster. That is just… FUCK YOU! How do you make such a horrible, obvious oversight?

I can’t see the enemies or the terrain of the battle scenario before choosing/equipping my team like you can in say Fire Emblem or even Plants Versus Zombies. If it’s my first time attempting the battle, I have no fucking idea what tactic I might want to go with. I’m just throwing darts in the dark.  I also have no clue where in relation to anything else a unit is when I place them on the board. All you get is an arrow which means the enemies will be that way but sometimes that’s not even correct. For a game with “Tactics” in the title, this doesn’t seem to facilitate tactics very fucking well, does it? Guessing is not tactical. And it doesn’t even make sense. How do you not know what the environment looks like that you’re already in? Am I walking around with a fucking blindfold on?  

Random battles happen while traveling and again you can't see anything in the battle before you start. You can't reequip weapons or classes. Just pick and place people. And then deal with whatever the matchup is the best that you can. On top of that, there is no option to flee so you are literally trapped with the given scenario unless you exit the game. That is such bullshit. Realistically, you either need to give the player an out or don't force them to play Russian roulette. You can't expect them to make a bunch of random guesses EVERY SINGLE TIME and then make it work EVERY SINGLE TIME or it’s game over.

I also find it hilarious that so often the enemies you're facing are some nonsensical team of random assholes. Why are a bomb, some geomancers and a flock of birds conspiring together to attack me? At the very least, the animals should be attacking any humans indiscriminately and more likely ANYTHING indiscriminately. But they are literally collaborating to kill just me and my party. And most things, including animals, have the same intelligence as humans so they actually heal and cure each others’ status ailments. A chocobo will go heal some elves that you injured. You'll see a bomb go up to a random summoner and use a weak attack on them to cure them of charm without hurting them too bad. A BOMB does that, a creature named after an inanimate object and which possesses no logical collaborative association with said person. I didn’t even know you could cure charm with an attack until I witnessed this phenomenon. A fucking BOMB taught me this. This crosses the line over into fucking ludicrous. The game goes so, so far out of its way to be a shit to you that it completely abandons logic and reason. You’ve heard of the rule of cool? Where the amount of awesome something is is inversely proportional to the amount of suspension of disbelief it requires from the audience? This is the rule of bullshit where bullshit takes precedence over everything including logic and the laws of nature.

On several occasions you’ll come across some character in trouble and you’ll have to protect them from whoever or it’s game over. A lot of times you’ll start out on the board far away from the character and you’ll need to go join up with them quick before they get the shit beaten out of them. But on multiple occasions I’ve tried to play one of these battles and it was literally impossible to get within range of anyone before the character died. Well that’s real fucking nice. You, without reservation, just made me play a no-win scenario. What was the point of that? If I restarted the same scenario off the same way, It would all happen again in the exact same way. This is because of how the AI works. It always does the best possible move. The only way you can get through this type of problem is to somehow present the enemies with an alternative “better” move which distracts them from the other character. The only thing in your power to try is scramble your party members or formation until you find something that makes them deviate from those calculated actions. Hey guys, look over here! It’s a shitty fucking mage! He’s trying to cast a spell of some sort! You’re not going to to just let him get away with that, are you? It’s so stupid. This game is so flawed and I don’t know if I’ll ever have the constitution to pick it back up again and actually finish it.

There is one thing that I thought was awesome and actually kind of levels the playing field so to speak, (in some scenarios.) I believe it was an ability called “ignore terrain.” Basically it treats any terrain as level ground and takes the same number of moves to cross. Even if it’s something that’s twenty stories high. The downside is that it takes a significant amount of training to learn. I made a couple of my characters learn this when I got stuck on a scenario where archers and long range castors are camped up really high on a cathedral roof. It would take me so long to climb up there that I’d get reamed on the approach and be unable to withstand a fight once at the top. After playing the entire game up to this point in an uphill battle against enemies continuously holed up like little bitches behind their battlements and castles, I finally had something to bring them down to my level. Oh look, I just jumped onto your roof in two turns and started slapping your shit. Not so smug now, are you? If there are two passive abilities that you want every character to have, it’s auto-potion and this.

Cool World

This is another one of those instances where something came out in my childhood which caught my interest but I didn’t have the means of experiencing it. Then years later as a powerful adult with an internet connection and a jonesing to reclaim my childhood via expired media, I am suddenly reminded of its existence only to track it down and finally close the book on it, knowing once and for all that it’s shit. Thank you, Netflix.

Cool World is one of those movies that purposefully comes out around the same time as another movie with a similar premise but one is clearly better like Babe and Gordy or Armageddon and Deep Impact. This is Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Cool World. Actually, Cool World came out about four years later so I guess instead of being developed in tandem, it was just being a johnny-come-lately.

This is the story about a GI who comes home from World War II to his mom, the only person he has in the world. He wins a shiny new motorcycle in a poker game and takes his mom out for a spin. They get in a crash and she dies. And then right there on the scene he gets transported to Cool World, a more low brow and adult version of Toon Town. Why him? Why then and there? Because a cartoon professor did it. Why? Because reasons. Because reasons will likely be the only explanation to around 80% of your questions during the course of the movie.

Flash forward to the then present day 90’s where Jack sits in a prison cell, drawing characters from his hit comic book series, Cool World. Herein lies one of the main ignored issues. Cool World is established later as an alternate dimension that is independent of our reality and has existed since long before Jack was even born. In Cool World he’s actually recognized as “the guy that thinks he invented Cool World.” So if he’s never been there, never seen it, how did he create something with the same name, same look and same characters? How is it that when he draws Holli Would in his cell, it’s actually also Holli Would in Cool World and it comes alive and beckons him into the paper Take on Me video verbatim? Next he gets spirited away into Cool World. Then what? We don’t know. How did it happen? What did he do in there? How did he get back out later? This scene has no reason to exist. All it does is establish that humans can travel to Cool World… which was already established. This occurrence gets totally abandoned as we cut to something else and by the time we get back to Jack, he’s being released from prison.   

Going back to present day Frank, he’s somehow working for the Cool World Police Department after deciding to stay there for about the last fifty years up to this point in time. He hasn’t aged at all. (No one ages there.) One of his usual calls he gets is to go cock block Holli Would, (the poor man’s Jessica Rabbit.) She keeps trying to get real guys to come to Cool World so that she can have sex with them. If a human fucks a doodle… Pfff, fuck-a-doodle-do… If they diddle a doodle- damn it. If a human has sex with a doodle, (there’s no way to say this with a straight face,) the doodle becomes real. Why? Because reasons. Why is it bad? Because reasons. They needed some kind of conflict so they pulled one out of their ass.

Holli wants to be human because I guess it feels better. But she doesn’t really stop to think about the implications like not being immortal and eternally beautiful. Though I never saw a single humanoid man doodle in her world and there's only one other humanoid girl so really what the hell’s the point in that lonely existence? Man doodle. Man doodle. I hate the term doodle in this movie. “Toon” is probably copyrighted though. The fact that doodles can turn real also begs the question what about all the shtty looking freaks that populate Cool World? How would it work for them? Why are you making me imagine a person having sex with this? Who would do that? How? What would that even look like as real after they presumably transformed?

Most of the cartoon voices in the movie don’t really sound like good cartoon voices. The characters that populate the world have a real spectrum of art styles going on. There are some that look like they’re from any old WB short, or a Little Orphan Annie or Mutz strip. There are people that look like they’re from Popeye and then there are people that look more or less anatomically correct and human-like in the style of Don Bluth. The world around them seems to flip flop between Burtonesque and Gigeresque which is a huge contrast to many of the extras. Why are there so many different styles clashing here? I really want the whole thing to look like a cohesive universe but it doesn’t. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Toon Town was just one big collective place where all Cartoons ever made lived together so it made sense for everyone to look different. But this is a world not created by a bunch of different people (or anyone) so there should be some consistency in the same way the show Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends has a bunch of different weird creatures in it but they are all within the same art style.

Also, I like zoot suit wolves as much as the next guy but I think the maximum effectiveness of their presence in numbers is probably somewhere around three. Any more than that is diminishing returns.

All that being said, this looks awesome.

I also like the movie props that are semi cartoon and semi real in that they appear to be drawn but exist there on a two-dimensional plain like they’re on the side of a board

Another problem with Cool World, the world, is all of the contrived zaniness. The entire place is in complete anarchy. The movie will be having a scene and shit will be flying around in the background or doodles are clobbering each other the head with hammers and anvils in the foreground. This isn’t a place where characters live out their lives and you can write entertaining stories about it. This is just Wackyland. I realize it’s a cartoon world but they’re just going “Hey it’s a cartoon world! Look how cuhrayzee everything is! Woooooooo!

Why the hell is Frank the main character? I mean he had the potential to be but he just has little stake in the conflict. He’s trying to stop Holli but that doesn’t come off as all that interesting because they never explain why what she’s doing is bad. The only real motivation here is that toward the end Frank thinks she killed his partner. Jack, however does much better as the unwitting protagonist and antihero. His story is more interesting what with him being incarcerated, having a personal connection by being the comic book writer that thinks he invented Cool World, making the mistake of getting involved with a crazy cartoon lady and then rectifying his mistake at the end where he was blatantly made out to be the hero. But no, Frank has to be our story vehicle for some reason. It’s like having to watch Star Wars through the perspective of Chewbacca. Yeah, you could do it, you could even make it work but it still would have been much better the other way.

So Jack goes back to Cool World and has sex with Holli. She turns real and the two of them escape back into the ordinary world. (Jack lives in Vegas by the way.) When they appear in his house it’s accompanied with all manner of electric light shows. His two female next door neighbors come over to check on him and find that he’s apparently just hanging out in his house with his presumably new really weird girlfriend, Holli. I really feel like these two characters should have been introduced earlier in the movie. They’re obviously closish friends who care about Jack but because we’re just now learning about them, this seen and their reactions to what’s happening don’t have quite as much impact.

So, they go out on the town. Holli has little inhibitions or social grace. Back in Cool Worldshe liked singing and dancing so that’s what she does here. Before long, both he and she start exhibiting this weird phenomena where they begin to flicker in between doodle form and real form… which look nothing like them. Jack looks kind of like Wimpy from Popeye and Holli looks like… I don’t know, some stupid fucking clown. Needless to say they are a little dismayed by their collective identity crisis.

Holli runs off and just happens to come across the professor from earlier in the movie, now in the real world incognito. He tells her with some coercion that to fix the problem she has to merge the two worlds by unplugging a nexus point that happens to be at the top of a big neon billboard. Yeah, apparently there are just random nexus points or portals that lead from one world to the other scattered all over the place.

Frank comes back to the real world for the first time in fifty years to go after Holli. Now something else has to be addressed. The human world and everything in it is referred to in Cool World as “real.” So that implies that our world is used to justify Cool World by it’s own citizens as false, fake or secondary. In other words it has to be an imitation of something that already exists and is thus unnatural or manufactured. Otherwise any parallel dimension is just as “real” as any other. So this basically contradicts one of the few things they dared to actually explain. Which is it? Was Cool World created or not?

So anyway, Frank finds Holli and sees her odd blinking condition and then remarks “It’s happening.” What? What is happening? You didn’t explain what this shit was before and you aren’t doing it now. It might as well have never happened at all because you failed to give it meaning.

On the chase up to the sign, Holli knocks Frank off of the building and he hits the cement. Holli opens the nexus and a bunch of doodles from someone’s bad drug trip come spewing out all over the city like an alternate version of Fantasia’s Night on Bald Mountain segment. Jack transforms into a doodle super hero in the style of John K, and starts beating the shit out of everything, eventually fixing the nexus and restoring balance between the worlds. In the process he becomes trapped in some weird doodle limbo with Holli which is his dream and her nightmare.

Frank, who you write off as dead already, gets dragged by his unrequited love, (who wasn't worth mentioning up to this point,) back to Cool World where she actually watches him die. But that’s okay because they also forgot to mention that when you die in Cool World, you become a doodle and then I guess live forever. Because who gives a shit about things like exposition, foreshadowing and rules? If a conflict ever arises in your story, immediately resolve it with whatever you can make up on the spot. Or just forget it exists entirely. That’s always an option. This should have played out like the scene from American Horror Story where the girl gets hit by the car and her mom comes and frantically tries to drag her to the haunted house property before she dies so that she’ll be a ghost there. But in order to create a good scene like that, you have to ESTABLISH THE RULES BEFORE HAND. She acts like she knew this fact all along but conveniently forgot when it became important.

My final unanswered question is this: could he now cheat death by having sex with a human thereby turning back into a live human? I have to admit that as unclear and nonsensical as everything in this movie is, it sure does leave plenty of room for the viewer’s imagination.