While I don’t usually write reviews for TV shows or movies I watch, the friend I watched this with tossed out the idea once we finished watching it a little while ago, as I clearly had so much to say about (as I had already said at length during our post-episode discussion sessions). Mulling it over, I decided I did indeed have enough to say to at least take a crack at writing up my thoughts about the original Macross series, so I’m giving it my best shot here. We watched all 36 episodes of the original series at the pace of about 2 episodes every weekend over the course of about five months. Fair warning: This review will have spoilers galore, as it’s really impossible to relate my issues with Macross as a show without getting into specifics about its plot.
The 1982 anime, Super Dimension Fortress Macross is the story of the titular ship, the Macross, and the interstellar war that it takes part in in an imagined early twenty-first century. In the last couple years of the twentieth century, a mysterious interstellar object crash lands on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. That object is in fact an extra terrestrial space ship, and the massive tsunami from its impact as well as the fight as to who would take possession of it sparks a massive conflict known as the Unification Wars that take the better part of the next decade. At around 2008 (over two and a half decades from when the show was released), the Unification Wars have resulted in a united Earth government, and the Macross itself is just about ready to launch, having been under repair for nearly that entire time. However, just on its landing day, another extra terrestrial visitor comes to Earth, aliens known as the Zentradi who have been pursuing the Macross. Their attack on the island the Macross sits on culminates in that very ship initiating a “fold”, a worm hole jump, to escape the combat, but a technical mishap results in the Macross as well as the island and town surrounding it being un-folded out past Pluto in the depths of space. The Macross’s perilous trip back to Earth and the ensuing conflict with the Zentradi take the course of the show’s first 27 episodes, with the last 9 episodes detailing events two years after the end of the first 27. Our show follows a young man named Hikaru Ichijyo. Starting the series as just a teenager, he’s pulled into the Macross conflict and the military branch of the Macross after attending the ship’s opening ceremony at the request of his senpai, Roy Focker (a decorated veteran of the Unification Wars). Additionally we have Lynn Minmey, a young girl who loves to sing and who ends up becoming the Macross’s biggest cultural pop sensation after their trip into space, and we also have Misa Hayase, the captain of the bridge crew of the Macross. If nothing else, Macross would becoming most famous as a series for its love triangles, and the relationships between Hikaru, Minmay, and Misa are the core of this show (beyond its often confused politics). Macross had a very troubled production. Being inspired (as so many shows were) by the big sci-fi anime boom that the original Gundam launched, it would take passing between several publishers (each with their own visions of what they wanted this show to be vs. what the actual creators had in mind) and the help of several extra animation teams to get Macross to the finish line. On top of that, the publisher they ultimately found gave them only 27 episodes, but the first 3 episodes were such a massive hit that they then gave them another 9 (resulting in just how different and separated the last 9 episodes feel compared to the previous 27). With all this in mind, it is no wonder that the execution of the original TV series’s story is so scatterbrained as it tried to help pave the way for future plot-focused sci-fi anime that were more than just a “monster of the week” experience as past shows had so often been. However, understandable as its production difficulties may have been, that doesn’t really make Macross any easier to watch in the current year. Just as the Macross within the show was a large vehicle assembled as it went along, so too was the show that it starred in. The hurried production schedule has left a large and very visible aftermath along the whole of the show, resulting in a lot of larger plot details that are either swept away out of convenience, or stated suddenly with no prior established reason for their existence. The crew of the Macross will suddenly and inexplicably have key information about their adversaries, mechanical problems in the ship itself will undo themselves after enough episodes have passed, and the exact nature of the danger they’re all in will shift and change beyond what we’ve previously been shown. It all makes for an overall experience that will very often leave you asking yourself, “Wait, what? Since when did that happen?” But there is no casualty of this “write as you go” production schedule that is greater than the show’s characters and the themes they represent. This is a larger web of relationships so big and messy that it’s honestly hard to know where to start, but we may as well start with Hikaru and Minmay. Hikaru gets tangled up in a vague romance with Minmay that takes over a lot of the show’s first two thirds, but Hikaru’s career in the military and Minmay’s rising pop-star successes keep driving them apart. Hikaru is a confused young man trying to balance his own feelings about the life he lives and the conflict he’s a part of and the girl he loves. We get a ton of windows into Hikaru’s frustrations, but very few into Minmay’s. It’s ultimately very unclear that she has much agency in anything beyond what her managers tell her to do, and that’s especially true once her cousin (and eventual sort-of boyfriend) Kaifun enters the picture. Once we get to the show’s first sort-of finale at episode 27, Minmay’s reveal to Hikaru that she only ever thought of them as friends (despite all the romantic dates and such that they went on) comes off as nothing short of absurdity in service of the plot, but with the momentum the plot has at that point, it gives Hikaru some sort of closure and allows him to pursue Misa as a more responsible romantic partner. It’s hurried, sloppy writing, but at least it seems to serve a kind of purpose. Near the mid-point of the overall show and especially after the 2-year time skip, Hikaru has matured into a much more logical and duty-driven young man. He still makes mistakes here and there in his interpersonal life, but he is virtually always correct when it comes to the military conflict he has such an important role in. This is not true, however, for Kaifun, Minmay’s cousin/boyfriend and eventual manager. Kaifun is positioned as a sort of romantic rival for Hikaru, but he’s also positioned as a kind of ideological rival as well. Kaifun is staunchly anti-military. Not just anti-war, but anti-military, and he takes every opportunity he can get to rail against the military that he sees as single-handedly continuing this conflict simply because it can. However, we the viewers know that this is nonsense. The Macross, its crew, and all of humanity are locked in a defensive war for their own survival. Early on, you could attempt to write off Kaifun’s words as simply the result of his ignorance of the larger stakes of the conflict, but this becomes impossible to excuse as the story goes on and he becomes a more and more important figure in the story. Other characters (such as Hikaru and Minmay) express similarly baffling statements at times, asking in frustration when the fighting will end as if their superiors have any choice in the matter. It all results in a story that comes off as incredibly pro-military, as anyone who expresses ideas of pacifism or non-violence are either making clearly illogical statements or shown to be simply wrong in their assertions (either implicitly or explicitly). Kaifun in particular feels like a far-right conservative’s idea of a “useful idiot” pacifist, where their calls for non-violence are so illogical that it just plays exactly into the enemy’s hands, as this is shown to us over and over with Kaifun and others. This is a show that has very messy themes, but the supremacy and moral virtue of the military is one very consistent theme throughout the entire show. Adding to this very conservative vibe that Macross has is its treatment of its aliens, the Zentradi, and their strengths and weaknesses. The Zentradi are a warrior race of giants who know only war. They know no culture (no literature, song, or fiction), and exist only to fight. Men and women of the Zentradi are forbidden to serve on the same ships, and they know nothing of love either. They can’t even repair their own ships or vehicles they’re so single-minded in their fighting. Now the first 27 episodes focus on this a fair bit, as the “culture shock” they experience upon being exposed to human culture, especially Minmay’s songs and ideas/depictions of love & romance, gives them the realization that there is something else to live for other than fighting, and it leads to huge defections among their ranks to the point that a lot of them choose to size-down and try to live among humans. However, this isn’t just “beauty taming the beast”. Repeatedly, we are shown that the Macross and the earthlings are willing to use culture not as an olive branch but explicitly as a psychological weapon. It’s how they defeat the larger Zentradi fleet in the climax of the 27th episode, and many times before then it’s used similarly to catch off guard and ambush other Zentradi enemies. Culture and love are shown time and time again to not be some illuminating light to let us escape from constant war, but as weapons of war no different than any bullet or missile. This gets even more problematic and troubled once we get into the 2-year time skip and the last nine episodes. Zentradi (both big and small) have chosen to live among humans and indulge in a shared culture together. This is especially true after, earlier in the show, we are given confirmation that Zentradi and Earthlings are effectively biologically identical. This even extends to a sized-down female Zentradi falling in love with an ace pilot among the humans, and them getting married in a very public ceremony. Their union is explicitly used in-universe as not just proof that Earthlings and Zentradi can get along, but as a propaganda tool. They are even even shown to have had a baby together during the time skip. However, regardless of all of this, the show takes very explicit steps to show that the Zentradi are biologically tied to violence. There are some small attempts here and there done to suggest that the long Earthling history of warfare shows that they’re no different, but these ring very hollow when the whole premise of the last 9 episodes is that Zentradi, unable to assimilate into normal society due to their biological need for violence and warfare, begin defecting to a surviving Zentradi commander with whom they launch a rebellion against the new Earth government. A major plot element of the show, one that is never refuted, is that while these aliens, these foreigners, SOME of them can assimilate and be normal and peaceful like us, ALL of them still carry some risk of falling victim to their biological urges for violence, and it’s just not safe for them to live among peaceful Earthlings. They even are explicitly shown to be using the machine repair skills that the Earthlings taught them to build tools for their rebellion, and say things like “this will make them regret teaching us ‘culture’”, casting doubt on the value of rehabilitating former enemies like this at all. It’s all an extremely xenophobic and racist message that also ties into the earlier pro-military messages. The military and its actions of segregation and skepticism are shown to ultimately always be right compared to those who wish to give the benefit of the doubt to self-realization and self-governance, because anyone who gives the good aliens the benefit of the doubt and stands against the military government just turns into a sitting duck to be killed and attacked by all of those bad aliens out there. The military is always right, and aliens, even the good ones, are always most safely viewed with some level of suspicion of their unquenchable base urges for warfare. Then, last but certainly not least, we have the show’s approach to gender, love, and romance, best shown through the very troubled character of Misa Hayase and her relationship to Hikaru. Misa is a competent and very accomplished woman in the hierarchy of the Macross military, and is one year Hikaru’s senior. Her and Hikaru have a long, troubled courtship over the series that at least in part has to do with some similar things they’re both working through. She too has a past lover that she’s been trying to forget, and she also has trouble balancing her important military job with her personal love life. By the time we reach the original climax of episode 27, they’ve fallen into something resembling a quiet, mutual understanding of affection, even if there’s nothing explicit. However, as with most trouble in this show, the real difficulties begin once we reach the time skip. Once we skip forward two years, Misa is hopelessly emotional over her non-relationship with Hikaru almost constantly. Apparently, between now and the time episode 27 takes place, they had never actually started dating or explicitly expressed their affection for one another, and she’s just been building a stockpile of passive aggression until the time we rejoin the story in episode 28. Unlike Hikaru, who especially post time-skip is shown to be competent, logical, and driven by his sense of duty, Misa is a constant storm of emotional impulses that frequently endanger her and her comrades and cost countless innocent people their lives. At one point, she nearly goes to Hikaru to tell him how she feels, but upon seeing him simply talking with Minmay (someone he hasn’t seen at all in nearly two years), she instead turns heel immediately and sobs all the way home. Speaking of Minmay, she also receives a very odd character change in the last nine episodes. Where she was largely devoid of much inner life or character motivation in the previous 27 episodes, she now has a far more fleshed out and better character. She’s matured a lot, and has grown increasingly distant from Kaifun who, in addition to being a useful idiot pacifist, is now inexplicably incredibly greedy for cash and compensation as the manager/boyfriend of a famous pop star (as if the viewer needed more reason to dislike him). She repeatedly fights and tries to leave Kaifun and try things again with Hikaru, who she has only now realized she truly does have romantic feelings for. Despite the utterly baffling final scene with Kaifun (as he spouts wisdom utterly out of character towards her in an exchange that would frankly make more sense if he were the one being chastised instead of her), Minmay actually manages to really determine what she wants in life and goes back to Hikaru for good. She realizes she loves him, and Hikaru hasn’t been able to stop thinking about her since they last parted. The only real things you could call mistakes that Hikaru makes in the post-time skip period is repeatedly (and somewhat heartlessly) blowing off Misa to instead hang out/go on dates with Minmay. What ultimately seems to draw Hikaru back to Misa doesn’t so often seem to be love, but guilt. Meanwhile, Misa has been getting relationship advice from Claudia (Roy Focker’s fiance) that is easily one of the most explicitly poorly aged thing in the show. While Macross’s romance subplots have airs of this, Claudia’s story of her initial courtship with Roy really exemplifies how much this show pushes the idea of “no means yes” when it comes to relationships between men and women. Despite acting like a pig to her constantly, Claudia is still head over heels for Roy despite him doing virtually nothing to earn it, and her only real trouble is not knowing how to tell him how she feels in return (and this is exactly the situation Misa finds herself in with Hikaru). When Misa actually finally builds up the courage to tell Hikaru how she feels, he and Minmay are already living together they’ve become so close. Minmay is completely in love with Hikaru, and it takes some completely out of character Kaifun-like useful idiot anti-military nonsense from Minmay to try and plead with the viewer to not see just how heartless this whole situation is. Keep in mind, Minmay has lost her love for singing because of Kaifun’s greed and abuse, and she has thrown all of her career away to be with Hikaru. As a result, despite how heartless Hikaru was towards Misa earlier, he and especially Misa are FAR more heartless towards Minmay in the climax of the show, and the only way that the episode seems able to break the tension is with a final enemy invasion to force the scene to end, because otherwise we’d need to deal with just how little sense it makes for Hikaru to leave the loving and very emotionally matured Minmay for the emotionally mercurial and obsessive Misa. Hikaru’s ultimate reason for choosing Misa feels something closer to “well, we work together, so this just makes sense” rather than any “we live in different worlds” that was the original 27 episodes sort-of justification for Hikaru and Minmay growing apart. This is really where it all coalesces. Misa is shown to be weak in both reason and ability because of her emotional state, and it’s only once she overcomes these emotions and instead chooses duty (to protect the Macross, to do her military job) that she is able to do good things again. This mirrors very well the transition Hikaru went through earlier in the show as well. Once he’s able to put the conflict in key focus instead of obsessing over girls constantly, he’s able to find success in both duty and love, as now the women in his life he used to chase now chase after him. Following Roy Focker’s advice from earlier in the show, that the best thing in life is to fight in the military to protect the women in your life, Hikaru finally finds success and happiness. This is a show that first and foremost glorifies the military (its power structures, governments based around it, the relationships it facilitates) and portrays emotion as a point of weakness. Those who feel emotion and let it get in the way of their duty, in the way of the military, are just messing everything up, compromising their ability to accomplish anything, and effectively just aiding the enemy who are only just waiting to take advantage of their bleeding heart notions. That really is my ultimate problem with Macross. Sure, it’s a mess of a show plot-wise, and it’s not particularly pretty either. Characters change their motivations seemingly with very little motivation, the military political situation changes just as conveniently, and you really just need to not pay much attention and let the momentum of the show carry you if you want to enjoy it on a plot level. As for its aesthetics, some of the less talented studios who assisted in animating this left error-prone and ugly looking episodes strewn throughout the entire series. These are things unavoidable when talking about Macross, and are largely just the result of the troubled production it went through to exist. But the real devil in the details here is in the writing. Given the political culture of the early 80’s, I can honestly understand, to a degree, why Macross would’ve found such popularity in the past. But the messages it pushed were bad then and they’re still bad now. Its age isn’t even a particularly good excuse, as there are plenty of other sci-fi anime of the early 80’s (like one of my favorites, Galaxy Cyclone Brygar) that have much healthier and better aged theming and messaging. Intentional or otherwise by its creators, the themes of Macross have said no to more anti-war and progressive sci-fi anime and gone with a staunchly conservative approach instead. Macross is a show that loves the *vibes* of Vietnam War-style anti-war stories. Stories where the government is waging a war that's completely meaningless beyond pure aggression, and raging against the military industrial complex and the government enabling it is righteous work for good. But the problem here is that Macross either just fundamentally lacks cognizance as to why those types of anti-military resistance apply to a Vietnam War story or just doesn't care. It loves the style, but doesn't understand (or doesn't care about) the substance at all. All of the anti-war/anti-military pacifism in this show, from Kaifun to Hikaru, makes a lot more sense if you view it through the lens of a Vietnam War movie. The kind of conflict where "when will the killing stop?" makes sense as a complaint from a soldier towards his superior if their side is the aggressor. It's gibberish if he's on the defending team. What we end up with in Macross is equivalent to if you made a Vietnam War movie where you have a Viet Cong soldier raging at their superior to just end the war already. It makes no sense and comes off as FAR more pro-military and anti-pacifism in how nonsensical it makes those arguments look, but that's the story Macross is, and it's frankly disgusting. Despite all of the trouble in the production, despite all of the animation troubles, the plot of the first two thirds having needed to be condensed, last third of the show being written way later, all of that, the show still maintains that pro-military, very conservative message from the beginning to the end. This is a show that is very right-wing, very xenophobic, and very sexist (despite what all of the women in the main cast might lead you to believe otherwise). As a result, at least for the messaging, unless you’re of a very conservative bent, you’re likely not going to like the writing in Macross at all. If you’re anything like me, you’ll likely find it quite abhorrent. But even if you agree with the messaging, then we run into the problems born from the troubled production, and then we just have a show that’s paced very badly and plotted even worse, and it doesn’t even look terribly nice as a last consolation. With a very wide range of animation that runs the gamut from great to awful, dreadful pacing, and a reprehensible moral compass, Macross is a show I really cannot recommend at all. The most generous possible reading of it I could give places it at a very solidly mediocre mess, and even then, with all of the far better sci-fi anime (even from the same era) that's out there, your time is worth more than this. If you’re a huge sci-fi fan, perhaps you’ll find it worth your while to watch it if only to get a better grasp of its place in history, but outside of that scenario, Super Dimension Fortress Macross is a show worth staying far, far away from.
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I’ve really been in the mood to play some more PS1 RPGs lately, and I’ve also been meaning to play Wild Arms for a little while now. It’s an RPG series that I’ve seen around for years but I feel I just never hear anyone actually talk about. Given that they managed to make like six of these, I figured it was about time I actually check some of them out, and what better place to start than from the beginning~. It took me about 34 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
Wild Arms is the story of three characters in the world of Falgaia. You have Rodi the wanderer, Cecilia the princess, and Zack the treasure hunter. You start the game by playing out each of the three (in whatever order you like) as they start on their own, but they very quickly meet up and begin adventuring together in this (at times quite shockingly dark and grim) setting of western fantasy, high technology, and (surprisingly) only just a bit of wild west flavor thrown in there too. I understand the wild west theming and stuff gets more and more present as the series goes on, but it nonetheless struck me as very surprising just how little there actually is in this first entry with how strongly I’d associated Wild Arms as “the cowboy RPG” up to this point XD. The setting isn’t terribly unique, and neither is a lot of the plot (though I certainly don’t think that in and of itself is a bad thing, mind you). It draws *very* heavily from anime and RPG narrative devices that were popular at the time (with some inspiration from Chrono Trigger some of the most obvious of it), and at points it can be downright distracting just how much you might be thinking “I’ve seen this before” x3. That said, it still honestly mixes this stuff with more novel elements in a way that I think manages to be executed pretty well, even if none of it is incredibly unique on its own. Writing-wise, Wild Arms is a very mixed bag, but the kind of thing you’d expect from a relatively green company (the staff had a couple RPGs under their belt, but nothing like this as Media.Vision currently existed) on the relatively early PlayStation (barely a month before FF7 in late 1996). It’s a story about self discovery, a story about revenge, a story about love and what it means to fight for what you believe in, but it handles all of this rather imperfectly. Some of this is due to how the three stories of the main characters aren’t blended together *that* well (Zack in particular sorta has His Own Deal compared to Rodi and Cecilia who are much better narratively intertwined both in plot and themes), but the biggest reason I’d say is that they made the frankly inexplicable decision to make Rodi a silent protagonist. This might’ve worked well if he was anything like a player avatar, but he simply isn’t. He’s exactly as important as the other two protagonists, but he just inexplicably doesn’t speak, which means that all of his big character moments need to be communicated by long sections of other characters effectively speaking *for* him to tell the player what his whole ass deal is. That’s not to say the story is bad-bad though. This game still manages to have some moments that are really striking and touching moments (like Cecilia & Rodi’s dream, one of my favorite parts). For late ’96, I think it’s still a pretty well written if quite imperfect game, but it’s not one I’m surprised has ultimately gotten quite buried among the avalanche of much better written RPGs to follow on the PS1 in the years following it. Mechanically, it’s a very bog-standard turn-based RPG. You go around and explore, you do turn-based battles. There are a couple of unique aspects here and there, like how you gain Cecilia’s spells just as you want from a big list as you find more spell tags to trade in for new spells (which means they don’t scale great and is honestly a pretty less than good bit of design) or Zack’s new techniques by clues you find in the world, but outside of that, it should all be extremely familiar to anyone who has played even a few old RPGs. The difficulty balancing is pretty rough, however, with most boss fights and such not being terribly hard unless they have an annoying status effect, but then there are bosses peppered throughout the game that you just need to get lucky to beat. Whether it’s because there are two of them and they both hit like a truck or because they happen to have a really nasty status effect (or even instant death from which you never get any defense), it makes for some very frustrating difficulty blocks at certain points. The puzzle design is also absolutely brutal in some places, and I absolutely recommend using a guide if you’re stuck, because this game loves environmental puzzles (a lot like Lufia 2 does), but damn if some of them aren’t viscous. It’s all a mixed bag, but it’s more often good than it is bad enough that I can still recommend it. Presentation-wise, I think this is honestly some of the game’s strongest points. While battles are 3D (and look pretty darn cool with some really sick creature design for such an early PS1 game), the rest of the game is all 2D. It very often has the feel of what I called a “super Super Nintendo game”, even down to having what look a LOT like Mode 7 effects (and even a Mode7 airship! XD). But sprites are well drawn and expressive with lots of little bespoke animations for certain scenes, especially on the main characters. The music is also excellent as well. It has a very RPG of RPGs sorta feel to it, and gave me a lot of both Final Fantasy and Zelda vibes in a way that is absolutely a compliment. Verdict: Recommended. While Wild Arms 1 has a pretty good amount of flaws or problems, it’s still an all around quite enjoyable time. There are certainly better RPGs to spend your time with, particularly on the PS1, but you’ll still probably have quite a good time with Wild Arms as long as you don’t need a narrative or systems that are particularly unique or distinct. Wild Arms still manages to stand alright all these years later, even if it’s been surpassed quite thoroughly since then~. I watched this movie a few months back with a close friend of mine, and it got me thinking about this GameBoy game of it. I’d always heard that this was quite a good GameBoy game, especially for a licensed game, and this seemed like a great excuse to check it out, but finding a Japanese copy proved difficult enough that I was ready to give up on it and focus on other things. But my friend is such a sweetie that she actually found a copy local to her and bought it for me! I played it on Twitch via my Super GameBoy, and it took me just about 2 hours to get to the end of the English (British, technically ;b) version of the game.
While the story of this does ostensibly mirror the film’s (even down to recreating the introduction of the film quite charmingly), in grand 8-bit fashion, they add a LOT more action and combat to things XD. The only story really in the game is that title crawl at the start, and the submarine kinda sorta following the path from Russia to America that the sub takes in the film over the course of its 8 stages, but it hardly matters. Given that it’s a 1991 GameBoy action game, licensed or not, a good or compelling story really isn’t what you’d expect here, and the game is perfectly fine even with such a threadbare story x3 The gameplay is you, as the titular submarine “The Red October”, dodging all manner of (Soviet, I would presume?) enemy submarines, destroyers, aircraft carriers, jets, helicopters, and giant crazy undersea fortresses and robo sea mines in your quest to reach the end of each stage and make it to America! In your arsenal, you have equipped unlimited front shooting, weak missiles, a limited number of very powerful heat seeking torpedoes (which can even heat seak out of the water and into the air! XD), and the ever valuable EMP to slip by distant enemies while mostly avoiding their AI (as well as making their heat seeking missiles inactive). It takes a bit of getting used to how the Red October controls, as stuff like tapping left or right twice to change direction and only once to just move that direction without turning has a real learning curve to it, but thankfully you have a big radar of enemy movement at the bottom of the screen to help you avoid ambushes (and it even points out power ups too~). Stages are well designed, and even though the difficulty is a bit front loaded, it’s got a pretty darn good (certainly for the time) difficulty curve as well. I was honestly shocked I was able to beat it over just 3 tries (one of which was game over-ing basically instantly XD) over two hours, but I was certainly happy that I did it, and I had a fun time too! X3 The presentation is pretty much what you’d expect for a quite early life GameBoy game, but even still it does the job very well. Enemies and bosses as well as their projectiles are easily distinguishable (at least via a Super GameBoy screen), and your little sub marine is never confusedly stuck against terrain or anything. The music is also quite impressively good, with some stages having some really surprisingly good tracks. Though nothing can, of course, top the incredible 8-bit rendition of the Soviet National anthem on the title screen xD Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you’re in the market for some 8-bit GameBoy action, this is a great place to find it! It’s not too difficult and not too long, but it’s also unique enough and well balanced enough to be a good time well worth trying out (and you don’t even need to have seen the movie to enjoy it either, even if it is a movie really worth watching x3). And so came to an end my time with Shadow Hearts. In truth, this game is actually the reason I started playing Shadow Hearts this summer to begin with. Looking into who wrote the Mana Kehmia games after playing them earlier this year, I was surprised to see that they actually share their main scenario writer (Toshiyuki Suzuki) with this game, and it was even his first lead scenario writing credit as well! That was simply too much for my curiosity to bear, and I set out to play these games from the first one (minus Koudelka, as you can see ;b). It took me about 43.5 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game and get the good ending on real hardware.
Unlike the other two Shadow Hearts games, we’re not following Yuri anymore. This story follows Johnny Garland, a young man working at his own detective agency to try and discover the truth to his mysterious childhood. On a particularly supernatural case, he fatefully crosses paths with Shania and Nahtan when they save his life from a mysterious monster. Johnny quickly becomes bound to their quest as they try and find the cause of the mysterious portals that give form to these monsters (as well as why Johnny can suddenly turn his simple dagger into a light saber X3). During my time with Shadow Hearts 2, I couldn’t help but feel time and time again that the story would’ve been a lot stronger had they not tried to continue Yuri’s story but simply made a whole new story in the same setting, and From the New World finally gave me exactly that. Where Shadow Hearts 1 is a game about the struggle to overcome (or not) depression and despair, and Shadow Hearts 2 is more a story about accepting (or not) that you just can’t change the past, From the New World is a story about identity and why people fight for the things they fight for; why do they do what they do? Johnny and Shania’s relationship and goals are contrasted with the antagonists in a far better and more refined way than Yuri and the antagonist of Shadow Hearts 2 were. While it’s still a bit of a messy story and it muddles its themes here and there, I think this is a much better follow up to Shadow Hearts 1 than 2 managed to be. That’s not to say that FtNW isn’t without its own interesting quirks and foibles though. As the earlier light saber comment perhaps implied, this game is cranking up the campiness meter a fair bit compared to earlier games. Where Shadow Hearts 1 and 2 have their fun with anachronisms and pop culture references, FtNW goes even more so. FtNW even manages to use real world people in its story in a way far better done than 2 did, whether for comedy or otherwise. I personally thought the comedy in this game was *way* better than 2 ever managed (and I even often described it not as a more comedic Shadow Hearts 2, but a Shadow Hearts 2 with actually funny comedy), I can see the references making this game feel of a different sort to its predecessor (especially because a lot of the references in 2 are easier to get for a Japanese audience, where FtNW had a lot more stuff easily noticed by a global audience). The elephant in the room, however, really is how FtNW handles its depiction of the “new world”, that being North and South America, and particularly the First Nations peoples in its story. Shania and Nahtan are both First Nations peoples, so they’re a major part of the story from the word go, and I would say this game has a complicated relationship with how it depicts them. On one hand, this game honestly clears a lot of bars for representation that a ton of other media (from Japan or otherwise) doesn’t clear. For starters, it actually calls them “Native Americans” and not “Indians”. It also lets them be real characters in the story. Nahtan and especially Shania are characters with motivations, arcs, and flaws just like anyone else, and even the scads of First Nations NPCs you interact with get to be characters too. They’re not just boiled down to “Mystical Natural Connected Plot Knowers” like so many other video games (particularly Japanese ones) and media treat them. They’re never standard enemies in dungeons, and violence towards them (particularly that by white characters) is treated with the horror and gravity it deserves. This is not a game completely ignorant of the nature of the peoples that it’s depicting, and that was honestly very refreshing to see. However, on the other hand, this is (like a lot of other games and media) ultimately not terribly concerned with accuracy or respect in regards to the more finer details of its representations. I may be very white myself, but I’ve read up enough on this stuff (not to mentioned talked with native friends about it) to know that you don’t need to look much farther than their character designs to get the idea that this means that we end up with some stereotypes that are not always negative but are certainly far from inspired. Nahtan being a hunter (his side-quest being cryptid hunting, no less) who is a strong, stoic man of few words, for starters. For Shania’s part, she’s the fusion-using character in this game, and her first fusion is the Thunder Bird (a very important religious symbol and not the kind of thing you just portray in a video game as a cool powerful monster). All of the story important women are (as Shadow Hearts tends to do, thankfully) adults, but they’re all very sexualized in this game. This means that the particular degree of sexualization that Shania receives isn’t unique to the standards of the game (or even the series), but she is nonetheless still falling into the trope of sexualizing native bodies. Heck, one of the first dead give aways to this is that while Nahtan does have brown eyes, Shania’s eyes are bright blue (and this is never mentioned or pointed out at all. It’s just a casual aspect of her character). While FtNW thankfully tones back the homophobia a lot from 2 (though it is certainly still there) as well as the more explicit racist stereotypes, the aspects of simply not caring about the accuracy of what they’re depicting covers FtNW from top to bottom. While it’s not from malice (if anything they’re trying quite a bit harder than what I’d consider typical at the time to be respectful), there’s still a ton of rough stuff here simply by nature of being too ignorant of the subject matter to actually portray it properly, and while it didn’t bother me terribly much, I can certainly see it making others uncomfortable at the very least. Mechanically, this is also a huge improvement from Shadow Hearts 2 that gives that system the fine tuning it really needed. They actually made FtNW on a really tight time schedule compared to Shadow Hearts 2, but with the level of polish the mechanics have, you’d honestly never guess it. We still have the Judgment Rings, the sanity points, and the positional combat, but we’ve polished that all up very significantly. Most importantly, combos are now handled regardless of position, so they’re something you’d actually want to use a lot more because they’re so much more intuitive. Now, as you take and deal damage, you build up Stock Points, and 1 point of stock can be spent to do a combo or do a double turn (taking two turns now at the cost of your next turn being pushed back, a lot like the Bravely Default games later would). The thing is, not only can you do this more easily, but enemies can too, and denying your enemies stock is a major part of boss fights in particular that just makes the whole system far more fun and engaging. The spell crest system has also been replaced with the star chart system, which while very similar is handled far better, and it’s a system actually worth using this time. The whole game is just balanced and fine tuned a lot better than 2, making for a far more fun play experience overall on every level, as far as I’m concerned. For presentation, FtNW manages to achieve a much better happy medium than Shadow Hearts 2 did in regards to making it look less like a fancy PS1 game but also keeping a lot of the aesthetic styles that makes Shadow Hearts what it is (as well as having music just as good as always~). So while we still have a quite anime-based art style, we also have character and especially environment design that makes it feel a lot less generic than a lot of Shadow Hearts 2 did. Additionally, and imo most importantly, we’ve gone back and made enemies far more gruesome and monstrous, far more like they were in Shadow Hearts 1. We finally have big, awful fleshy horrors to fight again against instead of big cartoonish looking monsters, and it makes for a much better and far more “Shadow Hearts” experience as a result. Verdict: Highly Recommended. While I certainly think that (even *if* you were to set aside the more problematic elements of the narrative) From the New World is yet another Shadow Hearts game that doesn’t manage to surpass the original narratively, this is a much more worthy successor to the brand than Shadow Hearts 2 was. It honestly boggles my mind why people like Shadow Hearts 2 so much when I’d argue it’s so easily the weakest of the trilogy, quite frankly XD. But regardless, while I think that this game certainly has its warts and negative aspects, it is an excellent game that manages to stand out from the pack of excellent PS2 RPGs. It may not be as good as Shadow Hearts 1 in certain estimations, but it is absolutely a game worth playing just as much (and you don’t even need to have played the earlier games in the series to appreciate it)~ After Shadow Hearts 1 it was on to the sequel! Called Shadow Hearts: Covenant in English, this is a direct sequel to the previous game in the series (and specifically a sequel the bad ending of Shadow Hearts 1). Though the first game came out in 2001, the sequel ended up coming out all the way in 2004, so a lot of time had passed in the gaming world by then, and the sequel to Shadow Hearts absolutely does its best to keep up with them (with varying degrees of success). It took me about 52 hours to get through the game in Japanese on real hardware.
Picking up about six months after the bad ending of the last game, Yuri managed to save the world but failed to save the love of his life. In these opening months of World War 1, Yuri (called “God Slayer” by those familiar with his deeds from the first game) is doing his best to find purpose protecting a small central European village from the ravages of the war. However, when an officer of the Vatican and a German minor officer come to that small village on the hunt for Yuri, he’s pulled back into a larger conflict whether he likes it or not. I have very mixed feelings on the narrative of Shadow Hearts 2. Over the course of its two discs, though I more or less had a positive impression by the ending, the main takeaway I also left with was that the developers really just had no really great idea on how to make a sequel to Shadow Hearts. Almost the entirety of the first disc (which is 20~25 hours of gameplay, mind you) is spent effectively just getting the party together with very little in the way of actually meaningful storytelling. The villains of the first disc have quite little to do with the villains of the second disc, and it makes the first disc a real chore to get through for someone like me who was expecting something more, well, something more like Shadow Hearts 1. The second disc actually starts to feel like what you’d expect a sequel to Shadow Hearts 1 to look like, but even then, just how much wasted breath we’ve spent getting here is dragging the story down all the way. Yuri already had his character arc basically completely finished in Shadow Hearts 1’s good ending, so a lot of the better bits of Shadow Hearts 2’s writing are just going over those same plot beats (and almost always more poorly than the first game did it), and the good writing that is there is often stuck between plot aspects (often borne from the careless use of fictionalized versions of real historical figures) that needlessly confuse and complicate the themes they otherwise seem to be going for. In yet another step of being a quite poor narrative sequel, it does some really serious ret-conning of characters and events from the previous game that, while serviceable enough utilities in its own story, wind up coming off as extremely strange and outright wrong in regards to the story it’s allegedly building upon. Being that, like the first game, this is first and foremost Yuri’s story as opposed to each character having their own arcs that build towards a larger whole, Yuri’s story being so poorly paced and muddy makes for a much weaker story as a result. None of this is helped by just how clumsy and blunt this game’s writing is compared to the first either. Now, while I’m a firm believer that you absolutely don’t need to have subtle storytelling to have good storytelling, and quite often a blunt approach is simply better, the way Shadow Hearts 2 goes about this stuff feels more born from simple incompetence than a more distinct narrative choice. The story basically looks at the camera at several points to tell you Yuri’s Whole Deal as a character, and it comes off very unnaturally and at sharp contrast with how much more cleverly the first game handled such things. While this game is a very similar mix of darkness & campiness that the first game has, it runs into the problem that a lot of its humor (though certainly not all) just isn’t that funny, either due to distasteful subject matter or just clumsy comedy writing. On that note, the homophobic stereotypes present in Shadow Hearts 1 are also even worse here and even more present, and this game manages to get in some pretty damn distasteful racist caricatures in the mix as well. In the end, it’s a very mixed bag that, while still quite decent in its own right, really aggressively fails to fill the big shoes its predecessor left for it despite sticking its own landing decently well. Mechanically, while we’re still a turn-based RPG based around the sanity points and Judgment Ring system introduced in the first game, there’s quite a lot more here introduced to attempt to make Shadow Hearts stand out among the very competitive RPG crowd of the mid-life PS2. The biggest changes come from spell crests and the introduction of positional combat. For spell crests, instead of characters just having a list of spells they slowly learn things from as they level up as they did in the first game, now you collect crests over the course of the game that can be equipped to characters (other than Yuri, as he’s got his fusions still which level up just like they did in the first game as you infuse souls of defeated monsters into them) that give that character the spells associated with that crest. It’s very much like Materia work in many of the Final Fantasy games of the PS1 era, but a bit clumsier. It can be quite hard to keep track of what spells you have and where, and ultimately I just sorta stopped caring because the really just isn’t hard enough most of the time to encourage you to really get to grips with the crest system. Then we have the position-based combat. Instead of the class “your row vs. their row” combat that the first game had, now your characters will automatically move about the battle to attack different enemies as you direct them to. We even have an FFX-style turn order timer to help you take into accordance what slower or faster attacks you’ll want to use or how you’ll try to delay or advance enemy attacks and such. If your allies happen to be (or are directed to) stand close to one another, however, they can do a combo attack, where you chain their attacks together regardless of where they are on the turn timer. However, while the combo system can let you do some interesting things with turn order, given that you need to use a turn to set them up, it usually just adds up to a lot of extra button presses (though you can put together hot keys to activate them super fast if you want to, though I never bothered) for not much actual extra effect. Like with the spells crests, the difficulty of the game just never really pushes you to bother interacting with this system outside of disrupting when enemies try to do combos, which itself doesn’t really necessitate doing combos yourself. The difficulty balancing of the whole game is honestly quite poor, being very needlessly brutal through the first handful of bosses, and then being incredibly easy all the way through the end of the game. Shadow Hearts 2 has some very ambitious changes to the Shadow Hearts formula, but like with the narrative design, the mechanical design too just ends up feeling half-baked. Lastly, we have the presentation which is also a *very* mixed bag. On one hand, by its own merits, Shadow Hearts 2 looks quite good for a mid-life PS2 game. It uses all of that space between its two discs to throw together a lot of good music, really good voice work, and some really impressive looking pre-rendered cutscenes (with the one of Yuri and the airship being a personal favorite). On the other hand, as a sequel to Shadow Hearts, the presentation of this game was extremely disappointing. Shadow Hearts 1 has a very distinctive art style very evocative of the creepy, atmospheric Koudelka that it’s a sorta-sequel to. Its more realistic character models add to that atmosphere just as much as its super creepy monster design does. Shadow Hearts 2, on the other hand, really drops the ball on that front. We’ve completely abandoned the more realistic graphical style for a far more generic looking, anime-inspired art style that feels far more interested in chasing trends than it does being more Shadow Hearts. This is doubled down on even further in a way that doesn’t even matter for if you played the previous game are not, as this game just outright includes bits of cutscenes or screenshots of certain events that happened in the last game. But as Shadow Hearts 2 has a completely different art style than the first, these come off as incredibly dissonant and strange as the player (who may’ve never played the first game) is meant to understand that that tall, lanky guy in the coat is meant to be Yuri. One of the best examples of how unsure and self-conscious this game is can be shown in how the game so readily ruins a great original idea. There are some parts of the game where Yuri fills his new companions in on events that happened in the first game. This is portrayed in pre-rendered cutscenes of crappy drawings of events from the last game to try and get across that Yuri isn’t too great at portraying this stuff to his friends. It’s a great little touch and quite funny too. The only thing is that, I guess just in case the player is completely incapable of abstract thought, is that you have a picture-in-picture in the corner of that cutscene as it appeared in the first game, both completely ruining the stylistic choice of the crappy drawings as well as confusing the player with depictions of characters and places that look nothing remotely like how the game they’re playing looks. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I think I’d more easily give a simple “Recommended” to this game if it weren’t letting down its predecessor so aggressively. Shadow Hearts 1 is a really excellent game, but god damn does its sequel fail to live up to it in just about every way it conceivably could. Shadow Hearts 2 very frequently feels like a game *very* afraid to be its own thing. From the presentation to the narrative, so much of it feels absolutely terrified of not living up to the standard of either contemporary games or the original Shadow Hearts, and the whole experience suffers significantly as a result. This is absolutely a case where Shadow Hearts 2 is far from a bad game, but at the same time, it’s also a game I have a very hard time recommending as strongly as either of its sibling games. The 2010 visual novel White Album 2 (no relation to the famous Beetles record ;b) is one of my partner’s favorite games ever. However, it’s a sequel to a much, much earlier visual novel from the late 90’s (though it shares basically no key staff with that game). She’s been curious about what the original game that inspired her favorite one is like for ages, and she absolutely lit up at the announcement that the late 2000’s PS3 remake of the original White Album was getting an official English release on PC this summer. To have a bit of fun indulging in media as a couple, I decided to pick up that old PS3 remake of the game to play through alongside her, and that’s this version here. It took me about 18 hours to play through the main heroine Yuki’s route in Japanese on original hardware.
White Album follows Touya, a university student in Tokyo in the late 90’s. He’s incredibly busy, but he manages to maintain a few friends he’s had since he was younger as well as work acquaintances. But there’s no one in his life more important to him than his girlfriend Yuki. Both socially awkward young people, they started dating in their last year of high school, but are both still quite bashful and awkward with one another. Near the start of university, Yuki’s aspirations as a young pop star became real as a talent agency picked her up and rose her to one of the biggest up and coming celebrities in the country… while Touya is still a struggling university student working any part time job he can find to make ends meet. Unlike my partner who loves them, I don’t play many visual novels, so I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this game and its story at first. However, that didn’t stop me from completely falling in love with it by the end. The other people in Touya’s life help create a very fun and interesting tapestry of an insecure but kind young man, and he and Yuki’s love story is an incredibly sweet and heartfelt one. Their story of two people whose biggest obstacles to love are just respectively accepting that they’re actually worthy of one another’s affection really hit home for me in a big way, and both me and my partner just didn’t have the heart to try any other routes after that main one because the thought of breaking up Touya and Yuki was just too painful ^^;. The gameplay is somewhat of a mix of a life sim and a more straightforward visual novel. After a brief prologue, you get to pick where Touya goes and, by extension, who he spends his time with that day. These interactions build up behind the scenes to lead you into later non-optional scenes later depending on whose route your choices have led you onto, but it’s something that’s very enhanced by just using a spoiler-free guide like my partner and I did to help you actually get the best experience centered around the person whose ending you want. It facilitates the gameplay very well, and it also helps create a sense of chaotic normalcy for Touya that these larger events in his life end up taking place in. The presentation of the remake is gorgeous. Though this is of the style of visual novel where your main character almost never gets any screen time (as he’s kinda in that weird space between his own character and a player avatar), the art for all of the people and places in Touya’s life look excellent. The characters in particular have a good handful of outfits and expressions that are enhanced even more by the Live2D-like animation engine (as it apparently isn’t Live2D itself) they use for all of the characters, making them “breathe” and have a sort of idle animation as you talk to them. It looks a bit uncanny at first (especially if you’re familiar with VTubers or the like who use things like Live2D to animate themselves), but it was something I got used to pretty quick and really enjoyed. The voice work is excellent and so is the music, with the titular track White Album being one I really loved in particular~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. It may be old, but it’s still a great story. While certain aspects of the gameplay loop make experiencing certain parts of the story a little more awkward than they perhaps need to be, that doesn’t take away from what a great story White Album 1 is. From what I’ve experienced from watching my partner play the English version, that translation is a very serviceable one, though not incredible, so if this is the sort of VN you enjoy, that version is totally worth picking up on PC~. This is a game and a series that a close friend of mine has been telling me is great for years. I’ve actually even owned the first two Shadow Hearts games for years as well, but I’ve always been a little too intimidated by the mechanics to properly give them a try. But over this summer break, I resolved to finally play through the Shadow Hearts series, and that’s just what I did~. It took me about 38 hours to play through enough to get the good ending on the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
Shadow Hearts follows the story of Yuri, a young, foul-mouthed young man with the power to fuse with the souls of monsters he destroys. The year is 1913. At the directions of a mysterious voice in his head, he saves a young woman named Alice on a trian in Japanese occupied Manchuria. The powerful and dark sorcerer that he saves her from seems to let them get away purely out of whimsy, and so begins our tale. A tale that is often as dark as it is camp, and it really begins as it means to carry on in that regard x3 Coming out barely a month before Final Fantasy X, Shadow Hearts was then and is now very much a game living in the shadow (excuse the pun) of other great games on the system, but that isn’t to say that it doesn’t have excellent writing itself as well. It has an approach to myth, legend, and history that blends the three together in such a way that gives its places a delightfully uncanny presentation, and the game is delightfully creepy as often as it is just silly with how oddball its, at times incredibly joyfully anachronistic, characters can be. Given the time and location of the setting, there is a LOT that could’ve gone wrong in this game’s depictions of the places and people that appear in it, but by and large it very deftly handles its respective subject matters. The main writer of Shadow Hearts has said that a major inspiration was the original Devil Man manga, and it really shows with how painstakingly he goes out of his ways to paint villains and heroes alike in shades of grey, never settling comfortably into flatly evil archetypes. The major theme of depression and overcoming it with the help of those around you (or not doing that) is handled really well, and this is easily one of my new favorite written games on the console as a result. The only real negative I can give about the writing is a really awful homophobic stereotype found in one of the merchant NPCs. Given the skill that the rest of the game’s subject matters are handled, it was a really uncomfortable and unfortunate pitfall of the game’s writing, and while it is just a minor character, it’s hard to overlook it when the stereotype is quite as bad as it is. It wasn’t a deal-breaker for me (and I tend to be pretty strict about that kind of stuff), but I absolutely understand it being too uncomfortable a depiction for others, as it’s really no better in the English version, by all accounts. The mechanics of Shadow Hearts really show the nature of a company composed largely of ex-SquareSoft developers. It’s a pretty standard turn-based game RPG with two rows for your party of 3 to occupy, but with a few important and ever present gimmicks here and there. First and foremost among these is the Judgment Ring system, which is something all of the Shadow Hearts games have but none more than this. Upon selecting an attack, a quick time event of a spinning ring pops up, and you need to press the command button when the spinning dial is over the colored sections. For normal attacks, each successive press gets you another hit in your little combo, and for spells, you need to hit more and more successes for successively more powerful spells (meaning the QTE’s get tougher as the game goes on). Later Shadow Hearts games have the ability to turn off the Judgment Ring system, but that is not the case in the first game . It’s not super difficult to get a hold of (and the whole reason I thought it was so hard at first was because I’d been doing it wrong ^^; ), but it’s something that’s ever present enough for both combat and out of combat mini-games that, if you don’t like it, it’ll likely drive you crazy. The other major mechanical gimmick is the sanity point (SP) system, which other Shadow Hearts games would also continue to use. For every turn you take, your sanity ticks down by one until it hits zero. Once it hits zero, you go berserk and you can’t control that character anymore. This means you need to keep on top of keeping people’s sanity up with healing items (whose use *also* requires use of the Judgement Ring), especially during longer fights and boss battles. This is especially true for Yuri, who takes far more sanity points per turn when he’s fused into a more powerful demon form. While a lot of Yuri’s fusion forms really don’t matter much (the balancing of the game means that more often than not, less than half of them end up being really necessary or useful), you basically always want him in his fusion form if you can help it because it makes him just SO much more powerful, and he also doesn’t get spells to use outside of fusion forms. This ultimately just adds more balls into the air to juggle in boss fights, and it’s one more thing to keep track of in addition to health and mana and such. It’s not a great mechanic, but it’s not an outright bad one either. All in all, the difficulty balancing is done really well, and it keeps a very persistent air of being just hard enough to be challenging while very infrequently being something you’d feel you’d need to grind to get past. The only real “well that sucks” aspect of boss fight design is usually getting to one and realizing that it has some status effect that it’ll inflict that will make your life miserable, so you’ll need to load your save and go grab some status immunity accessories at a vendor to take care of that. Thankfully, HP, MP, and even SP replenishing items are at shops as well as these immunity items, meaning you’re only ever a little bit of money away from making a fight or particular bit of grinding eminently survivable. It’s another aspect where I certainly wish the game were balanced in such a way that you didn’t *need* to rely on having stuff like a bunch of SP healing items or status effect immunity accessories to progress, but the game being that way isn’t inherently a bad thing. It’s just a little annoying. The presentation of Shadow Hearts is absolutely excellent in a way you’d really expect from a dev team made of ex-SquareSoft developers. From the way the 3D models look to the pre-rendered environments they move around on, this almost has the vibe of a super PS1 game in certain respects. The music is also excellent, and the creature and character design is awesome too. The game has a lot of really gross and creepy monster and boss design, and I don’t blame them for apparently implementing Yuri’s fusion system entirely to use more of the sick-ass monster designs they’d made. They’re great! X3 Verdict: Highly Recommended. From the writing to the presentation to the fun & engaging gameplay, Shadow Hearts is an incredibly strong RPG on a system with no shortage of them. The fact that it’s *such* an early RPG on the console makes that fact all the more impressive. If you’re a fan of creepy, myth-filled (think SMT-vibes) settings and turn-based RPG gameplay, Shadow Hearts is absolutely not a game to miss out on. |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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