Entry 110: "Dodes'ka-den" (1970)

"Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack"

Dear Internet,

                This is the fifth Akira Kurosawa film I have gone over for the Backlog, and I will say it up front that I was unimpressed more or less.  I would rather not beat around the bush concerning what I think about this film.  Partially because I want to get this review over as quickly as possible but mostly because I would like to save you from having to experience a review as adrift as this film was.  The film suffers heavily because of this meandering narrative that goes nowhere for two hours.

                "Dodes'ka-den" is set in a landfill.  As far as the eye can see, there is trash and debris thrown about.  The houses are built from secondary materials and anything else the denizens can get a hold of.  The film follows around a collection of individuals as they go about their daily life in the shanty town.  There is the homeless bum and his son who dream of a house to call their own.  There are two couples, who are color coded for the convenience of the audience that regularly trade spouses.  There is the mentally handicapped child who daily goes out and works an imaginary tram late into the night.  On top of that are a number of other individuals that make a scattering of the setting.  As the film rolls, the audience witnesses a few mix-matched small stories play out.  All these small plots unwinds, the various characters that make up the world are displayed in deeper detail.

                If you are looking for a more cohesive story, you are not going to find one here.  "Dodes'ka-den" is about nothing in particular.  There is no overarching unification of the various stories or of the characters to one another very much.  For the most part, all of the various stories are independent of one another to the point that it feels less like a feature film and more like a series of short ones edited together.  The closest thing that unifies the stories together, besides the setting, is the collection of unnamed women that seem to perpetually do their dishes in the communal water source.  Yet, that is about the height of their interaction with any of the various stories.  They act more as narrators to create exposition through the gossip they pass to one another and inadvertently to the audience.

                What ends up happening with this lack of cohesion between the various stories is a somewhat haphazard final product.  While each one of the various stories can be taken by itself and examined to see what it is trying to showcase to the audience, the collection as a whole does not seem to have any specific direction.  Since there are only a few times that the various stories intermingle, the only thing that can be argued is that the film as a whole is meant to showcase a certain level of futility considering the rounding nature of the opening and closing segments.

                The film opens up and closes with the child that believes he is a tram conductor.  We see him begin his daily routine with all the various miming to show where his imaginary tram exists.  The audience sees his mother, who prays to Buddha alongside her son.  At the end of the film, we see him return to his home and finish his daily grind.  As bookends, these scenes do create some sort of framing mechanic, but that is about as far as it goes.  At first, I thought the film was going to follow specifically the child and treat him as a main character, but this is not the case.  After only a few minutes with this character, the film abandons him for all of two or three scenes here and there until the last scene.  When I figured out that the scope of the film was much larger than one character, I thought that maybe the film was going to continue to use him as some sort of segue to the various stories, but that did not seem to be the case.  Then I thought that the film would be using him as a sort of foil for the various characters and highlight their faults and problems, but that did not seem to be the case.  The film does not use enough juxtaposition to warrant such an outlook.  The film as a whole did not seem to have a specific direction as to where it was going.  If the point was that life is just going in an endless circle, it is a somewhat depressing point.

                There is one thing that the film does well that I cannot leave out.  "Dodes'ka-den" is Akira Kurosawa's first color film, and he presents a wonderfully vibrant world of color.  In the landfill world of the film, any sort of color quickly attracts the eye to it.  Take the color coded couples.  You can easily tell when one husband is cheating on his wife when he walks into the wrong colored house.  Then there are two characters that get gravely sick.  Kurosawa has the two painted up with deep hues of green and blue to highlight their physical maladies.  But the greatest visual display has got to be the tram child's home.  The home is made in a simple Japanese style manner, built of wood and paper.  However, instead of plain white paper being used to line the wooden doors, a large number of either crayon or water colored drawings are used.  Each one of the drawings depicts a tram car.  The effect created when the film shows the interior of the house in the morning is a beautiful stained glass house.  The light passes through the drawings and the house is illuminated by it.  Color is one of few things that the film gets spot on.

                You might find something about "Dodes'ka-den" to like.  In fact, there are a number of characters and stories to like here, but I did not find the film as a whole to be enjoyable.  At times, the quiet scenes added a dynamic to the behavior of characters, but would also make the film stretch out a bit too long.  For a film that is about nothing in particular, it takes quite a while to say nothing.  It reminds me a bit of Kurosawa's earlier work, "The Lower Depths."  While both films detail those that rest at the bottom of society, at least "Lower Depths" had something to say.  Albeit it was Russian realism, which means Russian pessimism, but at least that film carried a bit of suspense to a central plot.  "Dodes'ka-den" is like a slice of life film without any of the genre's charm.  Outside of the tram child, there is not much worth watching the film for.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Next is "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell" for PC, provided I can get it operational.

Entry 109: "Battle Royale"

Dear Internet,

                You will note if you have quickly skimmed the rest of this entry that the logo is the only image that I am posting for this review.  This is because "Battle Royale" is one of the bloodiest films that I have come across.  Not the most graphic considering some parts that I will cover in a bit, but definitely one of the bloodiest.  The film cannot be less graphic than it already is if it wants to tell the story and message it is trying to convey.  What is this terrible story that requires a high level of grotesque actions to exist?

                Some time in the future of Japan, a massive depression hits the country with record high unemployment.  In reaction to this, student protests erupted around the nation.  Fearing the youth, a law was passed which became known as the BR Act.  The BR Act creates a yearly death-match game.  A random middle school class is chosen every year to be thrown onto an island.  There, they are collared with electronic monitoring devices.  Every few hours, a section of the island is marked as a danger zone.  If the student is in one of these danger zones, the collar explodes.  If the student acts against the people running the game, the collar explodes.  If more than one person is alive at the end of the three days, all the collars will explode.  The last person alive will be set free, if there is one.  Every student is given a random weapon that ranges anywhere from a cooking lid, a crossbow, a knife, to a semi-automatic rifle.  These are the rules of the BR, the Battle Royale.

                Well, that is actually more the premise than the story in the film.  The story follows a few select students that participate in a specific yearly game and the former teacher that moderates it with the help of armed personnel.  I could go into details about the various characters, but that would place too much emphasis on specific ones.  This in turn would give away who finally wins the BR, and seeing as the film is a suspenseful one that relies heavily upon the outcome of the game, I will try and not talk about anyone specific.  That does not prevent me from talking about the former teacher, Kitano.  Kitano had been the group's teacher before he left because of being attacked by one of his students with a knife.  He is a multi-layered character, but is also somewhat a broken one.  This comes from the way that the game functions in the greater scheme, but I am again getting ahead of myself for the second time in one entry.  Let me talk about that graphic stuff first.

                The film rarely holds back the plethora of ways that characters die off.  Many students are killed by gunfire.  There are a number of double-suicides, and blood flows like stolen cash through a second world bank.  The film is not meant to be seen by the squeamish or the younger members of the audience.  That having been said, there is not much graphic stuff if you look really close.  Take the students that die by gunfire.  Not a single one had a bullet wound anywhere they were shot.  After hundreds of hours of watching old western films/TV shows, it has become second nature for me to look for bullet holes when someone gets shot.  In "Battle Royale," everyone only gets covered with blood.  One student, when being sliced in the back from a knife, tumbled forward to show where he had been hurt.  The blood was not what struck me first, visually, but the lack of a tear in his shirt.  Many of the "graphic" injuries that take part in the film are represented by these budget makeup tricks that make the film actually less graphic that what it is trying to be.   Sure, some people lose their heads, and quite a number of the violent acts are reproducible in a real life setting, but even a film like "Ichi the Killer" is more graphic despite being even more cartoonish than this film.  Is it the fact that the violence is being done by and towards individuals below the legal adult cutoff?  If that is the case, there needs to be a better reason.

                The film's violence is primarily being done towards and by minors, specifically 15 year-olds or so.  While from a legal point of view, they are seen as children, the film's nature throws this away with the "point" of the game.  The reason that the film's antagonist, Kitano, gives to the students as to why they are being forced to play the twisted game is that Japan has gotten tired of its youth acting like spoiled children.  From a lack of respect to the teachers, skipping school, and even assaulting people, the youth of Japan are painted as delinquents broadly.  In the real world, there are numerous problems with the Japanese educational system and the students that have to go through it.  A quick search of Japanese female bullying can bring up stories and attitudes that will turn your stomach even more than the film can.  The film, however, shows that the adults of the fictitious world shirk their own responsibilities and blame the problems of the children on the children.  It is the polar opposite extreme of the argument "I am this way because of my parents" where the individual shirks the blame higher up the family tree.  The adults of the film wash their hands of the responsibility of the children that they must raise and care for.  Take the suicide of one of the character's parents. This is an obvious running away from the responsibilities of everything in the specific character's life but most importantly the raising of his child.  Then you can take the whole BR game as a whole.  Instead of the government fixing the unemployment problem or even addressing the problems of the educational system, it decides that the children are not acting adult enough.  It concocts a death-match game to scare the students to keep going to school.  The final victor of each game is supposed to be the model individual by the logic of the game.  This only makes it seem that the model Japanese adult is one that should kill the competition ruthlessly for the sake of that one individual rather than aiding the group and working for the betterment of the community.  Then again, that does sound like the typical Japanese businessman mentality.  

                But I have digressed, again.  The violence of the film is no worse than the kind that is found in any other sort of violent action film.  The complete lack of visual wounds makes the violence no worse than stage acting, with blood capsules popping when a trick dagger "stabs" a person.  I have seen animated films be more violent than "Battle Royale," with the actions being directed at a much wider age range.  If one is suppose to be outraged at the violence being done to and by kids, you cannot at the same time sweep under the rug the real world problems that the film is trying to talk about which stem greatly from the educational system.  Japan has got one of the most messed up educational systems in the world.  Between the excessive national ranking exams and the emphasis on rote memorization rather than critical thinking skills, it is a wonder that the country is still able to function with the stress being placed squarely on the student.  If you do not get into a top level college, you are branded a failure with the stigma following you even to your job years later.  That is after you get into the prestigious high school before that.  The label of failure is placed so much on an individual who does not meet the expectations of this top percentile mentality that many people become shut-ins for years, refusing to try interacting with the world.  The mentality that these individuals should just "grow up and get a job" is the same kind that is directed to the students.  While there is some truth to the fact that one should take hold of one's life, the attitude that kids should just grow up as quickly as possible and begin to fit a broken mold is lunatic in nature.  They are the way they are because you molded them that way.  It reminds me of the lyrics of the song "Institutionalized" which went like:

                "How can you say what my best interest is? What are you trying to say, I'm crazy?
                When I went to your schools, I went to your churches,
                I went to your institutional learning facilities?! So how can you say I'm crazy?"

You cannot blame the child without also blaming the adult.  Both are responsible, not one without the other.

                The film is an obvious critique of the nature of Japanese upbringing where the adult is barely an adult themselves and criticizes the child for being a child.  However, the film does not make this critique well because of how it handles the reason for the game.  While on one hand, the fact that the Japanese adult makes an outlandish decision to bring forth a death-match to shirk the blame of how the youth are acting up and to attempt to discipline the youth is a great way to showcase the real life manner that parents hide from their responsibilities, it just does not come across as feasible in its explanation.  The fact that a bigger uprising against the government does not occur in response to an inhuman decision to bring back the gladiatorial games and mix it together with a Communistic fear of the government is hard to believe, but then again, there is a sequel that deals a bit like that.  The film does little to nothing to present why the game is the way it is.  It would be understandable if the true answer to the game was to not kill one another and that after three days all the survivors were let go free.  The film does not go into detail as to why the government makes the game.  Is it supposed to make the student populace obey?  It cannot since the class for the game is chosen at random according to the rules.  It is supposed to show the populace that a dog-eat-dog mentality is the best kind?  Surely not, since it would then be condoning wanton murder in the streets.  Is the government trying to control the rest of the populace into fearing for the lives of their children?  This cannot be the case since every adult, save one, thinks not for what is truly best for the children but that they should be aiming for this messed-up ideology.  The film just does a poor job in rationalizing the reason for the BR game that it becomes a nagging bug in the back of the mind.  It continues to nag for the whole film.  

                "Battle Royale" is a good film that knows how to keep the audience on the edge of their seat.  You can think of it as "Ten Little Indians" mixed with "The Orient Express."  A group of people are confined to a single place, and the mystery killer is everyone.  While it does try to tackle some modern problems of Japan, it does so ham-fisted by concocting a game with broken motives.  It would have done a better job if it tackled the problems head on, rather than going through a roundabout way.  In the end, it makes me want to pick up "Jisatsutou" which handled an apathetic government better.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Tomorrow is "Dodes'ka-den."

Entry 108: "Sonic and the Secret Rings" Pt. 2

I had the chance of choosing to go back, but I screwed that up.

Dear Internet,

                Time for "Sonic and the Secret Rings" part two.  Since I already covered the controls and how they are as responsive as a potato, I guess I can talk about some of the other aspects.  How about the skill ring thing?  At the beginning of the game, Sonic receives a ring from Sharha.  It is used to allocate  points into a variety of skills that the player unlocks as they progress through the game.  These skills are unlocked mostly by leveling up, which occurs when the player is awarded experience points depending on the score obtained after every level.  Get enough experience points and you level up.  The higher level you are, the more skill points that you can allocate.  The game lets the player configure up to four different combinations, but I never used more than one.  Eventually if I got enough skill points, I would use them on the skills I got.  This is a rather interesting mechanic that I really want to praise if it were not for the fact that it all felt rather useless.  By the time I ended playing, I had never got to the point where I was organizing the skills to maximize my ability to fit the situation.  I never rearranged my allocated skills to fit a race mission, an enemy fighting mission, or anything else.  There was no need to do this because the skills that the game threw at me were either essential to equip to try and get through the mashed up experience or were so non-essential that I could easily do without.  I can think of a game like "Trine 2' that also had skill points that could be reassigned at will, even on the fly while playing.  If you did not have many skill points, you could dump them all into exploratory skills when facing a puzzle or all into fighting skills when fighting enemies.  "Secret Rings" never gets to this point where one has to think critically of Sonic's abilities.  You can just keep treating all your problems like nails as you hammer through it.

                The menu is not something bad, but I feel like I have to mention it since it plays so big a role in the game.  Instead of navigating an overworld like in "Sonic Adventure," Secret Rings" unapologetically organizes all the missions into the perspective chapter.  You select the level, then the mission, your skills, and are asked if you are ready.  This is all well and good.  There is nothing wrong with this, short of the fact that the game will unlock missions and not tell you sometimes which one will progress the story, but that is done to encourage the player to play out the various missions in the same hide-and-seek way that the characters are looking for the plot items.  The one bad thing is the theme song.  Every time that the player is thrown back to the main menu, the same grating theme song plays.  I am not even sure if the game has more than one song at this point.  It is an earworm of a rock song with lyrics that might as well be nonsense words.  I still do not know what the singer was saying beyond "SEVEN RINGS IN HAND!"  Menu music should not get me more pumped up than the game does, but that is probably more because of how little the game gets me excited than the upbeat nature of the song.  All it ended up doing was making me speed through the menu system in hopes of listing to anything else besides that one song.

                The story is not bad, nor is it going to win any honors any time soon.  It is a simple Saturday morning cartoon plot.  It should not be anything more considering that whenever Sonic tries to delve into the emotional spectrum it hits angst and edge first and foremost.  Take Sonic's final form in this game for instance.  While the game does take a large chunk out of the "Arabian Nights" for the use of the aesthetics, do not expect any sort of adaptation of the book and stories here.  The game makes its own story to the point that it is a wonder as to why they even bothered to use the fantastical Middle East setting.  It feels shoehorned in at times.  Some "Sonic" regular cast members fill the roles of Sinbad, Ali Baba, and King Shahryar--who is referred to as the main character of the "Arabian Nights," which is erroneous considering the work rests heavily upon Scheherazade and her attempt to stop Shahryar's daily killing of his wives at the risk of her own life.  Then again, I guess you cannot put that in a kid's game without raising a number of questions.  However, what in the world made the developer think that there should be a dinosaur level in the game is beyond me.  It just shows that the game uses leftover ideas from early development that were too far developed to scrap when they finally got around to making a plot for the game.

A quick search of "Arabian Nights dinosaurs" leads to ONLY this game.

                Beyond those gripes are a few other things that I found annoying.  The game requires fine tuned movement that the controls do not lend easily towards.  A stick based movement that does not make Sonic run by default would have been much better.  The game makes use of collecting pearls to power up a special move bar.  You can either speed things up or slow them down using a filled bar.  For the first two levels, you do not have the special bar, but the pearls are everywhere.  What happens is a questioning period where the game has pearls thrown about the level but has not told you why they are there to begin with.  Numerous times in the game, it boiled down into a game of memorization because of how quickly the game threw obstacles at the player.  This is partially because of the unresponsive controls but also because the game's camera is ridiculously close to Sonic rather than being pulled out to showcase the world.  I do not remember the "Sonic Adventure" games having poor cameras, but that might have to do with being able to actually control the camera in those cases.

On the plus side, the game does offer hints if you die too many times at a certain section.

                "Sonic and the Secret Rings" is not a good game.  It was not fun.  It bored me and frustrated me to no nearly no ends.  I would have quit playing it yesterday but gave it a little more of a try because of the Backlog.  I sort of wish I did not considering that it did not get any better.  Even after somewhat getting used to the controls, I still cannot recommend this game except to those who want to punish themselves.  It is a hair-pulling fiasco that only goes to prove how not to make a game around motion controls.  Maybe if the game had better controls I could have like it, but that is like saying if I could see over a brick fence I would enjoy the scenery.  You do not know that until it actually happens, and you could be staring point blank at a landfill.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Tomorrow is the "Battle Royale" film.

Entry 107: "Sonic and the Secret Rings" Pt.1

At least the title screen tells you how to hold the darn thing. 
The game only had a mini manual that told me to find the real manual online.

Dear Internet,

                It has been quite some time since I played a "Sonic" game.  "Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed" does not count considering that it is as "Sonic" of a game as one of René Magritte's painting can be used to smoke some tobacco.  Then again, you could probably smoke the painting itself, but it is hard to find a wood chipper that big.  What I mean to say is that "Sonic and the Secret Rings" is as much of a "Sonic" game as "Sonic Advanced," which was the last "Sonic" game I played, but not at release time mind you.  Sure, you can argue that this is just a spinoff game considering that the setting of the game is outside the norm.  The world and the characters are far enough removed from the original series to warrant not placing this game in the same lineup as the main series, even if some of the faces are the same.  But the underlining aspect of this game is the same as all the others.  You have to get to the end of a track/world as quickly as you can while avoiding or destroying enemies as you go while at the same time collecting rings and other items.  Both series so belong in the platforming genre that I can look at "Secret Rings" with the same lens as I do when looking at all the other "Sonic" games I have played.

                "Secret Rings" opens up with that cocky blue hedgehog, that we all know, being called on for assistance by the genie Shahra.  She tells Sonic that her world of the Arabian Nights is being threatened by the terrible actions of Erazor Djinn, a powerful magical entity that is destroying the pages of "The 1001 Nights."  Sonic then enters into the mystical world to help Shahra, who is also the genie of the ring on top of being an allusion to the character Scheherazade from the original text.  Quickly, Sonic meets Erazor Djinn who in turn places a curse on Sonic.  If Sonic does not collect the various World Rings that are scattered about, Sonic will die.  Sonic and Shahra then set out to collect the legendary World Rings in hopes of saving Sonic and attempt to find a way to stop the destruction of the world of the Arabian Nights.

The primary characters from left to right: Erazer Djinn, Sonic, and Shahra.

                So, there you have it, Internet.  You got the premise, the Macguffin, and maybe a little suspense thrown in.  What more could you want?  The gameplay?  Well, if you insist.  The gameplay is standard 3D "Sonic" with some things thrown in for spice.  You control Sonic through a third person camera as he runs and jumps throughout the world, trying to reach a specific goal.  You collect rings and pearls while trying to reach the goal as quickly as you can to maximize the score you receive at the end of each level.  This is all pretty standard stuff for a "Sonic" game.  The kicker?  Sonic does not stop running.  He run forward as a default function while the player controls if he goes left, right, or jumps.  Well, that is not exactly accurate.  You can brake, and you can walk backwards, but I will get to that in a minute.  It would probably be most accurate to liken the gameplay to that of an on-rails game.  You go predominantly forward along a track with little possible input to either go either to one side or another.  This is not like an open world game where you can move freely on a plane or even change your camera angle.  But I am getting ahead of myself.

                "Secret Rings" has got major problems with its gameplay.  The fact that Sonic is constantly going forward is where the problem starts off.  It would not be as much of a problem if the game had allowed the player choose when to move forward.  Instead, the game creates a frustrating mess with this forced control method which culminates in being forced to run into walls and facing dead ends.  There is a brake button to make Sonic stop, but it is rather useless considering that the game places more emphasis on the second problem with the control scheme, the jump button.  Instead of having the jump button function as a jump button, "Secret Rings" tries to do something different.  It is a slide/jump button.  Most games would have the button work as thus: press it to jump and hold it for a longer jump.  "Secret Rings" does something completely different.  When you press the button, you begin to slide.  Depending on how long you slide will determine how high you jump.  If you slide too long, you completely stop.  At the same time, if you press it while airborne, you immediately fall back to the ground.  The sliding aspect is one that feels completely out of place, especially considering that at this point I have not once needed to slide under anything in the game.  It takes quite a lot of getting used to, but it feels so out of place in a platforming game to have to charge up a jump rather than determining the altitude of the jump after initiating the jump that I have to discount this against the game.  While it does add depth to the game by forcing the player to plan out the jumps ahead of time, it detracts from the twitch response gameplay that comes from such a fast paced game.  Maybe it would be better if it was not for the motion controls.

                "Sonic and the Secret Rings" was released for the Wii relatively early in the console's life and implemented a number of motion controlled features.  What does this mean?  You can assume that it means that those motion controls are terrible, and you would be right.  Very, very few non-Nintendo games use the motion controls of the Wii well.  For the most part, the games developed by other studios do a poor job of using the Wii Remote to its greatest of capabilities.  This is in part because of the unreliability of motion controls.  If you want to do a fine tuned motion with the Remote while under the pressure of a fast paced game, you will most likely screw it up in five different ways.  Take for example the Bonelich mini-game in "Zack & Wiki" Quest for Barbaros' Treasure."  In it, the player had to flick the Wii Remote like a baton stick at the moment when a note passed by an action bar.  It was a simple rhythm game.  However, it is one of the most frustrating min-games out there due to that simple control scheme.  The question of whether the game was logging the player's attempt to "hit" the note at the begging of the flick or at the height of the flick was never addressed.  What happened was a shambled attempt to try and accurately play a game with an inaccurate control scheme.  Each of these poorly designed control schemes have unique problem like this. 

                "Secret Rings" has only two motion control problems.  Moving left and right along the rail is as simple as tilting the Wii Remote left and right, like a see-saw.  The problem relies on the homing attack and the backtracking movement.  There is a homing attack that Sonic can use to aim directly at a specific target.  The game automatically chooses the player's target and displays a red signal when the player can and should use the homing attack.  This is done, according to the game, by shaking the Wii Remote forward in a small thrusting motion.  However, this makes the attempt to actually attack the enemy iffy at best.  A forward thrusting motion would require the player to straighten his elbows and then bend them back quickly to keep the Wii Remote on a level plane to ensure the thrust was truly flat and forward.  What the game actually means is to do a slight forward flick of the wrists, which in turn is more of a downward spin along the axis.  Why do I make such a big deal of this kind of thing?  Partially because doing an elbow based thrust causes the controller to be unresponsive but also because games that want to maximize motion controls need to be as accurate in their descriptions of what they are seeking from the player.  Is the game looking for a specific axis of the controller to be beyond a set increment, a motion set along a specific plane, or some combination of the two?  Unless motion control based games tell the player exactly what they are looking for, the player has to spend time fighting the controller to learn what they are supposed to be doing rather than playing the game.

                Then there is the backtracking movement.  Since Sonic is by default running forward all the time, there are a few moments when the player has to move backwards to either realign for a jump or look for something.  This is done by tilting the controller toward the player.  The problem with this is that the controller practically needs to be upside down before the game will register that the player wants to go backwards.  There is no sort of progression of a slowdown as the player begins the tilt.  The game just decides when the tilt is enough to begin the slowdown and make Sonic start to walk backwards.  It is often instant and fickle as to when it wants to acknowledge your attempt to walk backwards.  When the game does finally makes Sonic walk backwards, it is like trying to hold in your bare hands a cantaloupe sized amount of Jell-O.  Sure, if you are calm and well prepared, you can balance that much Jell-O in your hands by figuring out the best placement of your hands.  But in "Secret Rings" you do not get time to prepare to handle the Jell-O.  You are thrown the Jell-O from across the room.  When it hits you, you fumble the Jell-O all over yourself as it breaks up into smaller pieces and begins to slide right through your hands.  You see, the player backtracks mostly when they have screwed up a jump that already is requiring them to have twitched correctly under pressure.  Often, there are enemies and traps right at those moments when the player screws up.  Compound the unresponsive controls with having to move wobbly while surrounded by enemies, and you get a very frustrating experience rather than difficult gameplay.  

What inevitably happens is super slow runs of some levels while combating the controls rather than the game's enemies.

                I will stop here for today, Internet, considering that I have written so much for a single post.  Tomorrow, I will talk about the music, menu, story, and maybe a few other things if I have time, mostly likely other aspects of gameplay.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop