Entry 138: "The Worm Ouroboros" Pt. 2 End

Dear Internet,

                Well, I suspect that you most likely think I am dead or close to it by now.  I am not sorry to disappoint you.  I am well enough alive, as far as I can tell.  I have been busy with various things.  "What?" you ask?  None of your darn business is what.  Just know that even this entry does not mean that I can begin any sort of regular posting any time soon.  So, do not get any sort of ideas stuck in a loop.  All I am here to do is to finish up my review of "The Worm Ouroborous."

                The last thing that I talked about concerning the novel was the book's language.  The book can be broken down into three different types of English language that I am sure someone can define better than I can.  The most modern type of prose comes in the book's narration, which sounds the most of what we hear today.  The second is the spoken language that the characters use when communicating between themselves.  This is filled with "thee"s, "thou"s, and "thine"s.  The third type appears when the book's characters communicate through written word.  I would liken it to somewhere between Middle English and the second type I described above.  I mention all this because with each format, a modern reader would have some deal of difficulty in reading these segments.  The third format is especially difficult to get through due to the multitude of obsolete or archaic spellings of some words.  It is not impossible by any means, but it does slow down the novel, which is one of the hurdles that the book tries to overcome.

                "The Worm Ouroborous" is a thick book, but it is below that of what you could call a doorstopper.  It, however, does not move very quickly or smoothly.  There are times that the story progresses at a rather quick pace, such as the battles and the wrestling match, but at other times, it feels like the plot grinds to a halt.  These moments, usually when focusing specifically on the Witchlanders, move slow enough that I wanted to just skim over the text.  Of course, these segments are made to add exposition to the various characters.  The novel does this in strides, making sure that every character is given at least a wading pool level of depth.  The problem is that there are too many characters that just plain do not matter yet are brought up time and time again.  I think someone even got killed in their sleep at some point, but I could not even care because they were so unimportant.  Then there are a dozen or more military figures on both sides that show up at the end of the novel for the climactic battle but are either killed off or barely given any sort of information.  The point of them being there is just to make the world seem more alive.

                This is not a bad thing completely, but it causes the book to be read more like a history novel that is trying to make sure that future historians and genealogists can use it as a primary source of information rather than a piece of fiction that is trying to amuse and beguile away a number of hours.  I am reminded of T.H. White's "The Once and Future King" and how it remembered not to boggle the reader down.  During one of the last segments White's novel, he would barely go into detail about the various knights that were about to draw upon one another, citing "Le Morte d'Arthur" if the reader wanted to know everyone's names.  It was not that the names of the knights were unimportant.  It was that going into such a length of detail would have detracted from the scene, causing it to slowdown.  "The Worm Ouroborous" does what it does because it wants to world build more than anything.

                In this respect, the book delivers on all accounts.  The book goes to great lengths to ensure that all the "t"s are crossed and the "i"s are dotted when it comes to making a world that not only functions well but is also believable.  The world in the book is one that the reader can lose themselves in very easily if they wish to.  The landscape and the history within the world are fleshed out to the point that subsequent novels could have expanded upon small segments and still be folded within this novel.  Take the matter of the kings of Witchland.  We are told of at least four kings that all share the name Gorice.  That still leaves another eight or so that can be expounded upon.  These holes made evident do not detract from the plot that is progressing within the story.  Instead they show evidence of a much larger spectrum that is at play.  While the mechanics of the magic appearing in the book is usually glossed over to the point of requesting the reader to ignore plausibility, the book knows that it is not all that important, instead using that time to set up the scene.  Compare this to "Tale of the Abyss" which would constantly spend lengths of time ensuring that the mechanics of magic are so extensively detailed and plausible that it caused any scene that even mentions "fonons" to grind to a stop so it can be explained twice over.  It is alright that magic does not get explained as long as you do not contradict yourself later on.

                Then there is of course the ending of the novel that needs to be addressed.  You can just skip reading this if you do not want to spoil yourself.  At the very end, the demons wish that they could have someone to fight against since they are for all intents and purposes bored of peace time.  Their wishes are heard by the gods who turn back the world to the beginning of the novel so the war can begin all over.  This illustrates the bloodthirsty nature of the main characters who care not for their kingdom's well being but instead for their own amusements.  In the end, the only thing that separates the demons from the Witchlanders is a sense of aristocratic pride and elitist elegance.  Both of these are characteristics that you will be hard pressed to sympathize over by the end of the story.  The demon lords care not that hundreds, nay thousands, of men and women have died in the war just fought and will die again in the one coming soon.  They are a self interest lot that are more in tune with certain beheaded heads of state than the warrior kings that the book spent depicting.  I am not sure if Eddison, the writer, wanted to depict aristocracy as being so petty or if he wanted to make a criticism of the icon of the fighting hero.  In the end, it makes for an anti-resolution ending that failed to wind me back up again as it does for the characters it contains.

                In the end, "The Worm Ouroborous" is one of those books that I like when I am done with them.  It is not that I am happy because that it is over, as one could say about a kidney stone.  Instead, the novel is one that shines best as a whole rather than in parts.  The problem with me, at least, was just slogging through it.  I just wonder if the story could have been condensed a little to save on unneeded plot elements that fell a bit like padding.  Then there are the number of characters whose names all swirl around because they are similar in spelling. I could recommend the book, but make sure you bring a notebook to make a few family tree diagrams.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

Entry 132: "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance" (2005)

Dear Internet,

                I have wanted to watch "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance" for some time.  I saw the other two films in the Vengeance trilogy a few years ago, both of which I enjoyed quite immensely.   I particularly enjoyed "Oldboy" which got me interested in Park Chan-wook, the shared director for all the films, and got me to watch some of his non-Vengeance films, notably "I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK" and "Joint Security Area."  Overall, I find his films to be quite enjoyable if at least more than a bit hard to stomach.  Park's films are not visually disturbing in the same way that a gory film like "Saw" is.  No, "Lady Vengeance" is more difficult to watch because of the topics that it covers, most difficult being kidnapping, child murdering, prison life, and the conflict between personal revenge and public justice.

                The film tells the story of Lee Geum-ja, a recently paroled woman who has done thirteen years for kidnapping and murder of a five year old boy.  During those thirteen years, she created a demeanor of an angelic persona, taking care of numerous other prisoners, pretending to have converted to allow for early release, and incapacitating the prison bully.  Once out, she begins to call in a number of favors from the other ex-convicts.  One by one, the audience learns of the various things that Lee did while imprisoned and how each favor she calls in begins to fit into a much larger plan.  She plans on finding the real perpetrator to the crime that she paid thirteen years for.

                "Lady Vengeance" has an intertwining plot that does not let itself be known right away.  The film's true plot does not become apparent until about thirty minutes in.  Until that time, the viewer has to piece together a number of nearly disconnected scenes that do little to create a concrete understanding of the film's central character, Lee.  At one moment, the film presents itself as a straightforward redemption film, only showing how Lee responds to a preacher as being penitent, wishing to be forgiven for her actions.  After she is released, we do see that her actions prove this is a falsehood, only one of many faces she wears throughout the film.  While this does work while having the whole film examined in its entirety, I found myself heavily confused as to what I was supposed to be understanding at the time.  The whirlwind of information presented in the beginning can be difficult to absorb since the film as a whole is suspense and mystery.  The film takes a while to show that Lee was indeed innocent by only showing flashbacks to scenes that are outside her own experience, ones that are unaware of her guilt or not.  This early hump comes from spreading out the exposition out a little too much.  While it does eventually resolve itself, it should be noted.

                I enjoyed the film, but I continued to think of the other two Vengeance films while viewing this one.  The other two films remember that the one that was enacting the vengeance was not without crimes themselves.  "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" ended with the protagonist succumbing to the consequences of his own actions.  "Oldboy" at least made the viewer wonder if the protagonist had even gained his revenge at all or if his actions had dug himself into an even deeper pit than the one he was originally thrown into.  This film, however, gets to the end and leaves the viewer with a quick and dry answer.  Lee commits crimes throughout the film, but each action is against a guilty party that has committed far worse.  At the end of the film, there is no question of "Now what?" because Lee has tied up every loose end and received everything but forgiveness for her initial crime, something that she will never gain.  The audience knows that her first crime, aiding the kidnapping but not the murder of a child, can never be truly forgiven by the victim because the victim is dead.  Lee will never receive her redemption through her vengeance.  The best she can hope for is to stop the perpetrator from continuing his actions.  The film rests its ending on this obvious truth, but the viewer can reason this out when they learn of her plans.  In turn, the ending comes to its logical conclusion without any sort of twist that the other Vengeance films are able to spin.  But that leads more into the two-thirds twist that diverts the film as a whole.

                Near the climax of the film, the story switches to Lee's personal vendetta to that of small mob justice, for lack of a better name.  More crimes are found against the man who had sent Lee to prison.  The victim's relatives are brought in and his sentence is chose by mob rule instead of being instantly handed over to the police.  The whole thing turns rather "Murder on the Orient Express" rather quickly.  Then the film's speed slows down considerably because of this shift in tone.  It then has to spend time elaborating on the various new characters.  It does not get to the point that each and every character gets an exhaustive, but with a cast of at least of half a dozen that already received a likewise small introduction, it becomes a bit tiring.  Throw on top that thematic change and the film can really be divided into two parts to the point where it might have been easier to just separate it into two films.  The fact that the climax and the division occurs at the two-third mark means that the last third moves slowly and is worse yet, just playing out the logical conclusion.  The viewer can guess the rest of the film at that point as they watch being played out what is going through their head.

                "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance" is an enjoyable film if one can stand the film's content.  The film presents the brutal honesty of human depravity while depicting a horrible fiction.  Film artistry is there as well as a compelling plot.  The acting is spot on with the cast being able to convey the character's pain without being comically melodramatic.  Overall, it is a film that can stand next to other Vengeance films, if just standing a sit short.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Next is "Nier" for the PS3.

Entry 128: "Epic Mickey" Pt. 3 End

The single most annoying level in the game.

Dear Internet,

                "Epic Mickey" was an enjoyable game.  It made me think fondly back on many platforming games that I enjoyed when I was a kid.  At the same time, it makes me think of the morality system that many games being made today implement.  The game pulls itself from a variety of sources while making sure to be itself.  How well of a job it does this is what is up for debate.  I finished talking yesterday about a few gripes I have with the game, and I should continue with a bit of that.

                The duel morality system of the paint/thinner, while remembering not to strictly define itself into good/evil, leaves something nagging in the back of my head.  It works quite well, truth be told.  The player gets a feedback from the NPCs' behaviors reflecting the player's choices.  The epilogue shows the most noticeable reflection of the player's actions.  Depending on how the player dealt with bosses, how they chose to aid certain NPCs, and who the player helped, certain short scenes will play out to show how those choices make ripples down the lane.  If you redeemed a bad guy, the game will show them acting friendly towards others.  If you disposed of them, the game will show their remains or something equivalently depressing.  By showing the consequences of the player's actions, the game goes one step further than most by illustrating how both action and inaction can cause problems later on.  However, this is not what is scratching the back of my head.

                I cannot but help but wonder if there was even a need for a moral choice system in this game.  This is a Mickey Mouse game, which was made primarily for children.  Made to scare them, but still made for them to play.  With that in mind, the game has to stress a moral; otherwise it does not fit in line with the Disney creed.  Then again, if it is a straightforward comedy, it can ignore having to instill a moral, but "Epic Mickey" is not a comedy.  The moral of the game is your actions can have far reaching consequences and one must correct ones mistakes when possible.  Mickey accidentally unleashed the Shadow Blot years ago and caused the Thinner Disaster.  By the end of the game, he admits his guilt and works to make amends.  This is done without regard to how the player chooses to fight.  It is the central plot that cannot be changed.  The minute choices that the player makes along the way do not alter the final outcome of Mickey and the Wasteland.  They only affect the side details.

                In one way, the game does succeed in attempting to illustrate to its audience that those choices do matter.  I will give it that, but I still wonder why it was needed.  Having the player go through a game with no choices and being tasked with being the hero would have been perfectly acceptable for a Mickey Mouse game.  Did the game have to have a moral system when the ending was pretty much the same no matter the choices made?  It does spur the player to complete the game again and choose something different to see the effect.  I am not saying that the moral system is a bad mechanism or does a poor job in what it aims to do.  I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I feel that it is out of place in a game like this.  It is a sort of happy accident, if you will.

                Another thing that I have to begrudge the game is the camera.  The camera was poorly implemented and difficult to control at times.  This lead to a number of untimely deaths because I could not tell how far I had to jump or was killed because an enemy had come from out of nowhere to sucker-punch me.  One annoying circular room had me confined fighting a single difficult enemy.  Since it was not a boss, the camera was freely up to the player's control.  I spent more time trying to get the camera at a good angle to see the enemy than I did trying to fight him.  The camera leads up to another of the game's problems.  When pointing at the screen to aim the brush, a cursor appears to show where Mickey will shoot paint/thinner.  He then will shoot paint/thinner at where the cursor is pointing from his perspective.  Many times, I found him shooting straight at the camera towards the player or angled oddly so that he completely missed the curser.  Changing to a first person perspective to shoot did not always work because he shoots from the hip.  If there is a hip high ledge, the paint/thinner will stop at less than a foot away, never reaching where you want to hit.  I am reminded of "Super Mario Galaxy" which allowed the player to shoot hand-sized stars at enemies.  The difference was that the star was launched from the perspective of the third person camera instead from the player controlled character.  This maximized accuracy at the expense of immersion.  "Epic Mickey" requires an accurate aiming system, but it hiccups at moments where the player has to fight the controls.  

                My last grumbles is a lack of voice acting throughout the game instead of grunt talking, no good map, a minimal menu, many repeating character models, and a world hub that is not all that interesting beyond the first few times that the player visits it.  There is also the final boss levels (that is "levels" as in plural) that seems to last much too long to hold the dramatic tension that the game tries to create.  I just want to throw those out there before I finish.

                "Epic Mickey" is a good game with enough thrills and replay value to go through it a second time to try and find all the missable collectables and alternative decisions.  It has great atmosphere that it is able to keep for the entire duration.  The characters are complex, showing a range of emotions and desires, some of which contradict one another.  The game has a number of problems that are not big by themselves but add together to cause frustration in even some of the most patient players.  Overall, I liked the game, and it makes me all that more interested to play the sequel.   

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Next is "Epic Mickey2: The Power of Two."

Entry 125: "Parasite Dolls"

Dear Internet,

                "Parasite Dolls" is a three episode series that comes from an already popular franchise.  Specifically, it is the latest and last animated piece of the "Bubblegum Crisis" universe with emphasis on the AD Police section.  Considering that nothing short of a spinoff non-canonical light novel has come forth in the last ten years, it can be safe to assume that nothing is going to be done with the series anytime soon.  That does not mean that the franchise went down the drain due to quality or lack of sales, but what do I know.  This is the first time that I have come close to this series.  Thankfully, "Parasite Dolls" is a series that can be viewed independently of everything else in the series.  There need be no prior information concerning the "Bubblegum Crisis" universe to understand the episodes.

                The episodes follow Buzz Nikvest and the other agents of the Branch department of the AD Police.  Branch is a secret part of the AD Police who is able to operate without much of the red tape that the AD Police has to cut through.  Primarily, Branch deals with rogue Boomers, an intelligent android that is able to mimic human behavior despite not experiencing emotions themselves.  While the Boomers are generally programmed to protect and aid the human population, there exists a growing problem where Boomers have been found to be going wild and killing humans.  In the three episodes, Buzz and Branch tackle three specific cases.  The first has to do with a series of malfunctioning Boomers that all go wild at the same each week.  The second is the case of a mysterious Boomer that is killing other Boomers that specialize in prostitution.  The third episode is Branch's final case.  Within these three segments, "Parasite Dolls" creates a cyberpunk adventure that is both brutal and thought provoking.

                The narrative of "Parasite Dolls" is fast paced for nearly the entire length.  From the gunfights to the police work, the show does not spend much time sitting around.  On top of the action, the amount of information that gets handed to the viewer in both verbal and image format is quick and precise.  The information that is thrown at the viewer may be a bit much for some, but the best part of quick narrative is that it also knows how to be subtle.  Instead of handing everything explicitly to the audience, the show forces the viewer to think and come to the realization instead of requiring an explicit explanation.  Take the end of the first episode for example.  We learn about Buzz's wife who had died years prior.  However, we had seen a woman living in his home preparing a meal at the start of the episode.  In the last scene, we are able to figure out what had occurred off screen and what was the truth because we see the aftermath.  I would not like to say exactly what happens because it was such a smack to the forehead that I do not want to ruin the surprise.

                The art of the show has deep roots in late 80's and early 90's anime.  This era contained some of the most violent shows and had some of the most visually disturbing imagery of just about any other era.  Take my review of "Genocyber" for example.  Numerous people were killed on screen and off to the point that an entire ship was more blood and flesh than metal.  "Parasite Dolls" has its fare share of death and destruction.  The show knows how to use this imagery to its advantage instead of only suing it for shock value.  So not get me wrong, it uses the imagery for shock value, but it uses to illustrate a point.  While most of the broken bodies in the show are robotic, instead of making them inhuman on the inside to highlight their robotic nature, the show makes them appear as human as possible under the skin while remembering that they are metallic based.  When a Boomer is shot or torn apart, a humanoid skeleton is underneath with a metal piece for each bone.  When they are shot, black oil spouts out in place of blood.  If they are split in two, internal organs made from plastic spill out.  The show knows it can get away with more violence if it is towards non-humans but that does not mean that it has to make the audience unsympathetic to the androids.  The Boomers are characters despite not being humans.  With this in mind, the show knows how to make the audience care about the non-human characters.  It is a difficult tightrope walk that the show does.  If it depicts too much violence without taking time to portray the androids as character, there is no emotional bond between the character and the audience.  If the show takes too much time to foster that bond and leave out the violence, it halts the story and action to a standstill.

                The show's title is of course a reference to the Boomers and is the show's central theme.  It poses a few futuristic questions as to what makes a being human, like all cyberpunk stories do.  Instead of trying to argue that the Boomers are becoming human or that they are equivalents to human, the show firmly positions them as androids.  When they begin to think that they are human that usually signals that their demise is imminent.  If anything, "Parasite Dolls" is more of a showcase of the continual fall of man.  Remember: the show is about a police force, so they still deal with the criminal who is human.  Some of those criminals are barely human if you consider their crimes.  The only consolation that the viewer has is that the madmen of the story are still fictional as long as the technologies presented remain fictitious as well.

                I was able to watch "Parasite Dolls" with the original Japanese audio.   It sadly pointed out some aspects within the original that I find annoying.  There is a strange fascination that the Japanese have with the English language.  They interject it into their songs and daily vernacular.  The former only shows their ignorance of the language while the latter at least stems from borrowing technical words from the word's natural origin.  The opening song intermingles Japanese language lyrics with English interjections and phrases.  As a natural English speaker, these grammatical incorrect phrases grate against my ears because they barely make sense within the context of the song.  They feel more like buzzwords than the meaningful lyrics that the composer wanted them to be.  Within the show, a few English words are used, but at least they are borrowed words where there is no Japanese word to fit in.  However, a few English interjections do occur when a character shouts.  These feel more in line with the poor English lyrics as well.

You have to feel bad for the poor guys that ended up as the "Normal" policemen.

                "Parasite Dolls" is a good series, although, a bit short, which is a letdown.  The show does such a good job of world building and constructing a cast of characters that I wish there had been more stories.  More time would have been nice, but at the same time that might have distilled the narrative too much.  It tackles a number of topics, many of which I have not covered.  While the show does not do a poor job of it, I also feel that it at times feel a bit generic.  The animation is spot on, being both detailed and smooth.  It is worth a watch, but I am hesitant to say that it has great lasting appeal.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Next is "Epic Mickey".