A Long Way Gone - Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

This book is a memoir written by a young man not much older than myself who was a child soldier in Sierra Leone.

I actually don't know what to say about it. It took me about three months to get through it fully, because I kept having to put it down. That isn't really a criticism... at no point did I want to stop reading the book altogether or anything of that nature. Rather instead, the book is just so intensely sad and filled with such horrifying stories that it's just hard to read continuously. Beah exacts an emotional toll that is designed to obliterate everything before it.

This book might be too much for most people to read, but those that can withstand the intense and soul shattering grief that is presented will probably find the thing to be somehow rewarding. It's not a political book at all and at no time does it attempt to pass judgment on the political conflict. The story is rather told from the perspective of a boy who saw his family die in front of him before being given a gun, drugged up with cocaine mixed with gunpowder and sent to kill. The author tries to write as he feels and is extremely good at doing that.

It's not an easy story to read. But if you can get through that sort of thing, this is worth picking up. Just be prepared.

Few comments:

1) This is a memoir, so one is presumes that Mr. Beah's experiences are true here and I don't doubt them. A cursory glance at his wiki page reveals a discussion of some 'investigation' of a journalist from Sierra Leone that nitpicks details and tries to make the government look a bit better ('we didn't CONSCRIPT child soldiers, they were volunteers!'), but I'm willing to dismiss all of that as politically motivated hogwash.

That said, I did sense a certain amount of drama that felt a bit artificial. At one point, he's told that his parents and siblings are waiting for him in the next village and arrives in the village to find it burned to the ground just hours before. I would never have the guts to go up to this author and say 'Did it really happen like that?' but it still didn't quite ring true.

But quite frankly, I think it's his right to take some dramatic license with his story if he so chooses. It's his story to tell, after all, and I give him the benefit of the doubt.

2) The most powerful bit of the story for me was when he was standing in prayer in a village when the rebels attacked, scattering the prayer save for the Imam who stood before his Lord reciting a long sura until they came to butcher him. Beah isn't explicitly religious, but that image has power. That is the spirit that one hopes to hold onto as a believer, I do feel.

3) I don't cry for things that often and this is no exception. That isn't an assertion of some kind of machismo or anything, but rather it's just not what I do. Rather instead, when something makes me sad it gets me in my dreams. This book has haunted over me for the last little while and I think it will for a some time to come.

I should read something more cheerful next. There's more ...

Baccano! - "My, my. This is quite a racket."

I feel that this is a nice contrast to the last post.

Baccano is about two things. The first thing is 1930s New York gangster families that wear awesome hats and hire hitmen to shoot each other. The second thing is magic. Needless to say, it was really fucking good.

More than that though, it's a story that seeks to be innovative. It's not really a single story either, but rather something like three or four really cool stories (each with subplots inside) melded into each other. There are gang wars involving magical artifacts. There's a train that a terrorist group, a bunch of gang enforcers and some bandits try to hijack at the same time. There's an ancient feud between rival magicians. There's a Robber Couple that likes to dress up in weird costumes during their heists. It's a bloody wild ride. The only downside is if you aren't quick-minded you can easily get lost.

The cast is enormous (something like 15-20 characters in a 16 episode series) but everyone's such a character that they all get a lot of development in a short period of time. One of my favourite characters was this guy called Luck who didn't get much face time but made up for it by being so ridiculously laid back about the work he does that he just radiated cool. There is no dead weight on this cast list, which is very very rare.

It's a real breath of fresh air, I think. It's unique, arty (arty is not to be confused with artsy) and smart but never pretentious. It's just about having a lot of fun. Check it out.

Bit more talk after the jump.

Three spoilery things to touch upon:

First: The antagonists were great.


I really thought it was amazing how the villains were all these over-the-top cackling fiends and still managed to be somehow humanized. Ladd, Vino and even Dallas. They all were comically evil on one hand and yet filled with all these believable redeeming features. I think my favourite of the bunch was Vino, who's blood drenched affections will be difficult to forget.

Second: I liked how the magic worked.


There was a coherent and straightforward system for it. No magical surprise bullshit in this. The way that Maiza's character was sort of minimized so that he was really just a side character that was never in the thick of things I thought was an especially good touch. It leaves a lot to be inferred about him, which I think is a positive thing.

Third: Those hats really are pretty cool.


Seriously, why did gangsters stop wearing those things? They're awesome. They should bring them back.

Oh and I should also mention: Isaac and Miria.


Fuck yes. Normally pure gag characters wear thin after a while, but holy fuck I loved those two.

And nothing else needs to be said. There's more ...

Ef - A Tale of Memories

(Before we begin: Note that comments on the site are currently broken)

This was... hm... It's a 12 episode series about uh... artists.

The first storyline is about a one eyed writer girl with a bizarre form of Plot Amnesia that makes her forget all her memories for the day on the thirteenth hour of every day. She meets a dude who tries to give her confidence in her writing abilities so that she can write a post-modern novel about being a one eyed writer girl that loses her memories every thirteen hours.

The second storyline is about a genius manga artist that's trying to balance his publishing schedule and schoolwork. He has two co-dependent girls interested him (a cheerful though somewhat emotional gal and an overly possessive childhood friend) and he has to deal with that stuff somehow.

So... um... I am avoiding the use of the word 'bad' in reference to this, because really that's a bit too harsh. Still, I'm fairly certain that no one I know that I'm on good terms with would like this. But at the same time I'm sure there are a lot of people that swear by this thing and think it's the most deeply beautiful and meaningful thing they've ever seen. It's certainly very popular (multiple recommendations is why I ended up going through it, in case you were wondering). But still... let's talk about this, if you wish.

Let's start with the manga artist. Hiro Hirono.



When artists create fictionalized versions of themselves it usually is an excuse to pat themselves on the back. This is a tradition that goes straight back to that part of the Odyssey where that Bard sings about the Trojan War and has Odysseus in tears because of how awesome his storytelling skills are. That's basically what this guy is. He draws Shoujo Manga which he apparently started publishing when he was like 14 or 15 and while the show never mentions anything about what the stuff was about it is generally understood that it is awesome and that Hiro is amazing.

That in itself is a problem. I've never been a fan of the whole 'look at how awesome my artist character is, you can't see even a hint of what he might create' thing. It's a cheap device. But fine, whatever, that isn't the big issue here. The issue is that Hiro's utter awesomeness transfers to pretty much everything else in his life.

The guy spends his entire story being cool. He spends his time making deadlines and being pursued by gorgeous women. The women themselves are both kind of crazy and vicious, with each seeming to look to destroy the other's self esteem in order to win the artist. But the manga artist is pretty much detached during most of that giant emotional war, as he's just too busy being awesome. His only 'flaw' is that he didn't choose which girl he liked earlier, but that seemed to be pretty much thrown in as it was fairly clear who he would choose from the get go.


It's funny to me that this show plays at being post-modern and artsy so much and yet lapses into the 'stable, responsible and logical male'/'emotional, fickle and irrational women' molds. I don't know anything about who made this or why, but the way this thing was written struck me as base artistic wish fulfillment. And that just doesn't yield a satisfying story.

The second story is about Chihiro Shindou.



The amnesia I described earlier was caused by a car accident (which also took her eye). I know I don't really need to mention how stupid her condition is, but I will anyway. Thirteen hours of memories a day (her memories from before she was 12 are intact) and then she forgets it all. That is not simply not plausible. People might say 'well, it's fiction' but fiction needs to be internally consistent. I could not feel any sympathy for her condition throughout the show because it was just such a silly idea.

And that's a big problem. As I mentioned Chihiro's goal is to write a novel with the help of her boyfriend Renji, who she'll tell what's going on so she can keep on track and keep writing in spite of her memory loss cycle. But honestly, no matter how much she struggled and suffered, the inescapable fact was that it's a stupid premise that I couldn't suspend my disbelief for. Amnesia is an overused trope in any case. It's in everything from Firefly to Gundam. But this is stupid amnesia.


I doubt whoever wrote this doesn't even cared about that, being concerned more for the overall effect. It's 'a tale of memories' after all and so the author has to deconstruct the role of memory in human experience and obviously turning to something crazy like say science fiction to explain reoccurring short term memory loss would have just been so vulgar. So just stamp on 'amnesia' and keep going!

For some people that's probably enough... but me? I think it's lazy and irritating.

Finally, let's talk about the most egregious thing about this piece of work, mainly the art style.



Pretentious.

I get the feeling that whoever was art director for this thing thought that no one could understand him/her in high school. Every once in a while (sometimes more often than others) the scenes would randomly cut to a shot of one of the characters as a shadow or as a purple outline or the background would suddenly change or text would flash by. I'm not sure whether this style is called Impressionist or Expressionist or what... that isn't my area of expertise. But I do know that it was really annoying.


You can say art is subjective, of course, and I acknowledge that. But I think often people mistake novelty value for actual value. Great art would be something like Jin Roh rather than something that slaps a shadow on someone's face. I would even say Kaiji's big noses and weird looks outstrip this thing. All the silliness with photoshop filters and random scene cuts struck me as the product of someone who's really insecure and terrified that no one would 'get it' (though what 'it' is is rather nebulous). There was one scene that I really disliked which consisted of one of the girls leaving messages on the manga artist's cellphone.

That's how it looked like. As she left messages, what she said would write in text across the screen and she kept leaving messages which made more and more messages appear until the screen was covered. It went on for like ten minutes. After a minute or two I just said 'okay, I get it' and skipped the rest of the scene. But that's the junk I'm talking about.

Overall, I can say I got through it which is more than I can say about a lot of things. But generally speaking, I think this is not the way things should go. There's more ...

District 9

District 9... hmmm. Not too shabby.

Gotta give a film credit first and foremost for innovation. An alien refugee crisis in Africa filmed in pseudo-documentary style complete with occasional cuts to random experts/acquaintances of the main character. I've never seen anything like that before and it's a neat idea. The documentary aspect sort of breaks down after a while and it becomes what I think is fairly straight-forward science fiction. But still, I tip my hat towards risk-taking.

The movie was fairly politically charged, perhaps even a bit too politically charged. The politics of District 9 are pretty heavy handed, but also kind of vague. Refugee camps have extremely poor living conditions. Racism is bad. Okay sure. But these are bloody aliens.

Personally if alien refugees came to earth I would be in favour of a massive quarantine. You can't just let a bunch of people from another damn planet set up camp without knowing anything about them. Who knows what damn biological weirdness can come out of that? I don't care how damn malnourished the damn aliens are, you don't just let in a bunch of unknown organisms onto our planet. That's just stupid.

But in any case, details aside it was good. So let's talk about some specifics here...

Documentary-style:

I liked this. Documentaries have sort of become an art form these days, what with the spooky music and the interviews with loved ones/generic experts with European accents. It's all pretty standard and so seeing science fiction using the documentary style like this was rather nice. I would go so far as to say that I think that the first chunk of the movie before the infection part took off was actually the best part.

I especially liked the use of past tense. "Wikus was this" "Wikus was that"... made the movie more tense as you watched to see what was going to happen to the guy.

Main Character:


I liked the actor, I have to say. He really played the part of the semi-charismatic pseudo-liberal nerd pretty well. You could tell right from the get-go that this is the kind of guy that was picked on in high school and probably got his degree without doing anything that remotely resembled field work. He talks a lot about things being illegal, doesn't seem to like violence but is still kind of prejudiced. I don't think the audience is supposed to really like him, but he really works as a believable character.

That is until he gets some alien guns and becomes frackin' Rambo. Up until that point I was really liking the whole documentary aspect of it, but when Wikus blew up that whole military base and then escaped... well, he also blew up the documentary part too. Which is a shame really, as they could have still kept it going and put up some interviews with some people that survived his onslaught. That would have been awesome.

"He came through the door and shot the guard, yelling 'FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!'. We hid under a table and then he..." *breaks down weeping* "He told us to run... to run or else he would... he would..." etc. etc.

I don't know why they just abandoned that in favour of just a standard action scene.

That said, that mech he had was pretty cool.

Politics:



My main objection:

Why is it a stupid private contractor managing the aliens rather than some sort of government or UN agency? I mean, sure, I understand. Blackwater (or whatever the fuck those fuckers renamed themselves... Xe or something, isn't it?) is one of the most evil organizations on the globe. But for crying out loud, Blackwater are a group of mercenaries who are given contracts. You can't just put them in charge of the aliens. The whole shadowy 'MNU' thing running the show just felt silly.

Good Detail:



I think the movie does a fair enough job with explaining why the aliens don't just attack. They might have cool guns but when they get shot they die just the same and there aren't so many of them that they can just take over the Earth. If you chuck missiles at their spaceships, they will explode and if you shoot their crazy mech enough it will be destroyed. Nice way of justifying the refugee thing.

Bad Detail:

I don't understand how a trigger pulling mechanism is supposed to be linked to DNA. That's nitpicking though. But while we're on the subject, why exactly did alien fuel stuff make him turn into an alien?

Worst part of the movie:

Cannibalism. Or well, maybe not 'cannibalism', but the whole alien eating thing. I know that there are some weird cults with inhuman practices in Africa. But that was still really stupid. "I'm going to eat this thing to see if I can use this gun" is an idea with practical intentions. When that shit doesn't work then you can maybe see it not gaining too much traction.

The whole 'scary African gun guy' thing just felt out of place and unconvincing.
There's more ...

Space Wolves Codex - "Woof Woof!

So I guess I can write a post about the Space Wolf Codex. If you don't know what any of those three words mean, stop reading now.

I'm a Tau player first and foremost, but I got my start in 40k (like most players) with the Marines. I've been done campaigns as Marines, I've drawn up some fluff for Marines and I've probably played hundreds of one-offs as Marines. Not just the Vanilla Marines either, I've gone through Blood Angels, Dark Angels and Black Templars and played more than a couple of games with Thorpe's bullshit Chaos codex.

So I know my Marine codexes pretty well and when rumours swirled of how strong and overpowered it was, my interest was piqued. The bullshit of Guard and their stupid 140 point cheeseplanes has gone uncontested for months after all and so having some imba Marine stuff to cut those stupid green fuckers down to size would have been good.

After having used the dex and making some lists though, I feel confident in being the first Marine to say: "Uh guys, this isn't that great."

Or at least it does if you compare it the normal Marine codex. I'm not going to cover the whole codex here, so let me divide this into two sections

Why the good things aren't really as good as you've heard:

Njal Stormcaller - aka Cloudman:

Everyone's probably heard about this guy and his stupid storm. For the record: The rules for this guy are stupid and I think he's just generally a stupid idea. But for the sake of novelty I put him in a Drop Pod next to some Wolf Guard and dropped him on the second turn next to a bunch of Guardsmen. For the three turns before he was killed he rolled the morale check power, which managed to run one crappy infantry squad off the board. And that's against Guard who are probably the most vulnerable race to that.

Don't get me wrong, the storm has a lot of bogus and game-breaking results, but the big hits only come in later turns at which point he should probably be dead what with his 2 wounds. And since the guy clocks in at 270 points with Terminator Armour I really don't think he's even worth it.

Jaws of the World Wolf - An initiative test or death for all models within 24" of a line going out from your Rune Priest. That's really not so great as it sounds. Your opponent doing something as simple as putting his troops in a zigzag really takes the teeth out of it. Sure you can snipe with it, but most high-value models in the game are initiative 5 which gives Jaws a whopping 1-in-6 chance of actually doing something worthwhile.

Granted the likes of Necrons and Carnifexs aren't going to like that one bit, but those guys have been fucked around by Lash and Weaken Resolve for a while now so they should be used to it.

Why the codex isn't as good as the vanilla codex:

Transports:

Apparently Space Wolves are really fat. Only ten of them can fit into a Drop Pod as opposed to the normal Marine twelve. This wouldn't be that big a deal for ordinary Marines, as squads are going to optimally come in groups of ten anyway, but for Space Wolves the optimal number (i.e two special weapons and one sarge a Power-something) is 11 (or 6 if you only want one special weapon, in which case I guess you can ride in the Razorback but then you have less models hitting the front line). The reason for this is that they don't have Sergeants per sey but rather have a Wolf Guard assigned to lead the squad at the beginning of the game.

So if you want to shove a squad into a Rhino or a Pod you need to either give up your power fist or one of your special weapons. I can't think of another race besides Orks whose maximum efficiency squad size doesn't fit in any of its transports. What is up with that?

Wolf Guard

I'm sure most Chaos players are looking at the options these guys have and then wondering what the fuck happened to their Chosen, but the costs for these guys are weird. Note that the following things are the same stat-wise.

Normal Tac Marine Sarge with Power Fist - 51
Wolf Guard with Power Fist - 38

Good deal. But...

Normal Assault Marine Sarge w/ Power Fist - 53
Wolf Guard with Power Fist + Jump Pack- 63

Normal Bike Sarge w/ Power Fist - 65
Wolf Guard with Power Fist + Bike - 73

You pay a premium for special stuff.

One could call that a trade-off I guess, but when you consider the transport problem it's more of a simple mark up on your sarges.

Long Fangs

These things are so stupid. The whole point of a devastator squad is to have heavy weapons that you have to chop through some flesh to get to. These guys have nothing like that. No flesh cover for the models, leaving 40 point models exposed to the depredations to any Loota/IG HWT/Crisis Suit on the board. Wow, great idea GWS.

No Ironclad Dreadnought

There's only one type of Dread worth taking in the entire game and let me tell you that Dread isn't a stupid 13/12/10 guy that costs 270 points.

No Sternguard

This honestly can't be minimized. Nothing beats the Sternguard.

No Combat Squads

If you're coming out of a Drop Pod, being able to split into two independent squads is absolutely critical. It let's you shove Combi-Meltas into multiple targets and split your fire. Wolves can't do that.

But there are still things that are actually cool:

Wolf Scouts

WS/BS 3 on Marine Scouts has always been stupid so I'm glad that Wolf Scouts have it back up to 4. The super outflank power is also an excellent thing to use in this new era of Guardsmen bullshit, although they can only pack one melta-gun (not counting the Combi-Melta from the Wolf Guard).

Thunderwolves

I'm pretty sure these guys are overpriced. 50 point a model for T5 W2 Sv3+ isn't a very good deal, especially since basically every army has a Demo cannon these days. They seem interesting though and I look forward to experimenting with them.

Sagas

These things really shouldn't belong to a Marine Chapter. I mean, Saga of Warrior Born is something that would fit a Khorne Lord a lot better than a damn wolf dude. But they add colour and I approve of colour.

Overall:

The transport thing can't be minimized. That's incredibly crippling and has army-wide implications. Space Wolves will excel against the likes of Orks, which is an army that's mostly moving towards you anyway. But against Guard, Tau, Eldar and normals Marines I think they're pretty subpar. There's more ...

Planetarian - "Please do not divide heaven in two."

Planetarian is a magnificent piece of work that does what, in my opinion, more science fiction should be doing.

I've only read a handful of visual novels... three, in fact. First there was Fate/Stay Night, which was a decent fantasy yarn with a really out-of-place and too-long sex scene. Then there was Clannad, which were a web of reasonably well-told romances. Then there was Chaos;head, which was a wacky and good fun, though not really fantastic. Planetarian though is the first one that I actually want to actively recommend to people.

It's a short read. Took me around two hours to get through in its entirety, and this was while pausing to make a snack. The premise is simple though I think unique... it takes place after World War III/the apocalypse and stars a nameless 'Junker' (basically a heavily armed and grizzled veteran looking to loot things in order to survive) who is looting a 'Sarcophagus City' for when he stumbles across a still-functioning humanoid robot whose function is to guide tourists at a planetarium before the war.

(The spelling 'planetarian' in the title isn't wrong, by the way. The robot's name is 'Reverie Planetarian')

The story that unfolds is deeply moving and emotionally engaging, while the ending is something that I will always remember. There are only the two characters in the story (the Junker and Reverie) but they both get their hooks into you in a very short time. The setting is nicely conveyed and I think overall the work is a refreshing bit of science fiction.

My opinion is that all of you should try giving it a read.

It is a Visual Novel though and I would like to talk about that medium for a bit, if you don't mind.

Visual Novels vary in structure, but generally speaking it's a normal novel that you read on your computer usually with artwork, voices for the dialogue, music and the occasional sound effect. So the questions then are: Is that really necessary and would this work just as well as just a plain old novel?

In all the other Visual Novels I've read, I would say that the art isn't anything to get excited about. When a character is talking, one of several stock images of them will appear on the screen in one of maybe a dozen or so poses depending on what their mood is. Their lips don't move in sync with spoken dialogue and they aren't really animated at all. Planetarian sticks to the system in that respect, with Reverie on screen for the majority of the story.



I think it is cool to have an image of a character presented and by alternating the poses you can often get around doing a lot of the description work and keep the dialogue concise. The problem is though that often it seems like the images were drawn after the story was written. So when Reverie first enters the story, you have the protagonist in first person narration describe her, right down to her hair and ear-piece. But really, she's right there. I know what she looks like. What's the point of the visual part if you're just going to describe her to me anyway?

Though on the flip side, I think it is effective when the narrator later points things out about her as the picture changes. Like when she smiles and he points out as much, it tells me where the man's eyes are pointed, which is always a nice thing.

The other part where I think the artwork contributes is in the backgrounds. In the other Visual Novels that I've read a background is going to be a really boring picture that never ever changes. It's also kind of annoying, as there will be a big chair in the middle of a room and no one will ever sit in it. What Planetarian actually makes the backgrounds part of the story... I don't want to say too much about the fantastic astronomy scene, but if you're the kind of person that can (like me) be instantly distracted from anything by pretty space photos you are in for a treat. And certain images will hit the reader hard, no matter what his or her aesthetic preferences are.

I would post a picture to demonstrate that, but the scene I'm thinking of had such impact that I don't want to spoil it.

After artwork, comes sound...

Soundtrack-wise this isn't that exciting. A couple of good piano pieces (one of which I really like) and a few sorrowful tunes that set the mood well. An expanded musical budget to include some violins here and there would still have been opportune. During the battle scenes, you can hear gunfire and such as the fight is being described as if it were a novel, which I guess sets the mood (or at least isn't jarring at all).

The striking audio thing is really the dialogue...

All of Reverie's lines are spoken (in Japanese of course), but the protagonist's are not. I've read that in a later version of the novel the protagonist is voiced by Daisuke Ono (Koizumi from Haruhi). With all respect to Mr. Ono, I actually think that I liked the half/half structure stylistically. The protagonist is supposed to have a mysterious sort of air to him.



One of the objectives that the writer of this story has very early on is getting the reader to thoroughly love Reverie. That's in large part accomplished in record time by her voice. No matter what level of understanding one has of Japanese, her actress (who I looked up and found to be a completely unknown person who has done almost nothing besides this role) has this robotic sort of earnestness to her that is difficult for a reader to deny. That primal music of language that Patrick Stewart is always talking about is employed here to devastating effect.

All in all, I still consider Visual Novels to be a generally unproven medium. Most of Planetarian's success comes from the same place that any novel's success comes from - i.e. the writing. But I think that as production values increase and more things like Planetarian are made they'll become much more relevant to the discerning scifi fan. There's more ...

Devil Survivor - "Rest in peace, sinners."

Devil Survivor is a game that ought to be selling millions of copies. It won't and will likely attain cult hit status in a couple of weeks and be impossible to find anywhere, but it still should be selling like hotcakes.

What you have here is an Atlus turn-based strategy RPG (Atlus being the creators of Persona) about the Apocalypse occurring in Tokyo. The story draws on Christian/Old Testament material in that strange Japanese way, but fortunately not in that Japanese way. Technology, angels, the internet, rock music and government conspiracies are also involved. It's a wild ride and is occasionally a bit too wacky, but over all it's a good yarn.

If you've ever played Advanced Wars or Fire Emblem or FF Tactics, then you're already familiar with the rudimentaries of the system. You have 3-4 people on a grid-based map, each of whom have various elemental attacks and movement-manipulating spells. Battles are thus strategic and extremely intense. Haphazard attacks, bad mana management and poor formations often result in party wipes.

In layman's terms: The game is really bloody hard.

But beyond the raw gameplay is a really compelling storyline that handles something that few games handle well... Choice. So let's talk about that.


(As you can see, I find all my screenshots by google image searching them. Stupid sites putting watermarks on the things)

When I play a Bioware RPG or really any game that involves making important choices, the first thing I'll often do whenever anything happens is save. That's a pretty basic thing, I thought... being able to save and then go back if you don't like what happens is something you sorta take for granted.


But here's the thing... Devil Survivor has only one save slot. And because the fights are so damn hard, you'd have to be crazy to not be saving constantly. Moreover, the way things are set up in the game has it so that a choice you make at one point will have irrevocable consequences an hour or so down the road.

At one point I heard that a certain person was being hunted by a very angry man who hangs out with demons. At the same time as that was happening though, a woman was trying to fulfill a blood oath. I gave said lady a hand in a tough but fun fight and then immediately afterward got to see my pal get incinerated before my very eyes. And, since my choice to help the woman over him had occurred much earlier, there was nothing I could do to 'fix' it.

It's really amazing how much that changes. I found myself really thinking about the decisions the game made me make in a way that really wouldn't have been an issue if I'd had 15 saved games. I actually would put my DS down and think about what I was doing and why, which was I think a strange thing.


The other interesting thing about choice in the game is what they're willing to let you do and become. If you're so inclined, you can become plain old evil and sit on a big chair sipping red wine while concocting evil plans and being attended upon by hot evil slave girls and thinking about how evil you are. But there are at least 5-6 endings and there's a rather large grey area surrounding the non-ultimate evil ones. As I was making the Big Choice, I found that I couldn't really decide which course would really be right. Questions of free will, morality and human progress all sorta bounce between them.

I think that's much better than the usual good ending vs. evil ending that crops up in RPGs. Evil is there and good is there too, but there's a lot in between.

It's a crime that stuff like this passes by mostly unnoticed while shit like Metal Gear sells millions of copies. So go buy it!
There's more ...

The Kite Runner - "For you, a thousand times over."

So I really meant to keep politics out of Unity Plaza when I first conceived of it, but this is such a political book that I'm afraid this is going to be a political post. Strap in.

The Kite Runner was an awfully good book.

It's hard to really describe the book's plot adequately. The quickest way would be to say it's about the messed up life of an Afghani boy who grew up in the 70s and ended up as a refugee. It deals mainly with Pashtun culture and Afghani racial dynamics, while hitting fundamental themes involving the concepts of sin and redemption.

It's author, Khaled Hosseini, is an Afghani exile who lived in Kabul and ended up living in California. Pashtun culture doesn't actually have much traction with me. I vaguely am familiar with the ideas of Pashtunwali, but the details of those ideals are a bit alien to me. Still, no matter how un-Pashtun I might be, I know enough about the culture to know that Kabulite exiles are individuals one is supposed to be wary of. There is a small subset of that lot that have made their livings by selling out their homelands to our enemies, after all (You'll notice I say 'our' even though I have no right to).

Khaled Hossieni, I do believe, is not one of those people. This was a book he wrote from his heart and he did not write it to cater to a Western audience that wants its myopic stereotypes confirmed. But in spite of that, Mr. Hossieni is still a Kabulite exile and, for better or worse, it shows.

I'm always hesitant to talk about Afghanistan, mainly because I have a sister who has steadily been forging herself into the foremost expert on Afghanistan in the Western world. So I actually consulted with her about the book after reading one hundred pages of it, because I sort of could already feel what the author was doing and wanted to know if that instinct was right.

Mr. Houssieni's main political point in the book is the equating of the Taliban with the Nazi party of Germany through the character of a half-German half-Pashtun bully who later ends up in the Taliban top brass. Said half-German has read Mein Kempf and thinks it's filled with great ideas and also happens to like to rape young boys. It's thus strongly implied through the book's text that the Taliban are the Nazi successors. The word 'Islamofacism' is something that gets peddled around (though not so much these days now, thank you again Barack Obama) and Mr. Houssieni is obviously picking up on that angle.

It's a convenient sort of equation from the perspective of an Afghan on a lot of different levels. The Nazi party, from the perspective of modern German society, is considered to be a fit of temporary insanity. Many Japanese treat the Imperial period in much the same way. Labelling the Taliban as Nazis in turbans allows the Afghani exile to reconcile dual loyalities in a clean sort of way.

The problem is that I don't believe that that's true.

The Taliban were a military force that emerged out of one of the most brutal wars in human history. I don't sympathize with any of the policies or restrictions they imposed upon the Afghan people nor do I agree with any facet of their twisted practice of Islam. But I also am aware that their origins lie with a war against a brutal foreign occupier that sprinkled the countryside with landmines, followed quickly by a war against warlords that conducted systematic rape campaigns against rival ethnic groups.

There is a story I know about Mullah Omar that may well be a folktalk, but I shall recount it here. Mullah Omar had his origins as a low level madrassa teacher, very second-tier. One day when news came of some manner of warlord invading a man's wedding and kidnapping his bride for himself, Mullah Omar put up a sign on the madrassa decreeing: 'education is now haram'. For Mullah Omar and the young men he would lead, there could be no civilization so long as such things were taking place.

When people go to war on such terms, the only thing one can find on the other end is the Taliban. And that is why I reject any comparison between them and the narcisstic racial fantasies of an overly pampered European nation from a world away. To call them Nazis and fascists is, quite simply, a self-serving lie. It dismisses the specifically Afghan quality of their movement and tries to make it something foreign. It tries to make the Taliban not Afghani and, I guess I should say, not Pashtun.

The fundamental way I have come to understand the Taliban is that they are men who volunteered to fight against some of the blackest evils that world has ever seen and were tainted in the process. They fought an invading army that sprinkled millions of landmines shaped like butterflies about the countryside to attract Afghani children to them. They fought warlords who made rape into a regular military practice. And in the process of fighting those evils they, in the words of Nietsche, stared into the void and the void looked right back at them.

That does not justify any of their later actions, but I do believe that that is the proper context by which they must be understood.

There is a passage in which Khaled Hosseini does acknowledge his perspective as a Kabulite exile when he has a taxi driver deride his former life in Kabul as pampered and unAfghani. That took a lot of courage, in my opinion, and greatly enhanced my opinion of him. But nonetheless, my hope is that the oversimplification of the Taliban that he presents does not take root any more than it already has.

This all, of course, has very little to do with the actual book, which was really quite good. It's a fantastically written story, really. I found that the structure of the story was rather simplistic and you could usually tell when Mr. Hosseini was going to do something bad to his characters, but the amount of sheer abuse that he was willing to hand to his characters consistently surprised me. Though I guess that, in itself, is appropriately Afghani.

There is also a prayer scene that was extremely powerful when the main character turned towards God desperately in a hospital as the child that is in his care is about to die. I think there is a certain ardent form of prayer that's only possible from the Muslim context. The desperate sort of prayer that stems from the twin knowledge of one's recognition of the absolute supremacy of the Lord Creator and the belief in the infinite mercy that He is nonetheless capable of. It is a tearful prayer that is rooted in the purest sort of faith that one was not created without purpose, however unfathomable that purpose may appear at the time. It is the prayer of a person who has nothing else to hold on to and nothing left to suffer.

I did not think that the fundamentals of this prayer could be captured through fiction. In the Kite Runner, they were. And for that, Khaled Hosseini has my most highest of respects.
There's more ...

One Outs - "Please trust me now!"

It took forever for this to be completely subbed. Geez...


So One Outs is a high drama about baseball and gambling. The basic storyline is that a famous baseball player meets a prodigy pitcher in some random baseball field in the middle of nowhere and recruits him onto his team. Said pitcher then makes a deal with the owner of the team that for every out he gets he'll get 5 million yen but for every point he gives up while on the mound he'll pay 50 million yen.

A show with that premise has no business being good, but One Outs was something special. It wasn't so much about baseball as it was about strategy, ethics and attitudes towards money. The long and short of it is that it was really damn amazing.

I'm just going to touch on a few points here...


Baseball is an awful game. I don't like playing it and the very idea of watching it brings me physical pain. That said, I'm really not sure how accurate a representation of baseball One Outs really was. How much thought does a pitcher and batter put into their types of pitches and where they'll swing? In One Outs it's treated as a purely intellectual and psychological exercise. Is that what it's supposed to be like? I don't really think so, but it being presented in that way certainly made the game a lot more compelling.



In any case, Tokuchi's skill isn't really in pitching, but rather in waging psychological warfare. He's good at reading people and will trip up batters with some rather delicious trash talk, though his main thing is to make the opposition terrified. He'll do things like have his team step out to the outfield to make a mockery of the batter and apply psychological pressure. It's often mean and vicious, but man was it good watching.



Let me say that Tokuchi Toua here was an amazing sort of protagonist. The entire show very much revolves around him, but what really struck me is how often he wouldn't talk. You never get his internal monologue or even the slightest glimpse into what might be going through his mind, save for the occasional smirk or puzzled expression. He's just this overwhelming force that sweeps everything before him in a high tide of unknowable talent and intellect.



You can't really grasp his motives... does he want the money? He doesn't seem to really care about that. It's not glory and fame, either... he's just got this strange and silent desire to climb the very highest mountain, no matter how many lesser men he must destroy along the way.

So the long and short of it is that One Outs rocked. Here's hoping for a second season. There's more ...

The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi Season 2 Episode 1 - "Sorry to be late!"

So they aired a new Haruhi episode.

For the longest time, I really thought that Haruhi had some of the most ruthless capitalist minds Japan had to offer at its helm. The massive amounts of Haruhi figmas, crappy video games and merch they released coupled with things like Lucky Star (which is basically a giant commercial for Haruhi merchandise) made me conclude that these people were out to cut the purses of every hapless young man who has ever had a positive thought towards Haruhi.

Recent events have made me reconsider this...

Haruhi appears to be airing in this manner: They're showing reruns of the original series in chronological (ew) order. When they come to a part of the series where there's a story from the original novels to insert, they put in a new episode. Without warning. So last week's episode was the baseball episode. This week's was Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody... and then next week will be that episode where the Computer Society President is possessed by that giant bug. The next new episode will probably be in a month. And then there's another month of reruns between that new episode and the next.

The only reasoning I can think of for this is that kind of schedule is that someone at the studio doesn't actually want anyone to see the new episodes.

Say it with me now: What the fuck.

Anyhow, that aside, let's talk about the episode...



I read Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody over a year ago It's a nice little story that does the rare thing of bringing in all of the characters at the same time smoothly. So often Haruhi storylines will be segregated. There'll be a Nagato story and then a Mikuru story and then a Koizumi story. They don't really overlap in a significant way. What I like about Bamboo is that it manages to do character development for everyone (except maybe Koizumi) with one continuous story.


I've always been of the opinion that Haruhi works a lot better as an anime than it does as a novel. A character like Nagato, whose main feature is pregnant silences, just doesn't work very well when said pause is just the author writing 'and then she was quiet. And without a visual presence, Mikuru doesn't really work either. She's just the annoying useless ditz that Kyon pays WAY too much attention to for some inexplicable reason. Ditzy cutesy chicks are a lot easier to accept with an image than it is through text (which is something the author would do well to learn).



But a lot of other things come across a lot better visually... Nagato mouthing something before closing the door. The novel didn't dwell on her doing that at all, which is a crying shame. That's the kind of scene that you can interpret a couple of different ways and it is left nicely ambiguous.


So all in all, I think I feel comfortable saying that I enjoyed seeing Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody a lot more than I enjoyed reading, which is about the best you can ask for from an adaptation.

Still... Haruhi has some fundamental problems. Mainly: Balance of characters.


The author treats his main characters as equals (sorta... Koizumi certainly doesn't get as much screentime as everyone else). That's a good idea on paper, but it actually turns out to be a really bad one in practice. The reason for this is simple: No matter which way you shake it, an alien cyborg intelligence that has come to Earth to act as an observer does not weigh evenly with a ditzy redhead from the future.

So even though this episode integrated all the characters in a nice and unified way, it only really got good when Haruhi and Nagato had their scenes. Mikuru's scenes were mildly cute but wore thin after a little while. Then Haruhi's bit was great and Nagato's was fantastic. But the problem is they all had more or less equal time.



There's a reason why Lieutenant Barcley was never a regular member of the TNG cast. He's a fun guy and I love his episodes, but if he had as many episodes dedicated to him as, say, Data he would quickly lose his charm. Mikuru hasn't got half of Broccoli's charm and yet she gets put on even footing with Nagato and Haruhi both.

This is why for much as I love Haruhi, I don't have a very high opinion of the author. To be frank: he's a fucking amateur. He has good ideas and bad ideas and doesn't have a damn clue how to tell the two apart and just throws them all at the canvass in a big mess. Occasionally, when he's throwing the right ones, he'll manage to write something completely brilliant. But for a fair chunk of the time, he's just embarrassing himself. There's more ...

Persona 4 - "I reach out for the truth."

Persona 4 was really damn good.

It's a modern fantasy/mystery RPG/Visual Novel hybrid set in a Japanese small town. It's a crossbreed of Majora's Mask, Final Fantasy and Fate/Stay Night, except much more sophisticated. The story is immensely complicated and nuanced while the gameplay is well thought out and challenging, though it's really the scope of the entire affair that defies description. The game is long, but unlike other RPGs that usually have a filler 'go collect some knickknacks for us', Persona is packed full of stories upon stories.

The game revolves around a series of murders in the town of Inaba, with bodies showing up on foggy days hanging upside down from powerlines. I won't talk too much about the plot (that would take too long), but as you might guess the police are baffled and it lies with you to form a sort of Scooby Doo mystery-solving gang in order to stop the murderer.

The writers likes to alternate between somber darkness and lighthearted fun as they tease out the mystery. The whole game has a very anime style... catchy J-Pop numbers play as you go around town or get into fights and the game has an all-star voice cast that includes the likes of Rie Kugimiya, Yui Horie and Ami Koshimizu (even if you don't know all those names, believe me, you've heard them before).

All in all: It was a fantastic game and I couldn't put it down till the credits rolled. I highly recommend it (the undub version, obviously). After the jump, I'll talk a bit more about the gameplay and then go into a few things about the characters in my usual way.

So one thing about gameplay: Man, this shit was hard.

The first ninety minutes of the game are just visual novel bits and then beating up some ridiculously weak enemies. Then all of a sudden the game becomes this nightmare land where every point of mana is precious and not sufficiently protecting yourself against certain elemental attacks means doom for you and your entire party.


It's not a situation where you'll lose a battle and have to go and grind levels to win. You could play like that, I suppose, but it's more accurate to say that the game wants you to be tactical. Don't expose your elemental weaknesses, buff yourself up, dispel enemy buffs, use the defend command when it's wise to and keep your health bars high. Often boss fights can last over an hour, with a boss switching tactics/forms every time you knock off 1/4th of its health.

It's brutal and exhausting, but ultimately extremely satisfying when you think your way through.

So that aside, let's talk about some interesting points of the game...


This is Kanji. He's a thuggish delinquent with a bad history of gang violence and involvement with the police. He's a good guy though and has a big old heart of gold, in spite of his tough-guy act.

Not that special at first glance, but the thing is that he also has the unusual distinction of being the very first openly gay video game character.

(Some people might take issue with 'first', so let me say that the Bioware lesbians don't count because they're designed first and foremost to titillate players and the blue alien lady isn't even really a lesbian because she comes from a mono-gendered species that can reproduce with more or less anything with a pulse)

I'm not quite sure what to make of the portrayal of Kanji's sexuality. Like for one... The murders in the game involve an alternate dimension that victims are being thrown into, wherein a combination of their desires, anxieties and fears are made manifest by the 'Shadows', a race that feasts upon negative emotion. Kanji gets thrown in there and when you go in to pull him out his dungeon is filled with gay characitures... like you have to fight muscular men in rainbow underwear in there. Not exactly a tasteful depiction, but the place is supposed to be a manifestation of both his fears and desires, so in a way it kind of makes sense. I mean, clearly the writers were having some fun here, but it also shows that this is how he would be afraid people would see him if they knew he were gay.

But the whole thing is muddled when Kanji later develops a huge crush on this one dude who ends up being a girl (albeit a somewhat transgendered one). So I guess he's at least somewhat bi? I really don't know. I actually personally think him and that girl are a pretty good couple (he's very brash and straight-forward while she's intellectual and reserved), but I believe that that sort of thing really doesn't work out long-term. Although I read online that in Japanese culture it's apparently more common to be bi than gay, so who knows?

What I liked about Kanji though is that at no point did he feel like fodder for the degenerate yaoi fangirls of the world nor did he feel like he was an attempt to shout 'hey being gay is ok' or whatnot. He's not someone that's defined by his sexuality as gay characters in fiction so often are, but it's rather just an aspect of him. That's why it made me a bit sad when I read about him online and saw people saying things like 'oh yuck, Kanji! I never used that guy ewwwww.'

I hold some conservative views myself, but for crying out loud people, can we get passed that?

The other thing I want to talk about is the game's primary flaw, mainly the relationship system.


I say 'flaw' but it's actually mostly a good system. A group of characters in the game have mini-storylines that you develop through the game that are attached to a Persona card in the game... as you spend more time with them, you level up that card and get XP bonuses when you make Personas of that class. So say for instance you become friends with Kanji up there, who is the representative of the Emperor card... when I go to the next dungeon and make Odin, an Emperor Persona, I will get a good 6 levels on creation, which is really essential.

The problem is that relationships max out at level 10... not a bad thing in theory, as there are lots of cards to max. But there's an interesting quirk in practice: Once you finish a card, the person is essentially dead to you.

So you have a situation like with Rise here:


Rise of the Lovers card captured my character's heart with her ability to call out an elemental weakness/immunity of the enemy before a battle starts and her capacity to refill my party's health and mana after each battle (always something to look for in a girl). And of course she's also voiced by Rie Kugimiya. But anyway, at level 10, love was confessed and a long-term commitment was made... But from then on, it was now in my interests to refuse to spend time with her and to ask out a blonde bimbo so that I could max out the Moon social link. And, of course, my doing this will have no effect on Rise.

I'm not saying the game should be a bloody dating sim or something, but that just makes no sense and it really broke the immersion. A lot of the side routes (i.e. the blonde bimbo) are pretty pointless too so why not cut one or two and make it so that you max out that card with the girl that I had my character commit to? Surely that would make more sense than 'okay she loves you, time to start seeing other people!'

... Right?

In the end though, this was a fantastic piece of work that I enjoyed from beginning to end. If at all possible, you should grab it. There's more ...

Wolverine - "Every single time."

This rocked.

Seriously, I can't imagine why it got such negative reviews. I mean, prequels are sort of problematic because you know in advance who's going to live through 'em, but that honestly didn't detract much from the movie. The main complaint I could see people having about the movie is that it's not terribly realistic, but for crying out loud it's a movie about a guy with a metal skeleton and claws. It's not supposed to be realistic.

What it is supposed to be was Wolverine chopping things up as various tragic things happen all around him. The plot twists and turns in a rather comic book-like way and there are many fights and explosions. It has everything you would really want from a Wolverine movie. I guess if you don't have any particular Wolverine-related desires, you could conceivably be disappointed, but I think most of the film's detractors must have their heads up their ass.

Was it as good as X2? No, probably not, although it does get bonus points for not having Halle Berry. But it was still a damn good watch.

Spoiler talk after the jump.

(If you ever get the chance, see if you can read the Marvel Wolverine Origins story, it's quite good)
I'm going to keep this short, so let me hit on some key points:

1) The intro sequence was damn good.

The whole point of the Wolverine character is to be this incredibly tortured creature that clings to a minuscule amount of goodness in a world where everything bad has happened to him. The war montage got that across, while also doing a good job of differentiating between him and Sabertooth. I thought it was genius.

2) The plot was wacky.

This is what all the critics on rotten tomatoes seem to agree on, but I'm not sure how it wasn't more twisty or farfetched than X2. Yes the 'Achtung, spy!' bit and 'he was working for me all along' stuff is loopy, but it's not hard to follow and this is what comic book storylines are like. I don't see why this is a bad thing in Wolverine and not in X2. X2 has mind-control drugs leeched out of a wheelchair psychic guy and two attempts at psychic genocide.

I think a lot of these 'oh the plot sucks' people are just hopping aboard a bandwagon. The main problem with the plot is that it's a prequel and you know generally what's going to happen. Content-wise, it was comic-booky but I sort of want comic-booky when it comes to comic book movies.

3) Hugh Jackman is too clean.

He plays a great Wolverine and I wouldn't have any one else. And most of the time he looks fine... grizzled and weary, just like you'd expect Wolverine to be. But there are certain scenes where the guy will look at the camera after a rough fight and just shine with excessive prettiness. Yes, I realize that Mr. Jackman has a female following to be concerned with, but they could've gone a little easy on the make-up.

4) Some of the minor characters are pretty stupid.

I think Marvel writers are partially spoiled by their movie success and think they can insert whatever bollocks characters they please into their movie. I'm not even talking about Blob (his scene was at least funny), but rather the throwaway mutants like Agent Zero or the guy with the swords. The Marvel universe has always been about a solid backing of b-list gimmick characters, but that doesn't mean that those clowns should get into the movies. Though I guess they aren't that much worse than your Toads or what have you, so this isn't a Wolverine-specific problem.

I didn't mind the last guy though, if only because it's sort of been established that that's the kind of thing that Stryker apparently likes.

5) The adamantium bullets thing was also stupid, but it's not the kind of thing I dwell on because (again) it's a bloody comic book movie. There's more ...

The Alchemist - "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy."

So the Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is my latest foray into the non-speculative end of the novel pool.

This is a book about a boy from Spain who has a dream that there's treasure near the pyramids and goes on a journey to look for said treasure. He makes a trip through North Africa to go look for it and along the way he goes on a sort of spiritual journey too. Along the way he meets some nice people, gets robbed a few times and finds a girl that he likes. Oh and there's also an Alchemist guy.

It's very short and there really isn't much story to it. The writing is flowery and the story is punctuated by philosophical mutterings about religion and God and 'The Soul of the World'. Indeed, the whole story is more of a platform for Coelho's vague ideas about how God loves all His children. At no point does the Alchemist offend and it isn't really boring or anything, but it's ultimately a book about nothing.

So as I said, a fair chunk of the short-book is dedicated to a sort of spiritual awakening on the part of 'the boy' (the main character does not have a name). This read basically like any scene from any book where some form of mystical power is bestowed upon the protagonist. By listening to his heart the boy can speak to the wind and then to the sun and then look unto the Hand of God, which in turn let's him realize that all things are part of the Soul of the World and that the Soul of the World is in turn an aspect of God and thus he can perform miracles and turn himself into the wind.

Use the Force, Luke.

The difference between the Alchemist and a good story though is that there is no conflict in the Alchemist. He isn't going to use his Soul of the World powers to do anything besides steal money from a church (that's where the treasure ends up being) and then live out his days being happy. The story is simplistic and unambitious. There are only really three characters in the book. There's the boy, who is Pursuing His Dreams. Then there are the helper type guys who appears throughout the book dispensing philosophy and encouragement, who might have different names but who are really just one person with different titles. And then there's the one named character, Fatima, who is a girl he likes.

My point: there isn't any actual story in this story. It's a religious philosophy text dressed in a layer of fiction.

The actual philosophy is perfectly inoffensive. It's standard Christian Jesus-loves-everyone feel-goodism translated into a form that attempts to make it have universal application through a Soul of the World, which I guess is also an analogy for the Holy Spirit (whatever that is). It really doesn't go any further than that, as there are no evil characters in the book, so I thus feel comfortable dismissing it as being utterly shallow.

The other message is 'follow your heart' which is, of course, tripe.

But the shallow philosophy is not the problem. Fiction has been used as a platform for philosophical and political insights for a very long time. I don't have a problem with book with a message. But the difference between this and your 1984s or whatnot is that those books have actual stories! If you ignore all of Orwell's political commentary, you still are left with a boldy imaginative and engrossing story. If you ignore Coelho's philosophical dung, you're left with blank pages.

And that just isn't how a novel should be. There's more ...