Fixing Ahsoka.

Okay, so, the Ahsoka series on Disney+ is over and.  Well.  It is not very good.  I attribute this to Dave Filoni, the showrunner, being completely inexperienced in live action.  He's an animation guy, and his animation, though sometimes hit and miss, is generally better written and blocked than this show was.

So, what would I do to fix it?  There are a few things before we even get to the show itself.

First of all, Filoni is not up to the task of showrunner.  He can be an assistant or consultant, but he absolutely is not the right choice for the top job.  Second, I would recast Ahsoka.  Rosario Dawson is a great actress.  She is, however, a TERRIBLE Ahsoka.  She doesn't look like Ahsoka.  She doesn't act like Ahsoka, and she is absolutely awful at anything involving action.  I mean, at the very LEAST use a stunt double who can keep up with the other actors in fight scenes.  And can run in a straight line believably.  She's wearing all that makeup.  No one would even notice.

Moving on, this is something I'm having trouble explaining to people.  Either I'm not explaining well, or they're just not understanding.  A story is more than a collection of things that happen.  A story is emotion.  A story is growth.  A story is a struggle against the odds.  A story is not just a simple string of things that happen to the same characters.  If there's no emotion, the characters don't progress, learn and grow as people.  When they don't even act like people at all, and show no emotion there's nothing for people to relate to.  When they just overcome everything in their way without any problems that aren't just immediately walked off as if they're nothing, it's just not entertaining to watch.  Events have to build upon one another.  They all have to lead into the next, raising the tension higher and higher until they reach a climax, thematically, narratively, and emotionally.

Next, this show has a very, very huge problem with relevance.  It just wastes SO MUCH TIME on things that don't progress the plot or develop the characters.  There is so much filler in this show it feels like the entire thing is just a filler arc in an anime series.  The editing is also so, so bad.  Why is there so much dead air between characters speaking lines of dialog?  I could get up and make a freaking sandwich in the time it takes Ahsoka to reply to something Sabine has said.  Why did I sit there for seven freaking minutes watching Ahsoka complete a videogame puzzle in complete silence?  That is both irrelevant, AND boring!  Why does Ahsoka just wander around and look at things in silence for so freaking long?  Why does Sabine ride around on a giant boar thing  for twenty minutes and get chased by nomads?  Why does Baylon just stand around for the second half of the series staring off into the distance meaningfully?

Okay, with those out of the way, let's get to the show.  This is what I would do with the story.  This is supposed to set up a movie where all of the Star Wars TV series characters come together to fight Grand Admiral Thrawn.  But it completely fails at that, because Thrawn is not portrayed as a threat, and anyone who hasn't read books, or watched the Rebels cartoon (which is MOST Star Wars fans) have no idea who he is, or why his return is so bad.  So, to start out with, I would give a recap.  I would take relevant scenes from the Rebels and Clone Wars series, refilm them in live action, and do maybe a 10 minute montage at the beginning of the first episode so that people who have not read the books, or watched the cartoons know who all of the characters are, and why they should care about them.  Kind of a "previously on Star Wars" little thing like they did at the beginning of Obi-Wan, except it would need to be a bit longer as these are characters that most Star Wars fans are NOT familiar with, and they will need to have things laid out for them.

Next, the first 3.5 episodes are completely irrelevant to the plot and just waste everyone's time.  Cut them off.  Start with an opening crawl that says something to the effect of "Rogue Jedi survivors disillusioned by the New Republic have stolen an ancient starmap that details hyperspace lanes to a neighboring galaxy from the old Jedi archives in hopes of finding Grand Admiral Thrawn and returning him to power.  Ahsoka, Sabine and Hera (NOT Jacen, because why would you bring a child into a war zone!?) have chased them in the Ghost to a remote part of the galaxy in hopes of rescuing the missing Jedi Ezra Bridger and preventing the return of Thrawn, while a Republic fleet gathers to aid them."  Then we cut to the Ghost arriving in system and being attacked by fighters and the guns on the Eye of Sion.  Them getting shot down, and crash landing on the planet below where Baylon and Shin are analyzing the starmap.  Destroying a beloved ship from the cartoon as your opening act sets the stakes early on.  This is a dangerous situation and our heroes are outmatched and stepping into things they might not be able to handle on their own.

The character Marrok is gone.  He was completely superfluous to the show, and ultimately did nothing important or interesting.  Morgan Elsbet can still be there, but she needs to be a bit more threatening, and a bit less cryptic.  We go through pretty much as before, Sabine and Hera fighting Shin, and Ahsoka fighting Baylon and Morgan.  EXCEPT they all lose.  They are just completely outmatched.  Shin takes out Hera and Sabine, despite Sabine having been trained by a Jedi to fight Jedi (and none of this you can be a Jedi without the force if you wish for it hard enough BS) And Hera having lived with a Jedi for many years and being aware of their capabilities, the two of them are just no match for Shin.  This makes Shin a credible threat.  Maybe have her whack a limb or two off of someone just to seal the deal.

Ahsoka is also outmatched because Baylon is just so much bigger and stronger than she is, much like in the show.  No matter how good she is, he can just batter through her defenses with brute strength.  You know.  How it works in reality.  Have her use some ingenuity to get the upper hand, showing that she's smart and can adapt to fights where she is physically outmatched, but forgets that Morgan is there, and have Morgan jump in and together, she and Baylon beat Ahsoka.  The prisoners are gathered.  The calculations are complete.  

The Republic fleet arrives, and our baddies use Ahsoka, Hera and Sabine as hostages to get back to the Eyes of Sion and jump to the other galaxy to begin their search for Thrawn.  You can keep the dream Ahsoka has about Anakin, since that was literally the absolute best part of the show, BUT it needs to be clearer to the audience what he's trying to teach her in this vision.

They arrive in the new galaxy to find that Thrawn hasn't just been sitting there for ten years getting fatter while Ezra picks off his Stormtroopers a few at a time.  Thrawn has, in fact conquered the entire galaxy, enslaved or recruited armies of indigenous people, commandeered their ships and built a massive fleet, just trying to find the right hyperspace route to take them back to the Star Wars galaxy and hand them over to the Emperor.  Ezra is a prisoner, because of COURSE Thrawn would just lock him up or kill him.  Why the hell would he let him go?  Our four heroes are reunited WITH SOME ACTUAL FREAKING EMOTION THIS TIME, in prison.  They make a plan to escape, and destroy the Eye of Sion before it can Lead Thrawn's massive fleet back to the other galaxy.  Sacrificing their way back home to save their people from the war that Thrawn would revive.

They escape and try to enact their plan, but they are utterly defeated by Baylon, Shin, and Morgan.  Thrawn jumps his fleet home, and completely destroys the Republic fleet that's waiting for him.  This makes Thrawn a credible threat.  Our heroes have been beaten repeatedly by enemies that are far stronger than them.  The Republic fleet has been destroyed, and Thrawn names himself Emperor in Palpatine's place, starting his war of conquest.  This is the perfect end and the perfect lead in to the movie.  You have your heroes at their lowest point.  The audience sees that they will need to learn, grow, and recruit more allies if they are ever going to win.  Thrawn is a tactical genius in command of the largest, most powerful fleet in the galaxy, and it will take everyone, everywhere coming together to defeat him.

My way cuts out all of the pointless crap.  Has the characters acting like actual people, and facing real threats.  It makes Thrawn and the other villains credible threats, and it sets up for an epic movie where they can have their big Avenger's style team up that they want this movie to be.

But, I don't know.  Maybe I just don't get Star Wars anymore.  Which would you like better, my story, or the story they actually went with in the show?

Watching Angel Manuel Soto shoot himself in the balls in real time.

You might be asking yourself, who the heck is Angel Manuel Soto, and why would he do something so stupid as shoot himself in the balls?  Well. Angel Manuel Soto is the director of the upcoming Blue Beetle movie, and the ball shooting is purely figurative.  

Okay.  So. Long, long ago, and not really all that far away, ten year old Eric was part of a very poor family.  He couldn't afford many video games, books, movies, or comics, but he did have a shining library card of justice, a library 3 miles from his house, and a bike.  It was there that he discovered the awe-inspiring wonder or comic omnibuses.  He couldn't afford to buy comics, but he didn't have to, because one of the librarians at his library was a huge comic book geek and ordered all of the omnibuses that she could.  Marvel.  DC.  Dark Horse.  IDW.  Image wasn't really a thing yet, but once it was, she was all kinds of on top of that too.  Yes, that's right, I predate Image Comics by over a decade.

Anyway, it was there that I discovered such heroes as The Uncanny X-men, Ironman, Green Lantern, The Flash, The Avengers, etc.  I was already aware of the big ones, like Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, The Incredible Hulk, etc because of TV series and cartoons, but that was where I found all of the other heroes, and the intricate universes in which they lived.  One such hero was the Blue Beetle.  He was kind of a D list hero, and he was killed off right at the beginning of Crisis on Infinite Earths just to show that the big event was serious, but he was a cool enough guy.  I didn't have any huge love for him, but I didn't hate him either.

But, here's the thing.  I am not like the majority of people out there.  The "normies" if you will.  Most people don't read comics, and never have,  They go to see superhero movies like the MCU because they've made comic book heroes accessible and cool, without having to nerd out and read comics.  Because of the MCU even normies can experience the heroes that I grew up with.  (they also seem to think they're experts on them just because they've seen a few movies, but that's another story entirely)

Anyway, here we are in 2023 and comic book movies are in serious decline.  Have been for years.  And lo and behold a new trailer.  The Blue Beetle is making his big screen debut.  Ah.  Hmmm.  It's the Jaime Reyes version, not Dan Garret, or even Ted Kord.  The race swapped replacement for Ted Kord that even the people who know about the Blue Beetle don't like.  He is like the Ironheart to Tony Stark's Ironman.  Some stupid kid trying to take over the legacy of a character he has no business taking over.  Siiiiiiiiiiigh.  But hey, it's got the kid from Cobra Kai, and I like Cobra Kai, so maybe it won't be too... bad... WHAT THE HELL DID THEY JUST SAY ABOUT BATMAN!?!?!?!

All right.  SO.  The makers of this movie already have an uphill battle getting people to come see it.  It's about a hero that none of the normies have EVER heard of.  It looks very low budget.  It looks like a Japanese Super Sentai movie, which are laughed at by American audiences at the best of times.  And it looks like a race swapped ripoff of Ironman.  My parents didn't even realize it wasn't part of the MCU.  They thought he was going to be the new Ironman.  And didn't really care all that much.  On top of that, they're doing a version of the Blue Beetle that even people who have actually heard of him, don't really like.  And then, they proudly proclaim in their first trailer, "Batman is a fascist!"

Hoo boy.  Where do I even start?  All right.  Let me explain this like I would to a particularly stupid child.  People LOVE Batman.  People LOOOOOOOOOOVE Batman.  Even people who hate Super Heroes, LOVE Batman.  Batman is one of the supporting pillars of all of DC, in comics, animation, and film.  In fact, Batman is currently the only thing keeping the head of DC comics above water.  It is the only comic that they have that is still consistently selling.  PEOPLE.  LOVE.  BATMAN.  NOBODY.  CARES.  ABOUT.  BLUE.  BEETLE.  So, what do they do when introducing the normies to a new hero they've never heard of before, and want very badly to have them spend money on their new movie?  They insult a hero that EVERYONE  LOVES.  

Pistol put to ballsack.  Trigger pulled.

 

AND THEN!!!

 

OH, AND THEN!!!

 

What does Angel Manuel Soto do?  Come on.  Guess.  

 

If you guessed that he went straight to Twitter when an overwhelming tide of lifelong Batman fans started screaming for his blood, and shot his mouth off like the absolute idiot that he is, you would be correct.  Because that is exactly what EVERY Hollywood asshole does these days when faced with backlash over substandard, preachy garbage they're trying to pass off as entertainment.  And worse, he roped the kid from Cobra Kai into doing it as well, poor, impressionable, little dumbass that he is. 

Okay.  So.  People are getting sick of being lectured to by Hollywood millionaires without even a passing familiarity with reality in the guise of entertainment.  I think that's pretty safe to say.  Looking at the response from the general populace to a lot of the agenda driven crap that's come out of Hollywood for the last  few years, falling box office numbers, cratering streaming service subscriptions, etc, people are getting pretty sick of it.  So, when you have a brand new super hero movie that most people have never heard of, and then you then insult a super hero that LITERALLY EVERYONE KNOWS AND LOVES in the trailer, THEN you shoot your mouth off about how racist everyone is for not agreeing that Batman is a fascist, how do you think people are going to react?

Not favorably.  Like.  At all.

The Blue Beetle Movie is projected to have the lowest theatrical opening of any DC movie in the history of DC movies, INCLUDING the 1966 Adam West Batman movie, WITHOUT adjusting for inflation.  And frankly, they deserve it.  All they had to do, was not insult Batman, and thereby his hundreds of millions of fans worldwide.  All they had to do, was not put that line in the movie, much less the first trailer.  But Angel Manuel Soto lives in the Hollywood bubble, where it's just accepted that Batman is a fascist because he's rich and white, and doesn't understand that the vast and overwhelming majority of people do not agree.  He put that line in the trailer because he thought people were going to stand up and cheer it in the theaters.  He thought he was going to be hailed as a hero for virtue signaling where no one has virtue signaled before.  And he was wholly and completely up his own ass, because he does not live in reality, like many other people in Hollywood.  People are just sick of this crap.  Remember when we could go watch a superhero movie and it was about superheroes being heroic and awesome?  Remember when mindless action movies didn't try to preach to you?  Yeah.  Me too.  A lot of people do.  That's why so many movies that are obviously preachy are failing these days.  Barbie seems to be the exception to that, but it's doing well for reasons completely outside of the preachiness.  

There's a reason that people have looked at the writer and actor strikes going on right now, and pointed and laughed at it.  It's because we're sick of the garbage.  We're sick of being preached at.  We just want an effing entertaining movie to take our minds off reality for a few hours, not have it shoved up our noses so far it'll be dripping out of our sinuses for weeks.  And this utter asshat, Angel Manuel Soto, is just completely incapable of reading the room.  

Well.  Guess what.  He deserves to fail.  And he has no one to blame for that but himself.  I hope he's happy with himself, because he just completely ended his own career.  I hope it was worth it to get that dig in at Batman.

Final Fantasy XVI

 So.  Final Fantasy XVI is a thing that happened this last week.  

And on that note, when was the last big AAA game to release that just worked out of the box?  No bugs.  No glitches.  No crashes.  It just works?  I can't remember the last time a AAA game this big launched and was not ridiculed for being an unfinished, buggy mess.  Heck, even Square-Enix has released a few of those lately, including one or two THIS YEAR.  I'm not sure if it was just better leadership on this game, or if they kept from making any announcements about it until they were sure the game was going to make its release date with no bugs.

I've long been waiting for this game.  The last good Final Fantasy game, outside of MMOs, was Final Fantasy X 22 years ago.  The series has had a very, VERY long line of mediocre or just flat out bad games after the glory days of the PS1.  Even Final Fantasy X was a bit of a decline from the PS1 games.  The series was once the gold standard for RPGs, telling amazing stories and innovating in gameplay, and incorporating cutting edge graphics at the time of each release.  Now, it's kind of become something of a joke.  After the series creator left the company, taking responsibility for the failure of the Final Fantasy movie to save the jobs of his colleagues, the series has not been the same.  It's fumbled around without direction under several directors that just don't seem to know what to do or how.  But, I keep holding out hope that maybe the next one will be good.  Maybe things can go back to the way they were.  And, I am VERY happy to say that Final Fantasy XVI is the game that FINALLY brings Final Fantasy back out of mediocrity.

The game was produced by Naoki Yoshida, or as he likes to be called Yoshi-P, the man who pretty much single-handedly saved Final Fantasy XIV.  Under his guidance FFXIV went from the joke of the gaming world into a MMO titan that rivals even World of Warcraft, with more than 25 million subscribers all over the world.  It's had a very successful relaunch followed by four expansions, three of which are amazing stories, and the fourth is just kind of there.  So, when I found that he was going to be heading up Final Fantasy XVI and bringing with him not only the writer of two of the best FFXIV expansions, and the composer of all of the FFXIV music, I was very excited.  He's well known for being a great leader, and pulling off some amazing stories with good gameplay.  I think he outdid himself with Final Fantasy XVI though.  

The graphics on this game are amazing.  It's got this sort of photo-realistic real world look mixed with a lot of fantastical elements that give it a more otherworldly feeling.  The character models and design are great.  The over the top Eikon battles are enough to give even the most chill guy on earth sensory overload. It's just a very beautiful looking game.  It plays very smoothly, no hitching or frame drops that I noticed.  It sure did turn my PS5 into a freaking oven though.  The combat and gameplay is great.  The combat, especially is very fun to mess around with.  There are so many different abilities to mix and match that you can pretty much tailor the battle system to any type of combat that you enjoy most.  It's also got some very deep mechanics that, once you start figuring them out, there are endless possibilities for creating combos and chaining them on into infinity.  I do prefer turn based RPGs but the combat system in this game was so good that I didn't really hold it against the game.  The music is also really, really good.  Soken really outdid himself for this game, bringing in old familiar tunes from Final Fantasies past and mixing them with truly epic original compositions. I've already bought the soundtrack.

As for the story.  It's a very dark and bleak story, but at the same time, it's a story about brotherhood, love, hope, building the bonds of friendship and using those bonds to bring people together to do the impossible, and learning to forgive yourself.  It has a lot of very epic hugely over the top action scenes, and very close emotional character interactions, especially toward the end of the game.  It's got some very heart-wrenching scenes, and not just at the ending.  I don't often say this, but every single side quest in this game is worth doing.  A lot of them are go here kill that sort of quests, but every one of them has a great story that is fully voiced.  There was a lot of love and care that went into the side content in this game.  I normally skip side quests because I just want to get the main story done with, but in this game, the side quests are just such good little stories in themselves that really enhance the main story by adding lore or development to characters.  I found myself doing every single one of them.

I only have nitpicks for this game.  No real problems.  First of all, my kingdom for a minimap.  Holy crap is it annoying to have to open the full map so often to make sure you're on the right path.  I'd have liked to be able to remap some of the buttons as well.  And there being no way to turn off the motion blur is kind of annoying.  The blur itself looks really fuzzy, and I can't believe no one said, hey, wait a minute, maybe some people out there won't want this on their screen while playing.  And those are, literally, my only complaints with the game.

To address some of the complaints brought up by the games journalists who seem very keen on seeing this game fail at any cost to their reputations:  First of all, yes, most of the main cast is white.  God forbid.  HOWEVER half of the world map is made up of a Middle Eastern inspired nation full of Middle Eastern looking people.  One of the main villains of the early game is one of them.  There is plenty of racial diversity, it's just diversity that makes sense within the context of the world, rather than diversity for the sake of diversity.  It makes the world feel more real, IMO.  But that's just me.  There's even a gay character who plays a very large role in the story in the latter half of the game, and guess what.  He has a personality, back story, and motivation independent of who he likes to bump uglies with.  He's an actual character who happens to be gay, not a collection of gay stereotypes screaming look at me, see how representative I am.  There was one review I saw where the girl was reading a book while just mashing one button for the combat.  Well.  Yeah.  That's what happens when you play on easy mode with the auto-combo accessibility accessory on.  It simplifies the combat so a todler could play it.  Put it on normal difficulty and don't use the accessory and it's a very deep combat system with endless combo possibilities.  And there were some complaining that oh no, not all of the women are perfect little Mary Sues, and the ones that are in the game don't play too much a part in the story.  Okay, so, yes, women can be horrible people too.  Put your stupid virtue signaling flag away.  There are some very prominent female villains in this game.  And yeah, it's fair to say that there's not many women playing big parts on the good guys' side.  But there are some who are large parts of the story, even if they do somewhat take a back seat to the men, so that one's a valid criticism.

All in all, it was a great game.  I'm happy to FINALLY say that Final Fantasy is back after a 22 year long stretch of mediocre and bad games.  I highly recommend it.  

For reference I did every hunt and side quest, but didn't bother leveling up all of the abilities, only the ones I kept set for my preferred play style.  I didn't get all of the collectables, but most of them.  I did get the best weapons and armor in the game.  With all of that and the main story, the game took me 97 hours to complete.

I am SO FREAKING SICK of the narrative that white people are living life on easy mode...

 

So, at work, they passed out a survey that seems to be trying to find out how minorities are treated at the Post Office.  One of the questions was “If you’re non-white, please skip.  If you are white, please describe how white privilege has impacted your life and career with the USPS.”

 

This is my response.  I ran out of space and had to stable three extra pages to the survey before mailing it back in.

 

When I was 4 my dad lost his job.  We had to move halfway across the country so that he could take a pity job from my uncle.  My uncle offered to sell the company to my dad, which was a big mistake.  The business was not very successful, and the taxes on it were pretty crushing.  We moved 9 more times before I was 8, because we kept being evicted because the business just wasn’t paying our bills.  My youngest brother was then born two months premature, and we had no health insurance.  This put my parents tens of thousands of dollars into medical debt, which they did not pay off until they were well into their 50s.  We were so poor that we ate store brand macaroni and cheese for dinner 5 nights a week.  At school we were part of the free lunch program, because we were so poor that we could neither pay for school lunches, or even buy food for sack lunches.  

 

I had 3 shirts, and a coat without a zipper for years.  My feet constantly hurt because my parents couldn’t afford to buy me shoes when I grew out of them, so I had to keep wearing the too small ones.  When I was 14 I started working after school for another of my uncles at a landscaping business he owned., being paid under the table because I was underage.  All of my money went to help my parents buy food.  Finally, my mom went to our church in desperation for help with food, and we were able, though the charity of the church, to eat actual food that didn’t taste like cardboard, and had some actual variety to it.

 

When I turned 16, I got an actual job.  I was allowed to keep $25 out of each of my paychecks.  The rest went to helping to pay bills.  It was expected that I would buy my own clothes and school supplies with that.  I had to save up for months, sometimes, to get the things I needed.  My dad finally sold the business, and got a job as a mailman, which paid better, and more steadily, but they were so far into debt because of my brother that it didn’t even really matter.  He worked long, long, long hours in overtime, and I barely saw him for weeks and even months at a time.  He eventually worked his way up to supervisor and worked even more long hours.  When all of my siblings were old enough to be left home alone, my mom got a job, and things got much better.  We were no longer on church charity for food, and they started to pay down the debt.  I was allowed to start keeping my paychecks so that I could start saving for college.  There was no way they would be able to help me with that.

 

I avoided student loans, because I’d seen what massive debt did to my parents.  It took me ten years to finish college, because I took only as many classes at a time as I could afford to pay for myself.  When I graduated, I couldn’t find a job, because the market was over-saturated with people who had my exact degree.  Thanks High School Guidance Councilor!  I went through several dead end jobs just trying to make my way through life.  I worked so hard that I actually developed a stress induced seizure disorder, and then had to take very expensive medication for years to correct it.  I had no health insurance to help with that, so I was out $400 a month to pay for it.  Because of that, I had to remain living with my parents until I was almost 30.  I was only able to move out when I applied for a substitute carrier position at the Post Office.  I worked more than full time hours for ten years at that job, but I got no benefits or health insurance out of it, because my job was considered a part time job.  When I FINALLY managed to get a full time position, I had put myself quite a ways into medical debt due to that medication, and other health problems I developed due to overworking myself.  I’ve been working every scrap of overtime available for the 10 years I’ve been a full time mailman, and finally after a freaking decade, for the first time in my adult life, I can FINALLY say that I am debt free.  I’m 43 years old, and I’m unmarried, because I worked so hard just to claw my way out of poverty that I had no time for anything else.

Please, tell me, which part of that sounds privileged to you?  I find this question insulting, racist, and, frankly, out of touch with reality.  I intend to make a formal complaint about this to my union and I will escalate it as high as I need to in order to find the idiot who put this question on this survey and make them accountable for it.  Until such time as I do, each and every person who approved this question may treat themselves to eating an entire buffet of dicks.

Andor. *Sigh* Okay, let's do this...

I have been very displeased with Disney's Star Wars content.  Rogue One was pretty good.  Solo was okay, if completely unnecessary.  I really liked The Force Awakens at release, but as time goes by, I like it less and less.  The Last Jedi was garbage.  The Rise of Skywalker was slightly less garbage, but garbage nonetheless.  As for the TV shows, The Mandalorian is okay.  It's not great.  It's not terrible.  But it's watchable and generally inoffensive.  Clone Wars season 7 had 8 really great episodes, and 4 completely terrible episodes.  The Bad Batch was good enough for what it is.  Rebels had glimmers of greatness buried in a large pile of crap.  Boba Fett was complete trash.  And then Obi-Wan Kenobi came out.  That one REALLY pissed me off.  It was lore-breakingly terrible character assassination.  I used to collect Star Wars novels.  I have almost 100 of them on my bookshelf.  I don't collect them anymore.  They're all terrible written, lore-breaking dumpster fires these days, not worth the paper that they're printed on.

So, after all of that, far, FAR more bad than good, I watched Obi-Wan, and I said to myself.  "That's it.  I'm done.  No more."  I promptly cancelled my Disney+ subscription, and gave them a scathing tongue lashing in the "tell us why you're leaving" comment section.  I'd sworn off Disney Star Wars.  I wasn't going back.  I was definitely never going to be lured back by anything.  Ever.

And then Andor came out and no one would stop talking about how good it is.  So I borrowed my parents' Disney+ password to watch it, because hell if I'm paying for more of this garbage myself.

I liked Rogue One.  I thought it was the only Disney Star Wars movie that was actually good.  Solo was okay, but, again, it was a movie that really did not justify its own existence, so it never really reached higher than being merely okay.  I thought Cassian Andor was a pretty boring character, woodenly acted by a man with all the charisma of a bowl of oatmeal.  Of all the characters in that movie, I think I cared about him and his story the least.  So, a show entirely about him was not exactly something I was ever going to get excited over.

Anyway, I was not impressed with this show.  It was really, really long, and really, really boring.  Don't get me wrong, there were parts of it that were great.  The heist was pretty good.  So was the prison break.  But the good parts were just buried under so much irrelevant filler.  And Gabriel Luna is one of the least charismatic actors I have ever seen.  The guy has zero capacity for emoting.  And he's got one facial expression, mildly pissed off.  Casting him as the lead of a TV series was a SERIOUS misstep.  He doesn't have the screen presence and acting ability to carry his own show.

So, okay, I understand that a LOT of this season is setup for season 2.  But the problem with that is that Season 1 is a boring mess of a bunch of storylines that lead nowhere.  You can set up for season 2.  That's fine.  But everything in this season still has to be relevant to THIS SEASON.  It is possible for things to both be relevant in season 1 and set up for season 2.  It's not a one or the other sort of deal here.  But that's what happens when you hire untalented writers, I guess.  So, we've got the whole Mon Mothma storyline that leads nowhere.  We've got the young cop that we keep following for the entire season after he's fired for getting so many of his men killed, which leads nowhere.  We've got Stellan Skarsgard meeting with Forrest Whittaker for reasons, which leads nowhere.  We've got girl in charge of the heist hanging around for the rest of the season after the heist, because reasons, which also goes nowhere.  We've got her little lover girl being an absolute champ at taking up space, and leading nowhere.  There's just so much superfluous crap in this series that doesn't do anything for the story.  It just takes up space.  And it doesn't help that the show is so poorly paced that every single episode just draaaaaaaags oooooooooon foreeeeeeeever.  

 

The first three episodes are abysmally dull.  The last three episodes are also pretty dull.  The heist was pretty good.  The prison stuff was pretty good.  But, I mean, it was also pretty pointless to the overall story as well.  Andor just randomly goes to prison because the writers needed him out of the way for a few episodes to set up the climax.  He couldn't have gone in to get information from someone, or to break a rebel spy out?  Yes, I understand.  I am not stupid.  I get that the point was to show how corrupt and evil the Empire is, but if you're going to spend three freaking episodes on it, there needs to be more of a purpose within the story.  As much as I liked that storyline, it was just utterly pointless to the overall story.

 

And so, the climax everything comes together in an Imperial auditor trying to catch Andor when he attends his mother's funeral, and this sets off what is supposed to be the first battle of the rebellion.  I have a very hard time buying the idea that all of this tension springs up over whether or not Andor is going to show up.  Like, who cares?  He's a petty criminal.  And just the mere possibility of him showing up causes a rebellion?  That's bad writing.  I'm sorry, but it is.  You can see the hands of the writers heavily at work forcing the outcome that they want without building to it organically.  This whole season is rife with bad writing, terrible pacing, bad editing, awful acting, and sooooooo muuuuuuuuch fiiiiiiiller.

 

I will admit that it is probably on par with The Mandalorian.  They're both okay, but not great.  Andor has a lot more problems than The Mandalorian, which brings it down a bit in my opinion.  It's definitely better than Boba Fett or Obi-Wan, but that is not hard.  I think that if it had been edited down to 8 episodes rather than 12, Andor had an actual reason to go to prison, rather than just randomly being arrested and being sent there, and if all of the superfluous plotlines that set up for season 2, but lead exactly nowhere in season 1 had been rewritten to have ANY relevance to the plot of season 1, this show would have been amazing.  But the way it is now, it's too long, too slow, too boring, has too much irrelevant filler, and just goes nowhere.  There's a good series in here somewhere, but it's buried under a whole lot of pointless crap.

Star Ocean: The little series that could... ish...

I first came across the Star Ocean series with Star Ocean: The Second Story on the original Playstation.  Why start on the second game in the series, you ask?  Because the first one was never released in English.  And wouldn't be for some years yet to come.  I grabbed it because it was released by Enix (before they bought out Squaresoft) and I'd had good times with games by Enix in the past, namely the Dragon Warrior (Quest) series.  I was treated to a pretty ambitions story that was a direct sequel to the first game, but didn't require you to play it for it to make sense.  It combines fantasy and sci-fi in a pretty interesting way.  You have your choice of two protagonists.  You choose Rena and the story is told from a more fantasy point of view, you choose Claude and the story is told from a more sci-fi point of view.  It's the same basic story, but the point of view changes everything.  It made a very compelling argument for multiple playthroughs.  It's basically a story in a fantasy world with some very high concept sci-fi ideas.  I LOVED it.  That's exactly the sort of genre bending fun that I really, really enjoy.  And it had GREAT music  There were so many characters you could recruit, all of them with their own little stories, and this huge epic story that melded my two favorite genres together.

I looked for the first game on the fledgling internet, and to my annoyance, I couldn't find it.  I wanted more, but there was no more.  Fast forward a few years and Star Ocean: 'Til the End of Time, the third game in the series came out.  I jumped all over that as soon as it released.  It was even more epic than the previous game, with some even more mind-bending high concept sci-fi ideas and more interesting fantasy worlds.  I also used to joke that it was subtitled "'Til the End of Time" because that's how long you'll be playing it.  It is a very, very long game.

Fast Forward a few more years and Star Ocean: The Last Hope was released.  As an Xbox exclusive.  WTF?  I bought an Xbox 360 for the sole purpose of playing this game.  But I ended up playing it more than the PS3 that generation because, like, ALL of the RPGs seemed to be coming out for it, while the PS3 didn't have much of anything for quite some time into it's lifetime.  The Last Hope clearly had a very large budget.  The graphics were the bleeding edge for the time.  There were long elaborate cutscenes of amazing fights and really cool space battles.  The story leaned much harder into the sci-fi elements and much less into fantasy, but I really enjoyed it still.  It was a very good game.

And then they FINALLY released Star Ocean on the PSP with pretty much full on remake called Star Ocean: First Departure.  (They also released a similar remake of Second Story as Second Evolution).  It was... Okay.  I really hadn't been missing much.  It had the customary melding of sci-fi and fantasy, but the story was a bit sparse and the characters were pretty bare bones.  But, I mean, it was a game that originally released on SNES so I wasn't exactly expecting a lost Shakespearean sonnet or anything.  It was entertaining enough for what it was.

I'm not sure what happened with Star Ocean: The Last Hope.  It must have flopped HARD, because its obviously massive budget was nowhere to be seen in the fifth installment of the series, Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness.  The graphics received a considerable downgrade.  The amazing cutscenes were COMPLETELY removed from the game.  All the story scenes consisted of the characters talking  while you run around doing things.  If you happened to accidentally switch areas or initiate a battle, the current conversation would cut off and never resume.  Where The Last Hope leaned more into sci-fi, Integrity and Faithlessness leaned more into fantasy.  And chose what is quite possibly the least interesting, most cliche fantasy story possible to tell.  I was not pleased with this game.  To come off of The Last Hope which was so good, and so epic, with such amazing graphics and cutscenes and go into Integrity and Faithlessness and have all of that gone was a real let down.

I thought that was the end of the series.  Integrity and Faithlessness seemed like a series killer to me.  So, I was extremely surprised when, ten years later,  I saw that there was a sixth Star Ocean game coming out for the 25th anniversary of the series, called Star Ocean: The Divine Force.  And I've just finished playing it.  While the story and characters are a considerable upgrade from Integrity and Faithlessness, it's clear that the game had a pretty low budget.  The graphics are pretty dated, and while cutscenes made a return, they're awkwardly animated, and character movement especially looks really clunky in them.  It's also clear that they didn't really have a lot of money to spend on big flashy cutscenes, so the ending battle of this game shows nothing of the actual battle, and has all of the characters on the bridge of their ship describing what's happening outside, which is pretty lazy.  If you don't have enough money to animate the battle, maybe don't have one and find something else climactic for the end of your story?  The annoying bit where the characters just randomly start talking as you're running through the world is back, but this time they keep talking if you get pulled into a battle, which is a VAST improvement over the previous game.  The battle system is really fun, the story is decent, the characters are okay, the fantasy mixed with high concept sci-fi is back.  It's just very clear that there just wasn't enough money to make a true AAA game out of it.  It looks more like a low budget indie game than a Tri-Ace developed, Square-Enix published blockbuster.  I did quite enjoy it, but it did have its shortcomings.

So, anyway, you might be asking where can I play these amazing sounding games?  

Well, Star Ocean First Departure can be found on PSP or on the Playstation store for PS4/5 and the Nintendo Eshop for Switch.  

Star Ocean: the Second Story is ONLY available on the original Playstation, and its remake Second Evolution is ONLY available on PSP.  Both versions are very expensive.  Your only viable way of playing this game is probably to *ahem* sail the high seas if you know what I mean.  I suggest the PSP remake, it has more voice acting from better actors.

Star Ocean: 'Til the End of Time is available on PS2, or on the Playstation Store for PS4/5.

Star Ocean: The Last Hope is available on Xbox 360, or on the Xbox store for Xbone/series.  An HD remastered version is available on the Playstation store for PS4/5, and on Steam.  I suggest this version, as it also has added content from the Japanese special edition that didn't make it into the original North American release.

Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness is available on the Playstation store for PS4/5.

And finally Star Ocean: The Divine Force is available for Xbone/series PS4/5 and on Steam.

My rankings for the series from best to worst are:

1.) Second Story/Second Evolution

2.) 'Til the End of Time

3.) The Last Hope

4.) The Divine Force

5.) First Departure

6.) Integrity and Faithlessness (it really was a crap game)

The problem with cliffhangers. (You eventually have to resolve them.)

 So, I recently replayed one of my favorite video games.  Trails of Cold Steel IV.  Why yes, I do have a good two dozen other games piled up in my backlog.  And yes, I have played this 120 hour long game already.  What's your point?

Anyway, it resolved the cliffhanger from Trails of Cold Steel III so well that got me thinking about how the resolution to cliffhangers are handled in all forms of media.  Off the top of my head, I came up with two extremely high profile examples of it being done very badly,  So let's compare them so I can point out why Trails of Cold Steel IV worked, while the others did not.

The Empire Strikes Back had a GREAT cliffhanger.  Han Solo is frozen in carbonite and taken by Boba Fett to Jabba the Hutt.  Luke has had his entire world shaken to the core by Darth Vader's revelation.  And earlier in the movie the Rebel Alliance suffered a stunning defeat that left their forces scattered.  Great cliffhanger that had people eagerly awaiting the next movie 3 years later.  But the problem with that great cliffhanger was that it had to then be resolved.  Han needed to be rescued, and Luke needed confirmation of the truth and to confront Obi-Wan for lying to him.  Return of the Jedi spends nearly 45 minutes of its runtime resolving this cliffhanger, almost 50 in the special edition because of that gawdawful Jedi Rocks musical number. *shudder*.  

 

On paper, this is fine.  This SHOULD be exciting.  But in actuality it is very boring.  Luke does the majority of his character development into the confident Jedi Knight between films, and so, goes through very little in this first part of the movie.  Everyone else pretty much stays the same.  The rescue goes on, and on, and on, and on, and we see no new sides of characters.  We see no growth from them, other than Harrison Ford's hair being considerable longer than it was when he got frozen in the previous movie.  Even the action scenes are kind of boring.  It's just like 45 mins of nothing just sitting there taking up space at the beginning of the movie.  

 

It's boring.  It goes on forever.  And when the movie FINALLY moves on to its main plot little of value has been achieved for all of the time spent.  Then the whole rest of the movie has to play catch up to cram the plot of an entire movie into a much shorter amount of time because it first had to spend so much time on resolving that cliffhanger before it could even begin its own story.  A lot of it feels rushed.  It feels like things are missing.  There is very little time left for characters to deal with new revelations, like the Luke Leia thing.  The whole movie feels kind of like a gigantic mess, because they spent so much time on that rescue that there wasn't enough time for anything else.

Okay, next let's move on to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  So, Halfblood Prince ended with what some people would call a good cliffhanger, but what I called, at the time, really stupid and pointless.  Harry and Dumbledore go for the locket horcrux, Dumbledore is weakened by the experience, and dies because of it.  And then the locket turns out to be fake with a taunting note to Voldemort from a guy named R.A.B.  Yeah, there was a lot of speculation and hype between book releases over who R.A.B. was, but, I mean.  Come on.  Anyone who was paying attention in book 5 already knew exactly who it was, and exactly where the locket was.  I don't consider this to be a very good cliffhanger, because I was paying attention, so there was no mystery for me.  But the hype train chugged along anyway.

So, book 7 comes out, and we spend over an entire third of the book resolving that cliffhanger.  This time is absolutely wasted in the story.  Very little of value happens in this time.  Our characters spend ages figuring out the mystery, ages tracking down the locket, ages planning how to get it back, and ages actually getting it back.  It goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and at the end we're left with very little of value.  Hell, the Deathly Hallows themselves are NOT EVEN MENTIONED UNTIL WELL PAST THE HALFWAY POINT IN THE BOOK.  Sure, there is the wedding, and a few other things of import in this beginning third of the book, but the majority of it is tracking down that damn locket  It's boring and it goes on forever, and the escape from the Ministry, which is clearly supposed to be exciting, falls completely flat because we're already bored out of our freaking minds by the absolutely nothing that has been happening so far to resolve that stupid cliffhanger.

 

Come with me, if you will, on a journey into an alternate world.  Say that Halfblood Prince didn't end with a fake locket, and instead, the cliffhanger was that Harry has the real locket, but he has no idea how to destroy it.  Now, the beginning of Deathly Hallows is more about the locket corrupting our heroes as they desperately try to find a way to kill it.  It's darker.  It's more entertaining.  It doesn't rely heavily on a mystery that isn't much of a mystery to anyone that was paying attention, and it is something they actually had to do later in the book anyway, which would give more time to more important things so the ending of the book doesn't feel so rushed, and the Deathly Hallows, can actually be a more integral part of the story from a much earlier point in the book.

 

Anyway, the cliffhanger sucked, and the resolution took way too long to meander its way through to its endpoint.

 

So, how did Trails of Cold Steel IV  succeed where the others failed?  Well, Cold Steel III is all about a new group of students following in the footsteps of the previous class, and learning about the world, and all of the political tensions in it, while also facing some pretty crazy combat situations.  It is made very clear in this game how naive and young these kids are, and how far they have to go before they're adults, and how hard they'll have to work to live up the the class that came before them.  The cliffhanger was very strong.  The villain defeats our heroes with overwhelming might and power.  An important character dies, sacrificed by the villain in an evil ritual.  Darkness is spreading all across the land, causing chaos and fighting everywhere.  Rean, our hero, after watching his friend be murdered, loses control of his power, goes berserk, and kills the holy beast he was meant to protect, thereby starting the apocalypse he was there to prevent himself.  The students can only flee before the might of the villain as Rean is taken prisoner.

 

So, how does Cold Steel IV resolve this?    Beautifully.  The entire world starts gearing up for war as an ancient curse spreads through the land, unleashed by the death of the holy beast.  The students who fled are outlawed, and in hiding.  They want to get Rean back, but it will take a lot of work to uncover where he's being held and then to actually get him out when they do.  The beginning of this game is all about these naive children from the previous game having to step up and use what they've learned.  It's about them transitioning from children to adults.  Taking responsibility.  Growing beyond who they were into who they need to be to get the job done and save their instructor.  It's crazy how much real, impactful character development is packed into the beginning of this game as our characters get closer and closer to finding Rean, and then, eventually launching an all out attack on where he's being held.  But he's been consumed by the curse, and is still running berserk and mindless.  They have to defeat him in battle, and then bring his mind back by forcing him to remember who he is, who they are, and what they all mean to each other.  It's a really touching scene. 

So, we've got our characters basically being forced to grow up into adults with no one to guide them anymore.  They grow quite a bit as characters.  And then they prove their worth through succeeding in finding Rean, and by overpowering him and forcing him to remember.  It's a story about students who were pretty clueless before meeting him, surpassing him, and taking their places beside him as equals for the coming darkness and world wide war rather than beneath him as children and students.  Great character development, great actiony climax, with a very emotional reunion.  This is a GREAT resolution to the cliffhanger.  Yes, it takes up a huge chunk of the beginning of the game, about 25 hours of gameplay.  That's 25 hours of gameplay not devoted to fighting the villain and his overwhelming superiority.  But it's 25 hours of characters becoming who they need to be to stand up to him, challenge him, and eventually defeat him.  Which is priceless.  

 

This is what Return of the Jedi, and Harry Potter lacked.  Cold Steel IV filled this cliffhanger resolution with deep emotional weight, and solid character development.  It used this time very well to push characters into bettering themselves for the coming battles.  The other two treated their cliffhanger resolutions like this annoying thing that needed to be dealt with, and couldn't be bothered to make it interesting in any way.

Anyway, those were just my thoughts about cliffhangers and the crappy way most writers resolve them in the next installment.  It's pretty rare that you get writers who can actually pull off a great resolution, and Trails of Cold Steel IV did really well at it.