It’s that time of year again! People dress up in silly/sexy costumes and put out ghost cut-outs and jack-o-lanterns and basically take all the balls out of Halloween. Well not here! You may remember last year I covered Jacob’s Ladder, a disturbing psychological horror film that served as a major visual inspiration for modern horror multimedia franchise Silent Hill (which has seen better days). This year it’s something closely-tied, yet completely different. While Jacob’s Ladder may be the father of Silent Hill, according to interviews of the Japanese staff of the original Silent Hill, Dario Argento’s Suspiria is very much the mother.

Suspiria is about a young aspiring dancer named Suzy who travels to Germany in order to train for ballet at the prestigious Tanz Akademie. Her taxi takes her to the entrance just as a fellow student rushes out the door, sputtering nonsense. Suzy is turned away from the school unexpectedly, and finds out the next day that the student she saw fleeing was found murdered. That’s only the start of the strange occurrences at the academy, like maggots falling through the ceiling and the blind piano player getting attacked by his own seeing eye dog. A friend of Suzy’s begins to suspect there is a connection between the macabre “coincidences” and the dubious absence of the academy’s director. Then there’s the puzzling question of why the professors’ footsteps don’t seem to be heading toward the front door as they leave every night…

The movie comes partly from the Italian tradition of giallo and partly from fairy tales. For the uninitiated, gialli are films that are part-slasher, part-whodunit. It was a big trend in the late 60s through the 80s, featuring tons of sex, violence and ridiculous dated fashion. And Suspiria certainly has gore. The opening 10 minutes of the film feature perhaps one of the most grisly, sadistic and utterly beautiful murders put to film. I hesitate to spoil it, although some have probably already seen it due to how infamous it has become over the years. Suffice to say, it involves wire, a dagger and a stained-glass skylight. There’s buckets of gooey European-style blood to be had in this flick.

But it’s got more than gore at the heart of it. As mentioned earlier, fairy tales were a big influence in the creation of Suspiria. Dario Argento looked to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for visual inspiration, taking the eye-popping primary colors from the classic Disney film and recreating them in real life. One of the last movies to be made with the Technicolor process, Argento and his director of photography fought hard to film the movie with this more costly, time-extensive technique, as well as taking a filter out of the camera to let colors bleed more freely. The result is an incredibly vivid, dream-like world with intense, blood-like reds, chilly blues, creepy greens and nauseating yellows that cause every scene to turn into a feast for the eyes. The lead actress playing Suzy, Jessica Harper, was chosen for her resemblance to Snow White and the movie starts out with a very “once upon a time…” sort of narration. There’s even blatant references to the poisoned apple that caused Snow White to fall into a sleeping death. Argento originally envisioned the movie starring children, and that perspective still makes it into the movie. Handles of doors were raised to roughly the level of people’s heads, giving the illusion of a small child being swept up in a grown-up’s world.

I mentioned before that Suspiria was a major influence on Silent Hill, but it might not be immediately apparent how. Silent Hill aesthetically shares more in common with the dilapidated, rust-and-blood-covered environments of Jacob’s Ladder, as well as the heavy psychological themes of that film. But Suspiria contributes with the heavily occult themes of the first and third games. As Suzy delves deeper into the secrets of the academy, she learns more and more about the unnatural conspiracy that surrounds her. And then there’s the music. Silent Hill wouldn’t be Silent Hill if it was just spooky mood music; I mean, even the main theme song has mandolins, for pete’s sake. And music is something Suspiria takes seriously.

A huge portion of the movie’s indelible style lies with the distinctive soundtrack. Italian band Goblin actually scored this movie’s soundtrack before the movie was even filmed. Argento suggested an instrument he found during a vacation in Greece, a bouzouki, to add to Goblin’s African drums and crushed plastic cups, giving the soundtrack a unique feel that moviegoers wouldn’t be accustomed to. The score plays an incredibly important role in Suspiria, so much so that Argento would play tracks from it during the filming, in order to give actors the mood that the scene required. The soundtrack, while being instantly identifiable and crucial to the experience of watching the movie, does have a downside. For whatever reason, one of the members of Goblin is whispering important plot points in the background of the theme song. So while it may not ruin the movie to know that there are supernatural causes behind the events at the ballet academy, it’s a little disheartening to hear “WITCHES” every so often in the music.

And yeah, Suspiria isn’t perfect. The emphasis on the visual and aural leaves little room for a very nuanced plot or character development. In fact, I could understand if some people saw Suspiria as just a very stylish, loose collection of setpieces. Italians made movies in the 70s in a very peculiar way: without regard for sound. They would ship their films out to other countries around the world, so they would just dub everyone over in whatever language the market demanded, so it’s not uncommon to see Suspiria’s actors’ voices not quite match up to their mouth, since many of them didn’t speak a lick of English. And then there’s the generally over-the-top performances that Argento gets out of his actors. Jessica Harper reaches just about the perfect balance between doe-eyed naivety and determination that makes her an eminently sympathetic scream queen, but the performances surrounding her are either flat or way too much. But then, I would argue that the dialogue in this film is almost besides the point, with its heavy roots in German Expressionism and childlike fantasy making it almost better suited to be a silent film than a talkie. That and the fact that Argento tries to cram some half-baked psychology into the final act.

It’s been over 30 years since Suspiria arrived and it still appears ageless and on the cutting edge, visually. While horror movies nowadays are all about torturing people to get a rise out of moviegoers (hi, Saw VI), Argento could accomplish more with lush, color-saturated visuals and a few well-placed stabs. Suspiria is a horror classic that’s being overshadowed by the Eli Roths of this world. Hopefully this little spotlight has made some of you aware and interested in the gorgeous, hallucinatory Suspiria, and you’ll pop it in the player at your Halloween party instead of Wrong Turn or Jeepers Creepers or Michael Bay’s Friday the 13th remake or whatever. Or even more hopefully, you’ll check the original out instead of the pointless remake that Hollywood is preparing to produce. Yeesh. Now that actually does send chills down my spine.

Survival horror is pretty much dead. Ironic, I guess that it didn’t … survive. It was very much a product of its time, when pre-rendered graphics and static camera angles were the height of sophistication. And c’mon, how long could monsters jumping out of windows stay scary? Things are different now. Silent Hill has been franchised to death, though a dubious remake of the original creeps on its way. The Resident Evil series mutated into an action game in a weird cyclical cannibalistic situation — Resident Evil 4 spawned Gears of War which spawned Resident Evil 5 and, ah, the rest of this generation.

Although, really, Resident Evil’s been an action series since Resident Evil 2. Beyond a few jump scares it’s a straight-up shooter with a few puzzles sprinkled on top. The game’s packed with ammo and weaponry despite the rudimentary aiming system. You just hold R1 to aim, swivel in one spot to select a target and mash away on the X button. But hey,  11 years after release, Resident Evil 2 remains a tense, effective game. I still jump, my heart still races and I still remember where every monster and item is, and that doesn’t take away from the experience to this day. It’s snappy, simple and constantly rewarding.

So I think I’ll just spout out what I love about it.

Raccoon City’s one of the best settings in video games. I love the way it’s introduced too. Depending on which disc you pop in, either Leon Kennedy or Claire, you watch them drive into town to find it deserted.  The CGI intro movie’s a dated now (artifacting and blobby shadows, ugh!) but for the time it was state-of-the-art! One of the best intros ever for a while. It set the stage perfectly with perfect, moody music, creative angles and cutting — Claire opens the door, Leon’s there pointing the gun straight at her, “Get down!”

The voice acting gets a bad rap, which I always found unfair. I always figured RE2 has one of the better voice casts in video games. Its Saturday morning goofiness, sure, but it’s perfect. For me anyway. Jubilee from the 90s X-Men cartoon voices Claire Redfield for crying out loud, and she does a fantastic job! Or rather, a good enough job to come back for CODE: Veronica and the Degeneration movie. Leon’s voice actor did not fare as well, although I always liked this wimpier guy more than his replacement in RE4. He sounds like such a doofus, which is perfect since no one in the game listens to him no matter how much authority he tries to assert. At one point in the game, he asks aloud to himself “Why doesn’t anyone ever listen to me?” He’s still a doofus in RE4 but they gave him a gruffer voice, which I suppose makes him an even bigger doofus. The guy’s always the butt-end of some joke, or conspiracy.

RE2’s conspiracy plot is still solid, by the way. Revealed in well-written little notes sprinkled throughout the game — a secretary’s diary, a filed police report, a memo from a sewage plant manager — the story that unravels cuts through a few American fears, mainly the corruption of big business, the police sworn to protect us and the nuclear family. In a mere night, Leon and Claire find out that the all-American Raccoon City (seen through the lens of the Japanese — a Taxago gas sign is a favorite Easter egg) has been bought by Umbrella Pharmaceuticals to be a testing ground for their bizarre genetic experiments, that the threat behind the outbreak is the obsessed patriarch of a scattered family who injected himself with his own creation and now seeks to impregnate his own daughter, and that the chief of Raccoon City Police is an insane rapist who wants to stuff the mayor’s daughter full of saw dust.

That’s one hell of a night, which also includes Umbrella spies, sleazy journalists (is there any other?), a gas mask-wearing merc named Hunk and a hunk of tofu named … Tofu.

Let’s go back to the father of the Birkin family, William. The guy injects himself with his own creation, the G-Virus (superior to the zombie-creating T-Virus of the first game), which rapidly and grotesquely mutates him into a hulking behemoth of muscle, bone and bulbous eyeballs and each time you encounter him he undergoes a new mutation, looking less and less human. By the end of the game the guy is a multi-limbed mass of teeth and sinew. One of, or rather, several of the best monster designs I’ve seen. Pyramid Head from Silent Hill always gets a lot of love. I always thought it was unfair Birkin got left in the cold.

The whole game is incredibly well-designed. It just flows so easily, from the burning wreckage of the beginning, through the city, to the ridiculous police precinct where you need to rearrange statues to find red gems to shove in half a suit of armor to grab keys and Unicorn Medals and African animal Legos… or something. OK, it’s ridiculous but well-designed ridiculousness. From the precinct to the sewers to the construction site to the final lab, the scenery refreshes every hour or so and it still looks great. The lab, infested with plant roots and vegetation in some parts, is a real standout.

There are a lot of other little things to mention. I love how Sherry Birkin, William’s daughter, hugs her knees when Claire gets too far from her. Her Japanese school girl outfit is so wonderfully out of place, too. Claire and Sherry’s relationship clearly mirrors Ripley’s and Newt’s from Aliens. You can find a lot of Aliens in RE2 if you look hard enough in fact, right down to chestbursting creatures, self-destruct countdowns, rescues, and a big fucking monster that attacks the evacuation vehicle right at the end when you think everything’s safe. It may sound a little unjust to call RE2 an Aliens copycat since that movie influenced the entire video game medium, but the James Cameron influence continues further with Resident Evil 2’s B-side scenario.

You see, after you beat the game once as one character you can replay it as another character in a whole new scenario. The setting’s the same but some events and characters, items and monsters are rearranged. There’s also the important addition of a brand new monster, Mr. X, a bald Terminator-like mutant in a trench coat who follows you around the whole game. He bashes through walls, grabs you by the neck and keeps you on your toes again, just when you think you have the game all figured out. It’s a blast, and the endgame for Leon’s and Claire’s B scenario has one of the all-time best pay-offs. It involves a vat of molten lead (hello, Terminator 2), a Tyrant, a last-minute rocket launcher rescue and that aforementioned “Queen Alien returns one last time” moment.

Damn. Have I said enough? Is it clear yet how much I lurve Resident Evil 2? I first discovered it in the January 1998 issue of Official PlayStation Magazine, where a glowing review convinced me I should beg my parents pick the game up. I read it while my brothers played basketball in a park on a chilly weekend afternoon. The few times I go by that park I remember discovering RE2 and showing my bros the article. I still listen to the soundtrack time to time, somber and lonely, full of great piano pieces. I remember meeting a friend downtown to discuss the game as we pored over his copy of the Versus Books strategy guide.

It’s a landmark game, I think, with few flaws. Any that exist I either don’t notice or don’t really care to acknowledge. I play it with nary a complaint. It’s still playable, fun and relevant. Similar to the first Silent Hill, RE2 is also getting a reimagining this season in Darkside Chronicles for the Wii, yet another lightgun House of the Dead thing. It seems that’s where the series is going now thanks to RE5’s tepid reception. I wasn’t impressed with Umbrella Chronicles so I’m not too jazzed about it. I don’t know. It definitely can’t hold up to the original but maybe the fanwankery will be worth it. We’ll see.

I’d rather they re-issue the Dreamcast release (lulz sure) or put the N64 version on the Virtual Console. I never did try the Dual Shock version out either though I can’t imagine 3D analog control would work in a game with a static camera. RE2 fans, feel free to weigh in. Have any good speed runs lately?

You gotta be nuts to play through Prinny: Can I Really be the Hero?. Well, nuts or an exceptionally gifted mutant, someone like that kid from X-Men 2 who can change channels by blinking. Prinny is only for masochistic sadists. It is one of the most difficult, infuriating games I’ve had the sometimes-pleasure to suffer through. Before Prinny, I never said aloud, while playing, “I don’t like this game.” Yet I continued to play, out of some misguided sense of pride, like if I quit I would dishonor my family or the game would furrow its Prinny brows and sneer at me.

Wait, what is a Prinny? Why, he is a peg-legged penguin housing the soul of a murderer that explodes if you throw it of course! He’s a minor character from the Disgaea universe, where this game takes place. It’s a sort of hell or netherworld or wherever, a manga-styled Halloween Town where ghosts and skeletons and jailbait loli anime girls frolic together. One of the loli girls, Etna, tasks her Prinny army with the absurd, uh, task of collecting ingredients from around the underworld so that she may have her dessert for the night. Unfortunately the ingredients are held by nightmarish bosses at the end of some of the most nightmarish platforming levels I have ever encountered.

The game is punishing. Cruel even. It takes old-school platforming to a difficulty level unseen since Ghosts and Goblins. Actually, Prinny could be seen as nothing more than a re-skinned Ghosts and Goblins mod. The jumping mechanics are the exact same, for one. You can’t control the velocity or height of your jumps, like you can in say, Super Mario Bros. If you see your jump is about to fail you can’t change direction in mid-air and land back on the ledge you just leapt off of – your fate is set. You’re kaput. Unless you do a Mario-style butt stomp. Chances are you, you’re kaput anyway.

Prinny requires you to carefully time every single move you make. This goes for attacking as well. Prinnies wield little pirate knives they can whack enemies with, and a nifty super-attack that can be executed in mid-air – Prinny jumps up and rains steely death on baddies with dozens of knives. It’s a flashy move you have to pay extra attention to how long its animation lasts. Jump up and rain steely death for too long and you’re left vulnerable to an enterprising enemy who could get a hit in and knock you back or kill you. There’s also a spin/dash move that keeps you invincible for a second or two. If you hold long enough you can dash and even accelerate your jumps. I didn’t even use this ability until late in the game when ledges got so far apart I thought that was the game’s way of saying “Give up, punk. You ain’t got what it takes.”

The levels change depending on which ones you choose to do first. There are six of them at the outset, and like Mega Man you can select which ones you want to attempt in whatever order you like. So if you can pick the Water Level first it will be slightly different than if you picked it third or last. Platform, enemy placements and even the the bosses you fight at the end will change. With a game like this bosses naturally require laser precision pattern memorization. These fights get downright harrowing, and it’s not like you can throw the controller in anger because the PSP is the controller. Which is even more infuriating.

Oh, as if the dessert quest plot wasn’t enough evidence, Prinny is not without a sense of humor. The game gives you 1000 – that’s one thousand – lives to work with. It knows exactly what it is. The writing isn’t too shabby either but I don’t care for the rest of the game’s presentation, a problem I also shared with Disgaea. I just don’t like the if-Tim-Burton-did-manga aesthetic. Yes, it looks cute and much of the 2D animation in the game is fantastic, but the overall design of everything doesn’t do anything for me. The soundtrack, though appropriately Danny Elfman-esque in that awful spooky carnival way, grates on the nerves as well as the ears. The game has the decency to give you volume control over the music and control over the voice acting as well, which varies from amusing and over-the-top to nails-on-a-chalkboard levels of pain. I set each option to zero and listened to my own music and felt relief just reading the in-game dialogue. Sadly, after each time your Prinny respawns you’re still subjected to him shrieking “Gotta have smarts, dood!” or some variation.

And Prinnies respawn a lot. A lot.

In all, Prinny is too damn hard to be enjoyable. The feeling of elation upon completing a challenge – defeating a daunting boss or navigating several platforms surrounded by fireballs while fighting an entire gauntlet of ninjas – doesn’t last long. It’s fleeting. It’s abusive. Playing it is like you’re an exploding penguin version of James Bond trapped on a boat getting thwomped in the balls with a heavy rope by a sadist with breathing problems. It hurts like hell, but maybe if you redirect your senses your mind can translate that pain into pleasure. That’s Prinny. Torture with tiny bits of cheer.

If that’s your cup of tea, go for it. Just don’t say I didn’t warn ya.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade continues Vanillaware’s mission to deliver gorgeous 2D gaming. After their PlayStation 2 action-RPG Odin Sphere, and now this, it’s clear Vanillaware gives all their attention to the beautiful, painterly visuals of their games. When it comes to the actual video game part of their games, well, things get iffy.

Muramasa gives you two characters to play as: Kisuke, a warrior without his memory, and Momohime, a princess possessed by the soul of a vengeful swordsman. Each character plays similarly, the only difference lies in their stories, neither of which comes across very well. The plot itself is a ghost, a non-entity. Once in a while you get a break from fighting and go around talking to NPCs who say the same thing over and over.

That’s about it as far as story goes. The presentation is barebones at best, no cutscenes or anything. Most of the time it isn’t even clear what they’re talking about anyway — blame it on the original Japanese script or a lack of interest in the whereabouts of Momohime’s soul. I usually say “Who cares about story in a video game?” but if you’re going to try, at least try harder than Muramasa.

The game itself fares better, playing a lot like a traditional side scrolling beat-’em-up fitted with numerous RPG-like elements, since that’s the thing to do to stale genres. It’s easy to rack up tons of combos, zip left to right in the air, crash down on enemies, switch blades to attack all enemies at once, recover using items all the while gaining experience points and tons of new swords, items and equipment. The battles are fun and keeps you constantly busy, though they are randomly generated which can grow wearisome. When stuck at a boss all I had to do was forge stronger swords and grind to get by. Typical skills like pattern memorization and timing didn’t really matter — it was all about the grind.

It’s also all about managing your inventory. You can forge tons of swords but only equip 3 at a time. Recovery items are unique in that you can only eat them when Kisuke or Momohime feel hungry, which can be tricky in the heat of battle. A degree of strategy between battles comes in handy. Actually, the most impressive part of the game’s presentation for me was the eating. There are various eateries throughout the game where your character can sit down and enjoy a fine, prepared meal. A plate of shrimp tempura is so lovingly rendered it got me watering, and bit by bit it disappears with each bite. The game has charm for sure, but charm can fuel a game for so long.

Muramasa is fun in short bursts. Playing for long stretches got me antsy for something meatier, more involved. I can only slash the same few enemies through the same few vistas for so many times. The vistas are gorgeous for sure, and I’d be foolish not to  appreciate Vanillaware for their dedication to 2D, I just hope their next game is something I can really sink my teeth into and not something so … vanilla.

While some developers cater to fans, ignore fans, or port shovelware Keita Takahashi aims for the edge of the solar system. Though not quite a household name like Shigeru Miyamoto or Will Wright, Takahashi should be known for Katamari Damacy and its sequel, two trippy games so fresh and fun the world waited with bated breath to see what his next endeavor might be. Eventually word came that Takahashi would rather quit making games and design playgrounds.

Hm.

Then word came that Noby Noby Boy would be his next venture. And nobody knew what it was – even Takahashi had trouble describing it. Now, all mystery surrounding the game has been lifted since it’s been available for some time on the PS3’s Playstation Network. Even then, it’s not an easy game to describe or play…

You control Noby Noby Boy, a sausage-like entity who has to stretch his body to obscene lengths. To do this Boy must eat the flora and fauna littering the world. After Boy is satisfied devouring and stretching he must report the lengths he stretched to the Sun – a guy with a sunflower-shaped head peering down at you from on high – who then transfers the distance stretched to Noby Noby Girl, who stretches her heart-covered sausage-body all the way across the solar system.

Here’s the interesting part: the game is online, so everyone playing Noby Noby Boy has their distances added cumulatively in order for Girl to stretch to new worlds. In a roundabout way, Noby Noby Boy is a massively multiplayer online game. So far, only the Moon and Mars have been unlocked. It will probably be a long time before we reach Jupiter.

Like Monty Python meets Takashi Murakami, the game resembles a mixed-up cartoon – child-like yet threatening in an absurd sort of way. As the game loads, photo-realistic woodland critters hide in corners of the screen, chittering away as the data spools up. A fairy that looks like a bee offers you advice on how to play the game. The way to quit the game is to enter a house with a face and a straw-like nose that shoots out green fluorescent blobs. Everything is cute and the trees and clouds have eyes. Eating the things with eyes poses some interesting questions, as Boy can effectively wipe out the entire map of all life, resulting in a mini-apocalypse for the bears, squirrels and human-like characters otherwise minding their own business. Of course, you can restore everything to order by, um, evacuating Boy’s bowels, complete with cute “poot” sounds. Boy himself is a marvel of “cute” design, a pink bulbous mass of Kirby-like rubber in his default unstretched form, and taffy made of rainbows when he’s stretched hundreds of meters. Adorable little multi-colored hearts spring out from underneath him as he pitter-patters around the world, and he blinks his eyes one at a time like some soft-minded dope. All this happens while a simple guitar track plays quietly in the background, although updates to the game added some new tracks including a bizarre song with taunting lyrics that consist mainly of “Noby noby noby noby noby.”

The worst thing about Noby Noby Boy is controlling Boy. An in-game manual explains things but it doesn’t make matters any easier. Using both analog sticks to move his head and butt independently is easy enough but even simple moves like flying (yes, Boy flies to get around sometimes) and eating can be challenging – because they’re mapped to the same damn button. I don’t know how that makes sense, but then maybe that’s the point. The rest of the game makes little to no sense, so why should the controls?

Similarly, controlling the camera is a nightmare. There are at least six different button presses and combinations to move the field of view around, including the Playstation 3’s Sixaxis motion control, which is just insane because it never works. But again, that may be the point. The whole game is insane. Other than that I can’t think of any other  excuse for such an unfriendly interface. It makes the game a chore to play.

The best thing to do is to play with friends in the same room. It’s a blast as everyone tries to figure out the (lousy) controls, and it made me pay attention to the ridiculous things people say when playing video games:

“Stretch around the tree to eat the boar.”

“I’m gonna eat all these mummies.”

“I guess I need to stretch more so I don’t accidentally poop.”

“Can I eat my own butt?”

“Yeah, we went through the donuts before.”

“Look at that chicken! I’m gonna eat all these chickens.”

“All right, I ate a sumo. That’s all I wanted to do.”

“You only ate one sumo?”

“This is a sumo-eating worm’s dream.”

Comparisons to William S. Burroughs and Akira were also thrown about, so good times are guaranteed in the right company.

Despite hang-ups with the controls, Noby Noby Boy is a terrific experience. It is nowhere near as good as Katamari and there are no immediate goals, levels or points to achieve besides the ones you set for yourself – eat the sumo, or fly through the donut-shaped cloud. There are Trophies for stretching certain lengths and eating certain things, otherwise, that’s it. Stretch, go up to the Sun, have Girl eat up your length (er…) and hope everyone else in the world is stretching Boy so Girl can stretch to Jupiter and beyond the bounds.

After completion of the monumental undertaking Phantasy Star II must have been, the development team was at the top of their game. They’d created a work of staggering importance to the medium of video game RPGs, so where to go from there? Apparently, to other things. One of the most important core members, Yuji Naka, left to create what would later become Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega’s 16-bit savior, leaving a large hole in the team. Ever the type to shoot themselves in the foot, Sega decided that they NEEDED another Phantasy Star, whether the original creators were available or not. So instead of patiently waiting for the band to get back together, they put together a team of questionably-qualified individuals and churned out Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom.  I think you might already know where this is headed…

Phantasy Star III takes place on Alisa III, a world that was once bitterly divided in war between the legendary figures Orakio and Laya. The two fought a bitter war until both sides were left utterly devastated, Orakio and Laya themselves disappearing. The game’s story picks up 1000 years later in the medieval-esque kingdom of Landen. Knowledge of lands outside of Landen has been forgotten and the pathways between Orakion and Layan kingdoms sealed. One day a beautiful woman named Maia washes up on Landen’s shores and the young prince Rhys decides to marry her. Before he can, she’s kidnapped by Layans, the first sighting in 1000 years. Rhys vows to rescue her, setting into motion events that bring the world to the brink of destruction.

Now all that might sound simple to you, but it also quickly becomes pretty difficult to keep track of. You see, Phantasy Star III’s claim to fame was its feature that let you play through three generations over the course of the game. Yes, you’d get to marry and have a child twice, resulting in branching paths that could make each playthrough of the game unique. So on top of trying to keep straight the 1000 years of history that continues to unfurl during the game, you have three generations of story to keep in mind, as well.

Unfortunately, PSIII’s generation system, frankly, is a pretty weak character development mechanic. You see, depending on the woman you end up marrying at the end of the first two generations, your child inherits the skills from both parents. What this essentially boils down to is whether the child gets fighting strength or magic power. Rhys starts out a fighter with no spells, so you can either create a line that results in a very powerful fighter, a mage that has access to healing and attack spells, or some combination of both. I ended up creating a fighter that was able to use healing spells, which I imagine most players would probably end up doing, considering the fact that attack magic is weak to the point of being nearly useless.

And then there’s the story problems this introduces. At the end of Rhys’ generation, he can either marry the fiancee he’s spent the last 5-10 hours trying to rescue or marry some random party member he knows nothing about. Does that choice make sense?! I mean, none of the characters are ever developed enough for the player to feel any emotional attachment for, so it purely becomes a coldly calculated move for what skills you want to inherit. This generation system doesn’t even really deliver on its “unique storyline” promise. The second generation seems to be unique (I somehow wandered into an entire section of Alisa III that I assumed had to be used in the story branch I didn’t explore), but aside from the bookends on the third generation, its exactly the same fetch quest.

But, really, who’s gonna play Phantasy Star III four times in order to explore all the branches? This game is Terrible. That’s with a capital T. Almost every detail of the game is painstakingly put into place to make you despise the time you spend on it. Let me explain.

The battle system is drastically overhauled from Phantasy Star II. While that system certainly could’ve used some sprucing up, that’s not what PSIII does. No, it practically throws it all out! The first time I entered into a battle in PSIII I just about turned the game off in disgust. Apart from the grating battle “music”, the menu consists of pictographic symbols that describe what they do in an oblique way. There’s a big wind-up key, a little wind-up key with a big 1, smaller boxes that include a sword, staff, box and shield, and a person that looks like he’s running for his life.

I mean, really, this is ridiculous shit. Was something wrong with the traditional battle display?! At any rate, you find out that the big wind-up key fully automates the battle until you cancel out of it (a la Phantasy Star II), the little wind-up key automates 1 turn, the person running away obviously means escape and the little boxes gives you what a fucking battle menu SHOULD look like. The amount of work spent on enemy sprites plummets from the previous game. Whereas in PSII enemies could have several frames of animation, the sprites in PSIII have two, at best. Otherwise the game just makes them flash or shake. And the designs are all over the place and an eyesore. You’ll fight little baby chicks, circuit boards, giant floating musclemen and angry moosemen. I would have been embarrassed if someone had walked in on me fighting a battle in this game. And the player characters no longer show up in battle, going for more of a Dragon Quest feel. They wouldn’t want to distract you from the amazing monsters, would they?!

Magic is also affected by this new battle system, with attack magic affecting monsters based on how they’re placed on the battle screen. Monsters are placed in what are basically quadrants of the screen. Smaller monsters make up a front row and larger monsters are in the back. Normal weapons can’t attack back row monsters, but bows and guns can. Magic can affect rows or the left and right sides of the screen. PSIII’s handling of magic strength is also quite unusual and annoying. Characters come into the party already knowing all the spells they can learn, and a grid made up of four spells controls each one’s relative strength. If you want a character to have a very strong single-target healing spell, you can manipulate the grid that way, for example, decreasing the power of all other healing spells. This also works for spells such as Anti which cures poison or Rever which revives a character, but the way it does this makes me tremble with fury. You see, Anti and Rever don’t work all the time. I think at neutral strength they only work, like, 50% of the time. Which means when someone is poisoned, you’ll spend lots of TP trying to cast Anti over and over, hoping to cure the poison. But eventually you just won’t fucking care because poison is an incredibly common status ailment in PSIII, so the moment you cure someone, you’re just as likely to get poisoned again. I have no idea why the developers thought it would be a good idea to make the curing of poison and the KO status be dependent on LUCK, but it sure doesn’t add to the enjoyment of the game.

So battles are a source of frustration, especially since they have the same high encounter rate as ever. But honestly, battles are welcome respite from the unbelievably shitty maps in the game. Everything in Phantasy Star III is S P R E A D out over vast distances. It’s as if the designers took sadistic joy from putting things at the opposite end from the player. Thanks to the limited view afforded by the screen and the VAST EMPTINESS that surrounds most towns and dungeons, without maps of the game’s overworlds, you’ll likely spend hours and hours just wandering around getting into battles every few steps, disorienting you even more. And when maps aren’t dull stretches of flatland, they’re still designed with the idea to waste the player’s time and patience. Instead of the clever, devious, maddening labyrinths from previous Phantasy Stars, dungeons in PSIII are simply designed in a zig-zag or spiral pattern to reach the person or item you’re looking for. But just because the pattern is simple doesn’t mean it’ll take you any less time to reach the goal, considering the high encounter rate and the incredibly slow walking speed that just exacerbates the game’s map design problems. Even without random battles, it can take MINUTES to navigate a map in some cases. And most of the dungeons in PSIII don’t even switch it up in terms of design. You’re either in a cave or on a bunch of square platforms linked together by walkways on four of the sides that may or may not be obstructed. It’s so LAZY. At least in PSI and II, there was a brain-teasing fun in trying to find the correct path through a dungeon. In PSIII, it just adds to the tedium since you probably know where to go from the start, it’s just getting there that’s time-consuming.

As for the regular menus… oh my god. Everything is displayed on these six tarot card-esque panels. So when you go into individual characters’ inventories, instead of seeing things in a continuous list, you have to hop across the screen to read the inventory. And when selecting who to cast a healing spell on, you have to keep navigating through the cards after each spell because it resets to the lower middle card where the protagonist is. There’s a reason no other RPG has a menu like this: it’s rotten.

And graphically, wow. Previous Phantasy Stars probably wouldn’t have won many beauty contests, but PSIII takes the fucking cake. The whole game looks like it could’ve been made in RPG Maker, by a mediocre designer, at that. The colors of PSIII eschew the vibrant palettes of past games, instead going for a muddy look that frankly is a bit depressing to look at. And while past player sprites were basically paper dolls that moved around the screen, the sprites of Phantasy Star III are a little blurry and indistinct. The bold lines of the sprites from PSII at least made them pop out from the background. The ones in PSIII are just blurry messes. And the character portraits… sheesh. Some of the designs are interesting, but most are just uninspiring and embarrassing to look at.

As you can see, Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom barely holds any resemblance to the games it precedes, either in story or gameplay. It’s mostly medieval in setting while Phantasy Star is a science fiction series. It’s not in the Algo star system, which the other games take place in. There are no familiar characters, or references to familiar characters. There’s practically nothing in the game at first glance that could possibly tie it to Phantasy Star, besides the name on the box. Well, I don’t think I’d be spoiling too much to say that there IS a tenuous connection to the other games in the franchise that becomes more apparent near the end, although it’s in a location in the game that’s entirely optional to visit, and since the game makes practically no mention of this location and exploration is such a pain, most players on a regular playthrough will probably ignore it. And there’s a familiar villain near the end, that PSIII nearly ruins by giving dialogue to.

Would Phantasy Star III have been better off if it had been called something else? That’s a difficult question to answer, but I’ll end up saying yes. Not because changing the name would’ve improved the game itself. If it had been called just plain “Generations of Doom” or “Rhys’ Quest” or something, it still would’ve been saddled with the myriad of problems it had, and would’ve sold even worse without misled Phantasy Star fanboys buying it only to be cruelly disappointed that it wasn’t a continuation from the edge-of-your-seat conclusion from Phantasy Star II. I say it would’ve been better for it to have a different name because there would’ve been less damage done to the Phantasy Star franchise. Phantasy Star II was released so early in the Genesis’ lifecycle that it was easy to miss, and with PSIII, Sega had a chance to market its franchise to even more players than before and really gain momentum with the brand. With a good game, perhaps they would’ve succeeded, but with a frustrating abomination like this, players were either burned and wrote off Phantasy Star as jumping the shark or never even gave the series a chance at all.

At the end of the day, Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom is a pile of shit. No, not just that. It’s a king-size cornucopia of putrid bilge on a throne of frustration in a castle of disappointment surrounded by a moat of bubbling feces. It’s like the team that made this game hated video games, or were locked in a room and weren’t allowed to look at previous Phantasy Stars to see what made them good. Perhaps its one highlight is the fact that it’s brief, although the gameplay is so tedious that each playthrough seems like a lifetime. Sometimes old games can’t stand the test of time and it’s not really their fault because they were a product of the times, from developers that didn’t know any better. But there were two good Phantasy Stars before this one, so I don’t have any mercy or compassion for Phantasy Star III, even though it looks like they had little more than a year to develop this skulking abomination. Anyone (anyone) who plays this is wasting his or her time. Even me.

In my introduction I professed my complicated feelings for Michael Mann’s 2006 dud Miami Vice. It’s my misunderstood baby, to be endlessly defended against the world. There are few other critics who grant it affection while audiences yawned or failed to notice. Which is understandable. It doesn’t have a normal story structure, it doesn’t waste time with exposition or setting up characters’ origins or whatever. It plops you right in the middle of an undercover drama full of confusion, heartbreak and some of the biggest beards you’ll see outside of Spanish cinema. It’s not the big-budget action extravaganza it was marketed as, but a love story wrapped around guns, style and mood. It’s the movie I point at and say “That’s everything Michael Mann is known for.” People often refer to Heat, the decadent crime opera that influenced everything from Grand Theft Auto to The Dark Knight, as Mann’s masterpiece. Those people haven’t seen Miami Vice. If they have they probably hated it despite everything those two movies have in common – which is everything. You know how auteurs seem to do the same thing over and over in different ways?

Well.

Public Enemies shares everything with Heat and Miami Vice. It sports the similar romance – replace Colin Farrell’s troubled gaze with Johnny Depp’s troubled gaze, and Gong Li’s accented English with Marion Cotillard’s. Mann loves tragic love stories, misbegotten affairs amidst the bullets and brawn. It’s his tried-and-true formula and he paints this one with a different set of colors and circumstances. Yet Depp’s John Dillinger and Cotillard’s Billie Flechette never seem like a couple, even when they’re together. They know their relationship is doomed, fleeting as the black bird Dillinger describes her as, and as such the two characters are best separate, suffering, pining for the other’s company. From the press and commercials everyone expects Christian Bale to share the screen with Johnny. To my recollection, they have one small scene together. There’s barely any screen sharing between anybody, everyone is isolated and desperate and it’s great. Moody.

The movie’s all about Depp, who is actually a pretty damn good understated actor when he’s not in pirate drag or obscured by outlandish makeup in Tim Burton films. Although, as Edward Scissorhands suggested, Depp could’ve been a silent film star. It’s really something to just watch the thoughts bubbling underneath his face. In the first scene he holds onto a fallen comrade dragging alonside a getaway car. He knows this guy is doomed, and he doesn’t want to let go. Dread is written all over his face. A far cry from Warren Oates’ blustery, explosive portrayal in John Milius’ Dillinger, Depp’s version thinks first and acts second, a contemplative guy who only lives in the present. Oates’ fun thuggish version is probably more accurate to the real-life figure – Public Enemies has been under fire for some inaccuracy – but Depp’s philosopher-criminal compels just as much.

Bale’s G-man Melvin Purvis shoots people with rifles in the back and doesn’t seem to like it much. He’s a hunter, moves like a Terminator, but the look in his eyes says he hates his line of work and he can’t do anything about it, trapped in a job surrounded by incompetents and sadists. He admires his boss, J. Edgar Hoover (a fattened, convincingly cartoonish Billy Crudup) until he realizes he too is just a showman, a mascot for a “war on crime” that will never work. Bale plays Purvis as mechanical, distant, a man obsessed and possibly self-destructive, with no family or friends to speak of. Given limited screentime, he only shows up to kill and to remorse. As a miserable symbol of a system as corrupt and misguided as the men he hunts, Bale plays the part admirably. If you expect an over-the-top tour de force of charisma on par with Al Pacino’s cop in Heat you’ll want to adjust your expectations.

Except for Marion Cotillard, who practically takes over the picture in its second half and does a wonderful job of it, the other characters are relegated to the edges of the frame. Those looking for Pretty Boy Floyd or Baby Face Nelson may want to look at Dillinger instead. That movie focuses on the gang itself. Mann even eschews close-ups for everyone else but his three principal stars. It wasn’t until the credits when I learned Stephen Dorff, David Wenham and Channing Tatum were in the cast – news to me. Claire from LOST has longer face time than they do, in a cameo. A bit maddening, but the way the movie is filmed, they hardly figure into the overall picture anyway.

Filmed with the same Viper cameras Mann used in Collateral and Miami Vice, the digital look looks fine, especially the nighttime scenes, or any time it’s dark. The nightclub scene, with its glitzy red jazz, really did it for me and there’s a scene of the two lovers in a field looks like a lunar landscape. It’s lonely and intimate, a feel HD does very well.

What Public Enemies also does very well is remind you, often, how guns are fucking scary. They’re loud, REALLY loud and they do terrible things to a human body. This time, Mann, King of the Shootout, adds bright-as-hell muzzle flashes to each and every shot, punctuating every blast with a ferocious spear of fire that lights the night.

If there are flaws I’d say the music editing is pretty awkward at times. Eliot Goldenthal’s melodramatic score will swell and then quickly fade away mid-transition. The introductory and closing text isn’t all that necessary either. The movie itself tells us all we need to know. It’s obviously not that concerned with historical fact so why bother with the text?

There are also the complaints that it’s too cold and methodical. Well, I don’t know about that. Depp’s Dillinger is contemplative, I’ll grant that. Bale’s Purvis is some kind of depressed robot, sure. But you look at the gunfights, the bank robberies, the meticulous planning, the moments between Depp and Cotillard and everything Cotillard goes through in the end … There’s nothing cold about it.

I try to think of another director who meshes the mainstream and the art film, who employs similar methods, and I keep coming back to Mamoru Oshii. The same complaints get lobbed at him: cold, distant, emotionally unengaging. They both make “slow” action movies and they both defy expectation. When I first saw Ghost in the Shell I wanted Dragon Ball with guns. When I first saw Miami Vice I wanted Bad Boys with Phil Collins. In both cases I ended up with something much, much richer. I wouldn’t say Public Enemies stands next to Oshii’s best or Mann’s best, but it’s definitely another solid chapter in Mann’s text.

In my ongoing attempt to catch up on the overlooked RPG series, we revisit Phantasy Star II. Released a scant seven months after the Genesis’ launch, Phantasy Star II was hurried into development soon after the completion of the original Phantasy Star. Of course, this was back in the days where RPGs didn’t take five years to develop. Phantasy Star was one of the last games to hit SEGA’s Master System, and with newer, shinier technology at their grasp, Rieko Kodama & Co. decided to reach for the stars…

Phantasy Star II takes place roughly 1000 years after the end of the original Phantasy Star. In that game, you ended up saving the Algol star system, comprised of the planets Palma, Motavia and Dezoris, from the clutches of the corrupt governor Lassic and the evil entity named Dark Falz. Alis Landale, the girl who had saved the day, was named queen and ushered in a new era of peace and prosperity. Somewhere along the way, a powerful supercomputer named Mother Brain was installed to oversee the day-to-day functions of life in the star system, using Climatrol and the BioSystems Lab to control the weather, flora and fauna. Mota (formerly Motavia) has transformed from a desert wasteland into a paradise. Poverty no longer exists, the people can choose how hard they want to work, if at all; all their needs and comforts are taken care of for them. Even death is no longer an obstacle, because for a small fee you can get yourself cloned at a clone lab.

All was perfect until two years ago when the BioSystems Lab started pumping out monsters. The game stars Rolf, a young agent of Mota’s government. He’s introduced by having disturbing nightmares of Alis fighting against Dark Falz… and losing, although the legend of Alis and her accomplishments have faded into obscurity. Rolf is tasked by his commander to find a way to recover the BioSystems Lab recorder which may have an explanation for why Mother Brain has been acting abnormally. Before Rolf leaves, his half-monster friend Nei, whom he treats like a beloved little sister, refuses to let him leave without her, so the duo set out to uncover the mystery of the origin of the monsters and Mother Brain’s suspicious behavior.

To be blunt, Phantasy Star II behaves like a missing link between 8-bit and 16-bit RPGs. This shouldn’t be surprising, given its comparatively brief development time. Phantasy Star II was one of, if not the, first 16-bit RPGs, so no one really knew what a 16-bit RPG looked or felt like yet. The development team didn’t seem to have enough time to really explore what the increase in processing power and memory could do to forward the mechanics of the genre past its clunky Dragon Quest roots.

I should say up front that the battle system is largely an improvement over the original. Instead of having a typical DQ-style screen with player characters off-screen staring dead ahead at monsters, it actually has large sprites of the party members visible in the foreground above their status screen. Instead of taking place on the field, battles are whisked away to an oddly charming blue grid where you face the monsters. Unlike the original Phantasy Star, multiple monsters of the same type are actually represented with individual sprites, so it’s easier to keep track of how many monsters are actually in the battle at any given time. And in a shocking turn of events, you can ACTUALLY TARGET SPECIFIC GROUPS OF MONSTERS this time, although individual monster targeting still eludes the series. This is a great leap from the original where you just had to pray that the characters would hit the monster you wanted them to. The battle system also deals out damage better than the original. In Phantasy Star, it had a sadistic tendency to deal out damage evenly across all monsters, which meant that they would be defeated at the last possible moment, leaving the player to soak up all the damage from the turns the computer wasted. In Phantasy Star II, there finally seems to be a leap to dealing out damage in a truly random fashion, meaning that instead of the game carefully measuring out how to spread out damage across a group of monsters, you might actually have a chance of attacking that one monster a few times in a row to knock them out quickly. There is a fairly large drawback to Phantasy Star II’s battle system, though. Battles are automated by default. What that means is that if you don’t hit any buttons, characters will continue performing their last action in the following turns. I’m sure the developers thought they were being nice to the player by having them reduce the amount of times they had to press buttons, but in reality it’s a really messy way to do things. For example in tense boss battles where strategies have to keep changing for each character in order to survive, it becomes crucial to micro-manage what each person is doing, which means remembering to press the button to make sure the next turn doesn’t automate. I had a few circumstances where I forgot to do so and had characters doing things I didn’t want them to do. Also, characters will continue using attack techniques until they run out of TP (PSII’s version of MP), but if they’re using a curative technique, it automatically resets to attack the next turn. ARGH.

Unfortunately, the game also suffers from a really clunky, awkward and confusing user interface. The worst offense is the nonsensical naming convention for techniques. There’s a five-character limit when it comes to technique names, and techniques come with names like Eijia, Gires and Nafoi. Can YOU figure out what they do just by looking at them? I hope so, because the game doesn’t let you know until you actually try casting it. Unless you’re looking at a FAQ sheet, good luck trying to experiment and see which ones are the most useful and TP-efficient. They really should have made it easier to at least figure out which ones cured you, since those are the ones you’ll be using almost exclusively, since most of the techniques in the game are a waste of TP. Apart from obtuse names, the menu and inventory seem to be fighting the player every step of the way. Each character has a limited inventory that has to share space with the items they’re equipped with, so you’re constantly having to sell or just plain drop items in order to make room for the ones you really need. The game provides a baggage room where you can store stuff, but even THAT has a limited capacity. If you want to cure someone from the field menu, you have to go through a tree of menus until you find the spell and select the party member to target. Then the game CLOSES OUT OF ALL THE MENUS so you have to go through all the branches of menus a second time if you want to heal again. Why not leave the menu open, SEGA?! It’s also a chore selecting options in the battle menu, since you have to work both out of the middle box in the screen and a separate menu that pops up underneath each character, using an icon system to select attacks, techniques or items. Furthermore, if you’re looking to heal someone, but can’t remember how much HP they have, the series of windows can easily block that person’s stats. And the battle windows don’t even show a character’s max HP in relation to their remaining HP, meaning you either have to memorize that person’s max HP to decide if healing is required or go through a bunch of menus to find their status page outside of battle to see their max. Equipping also becomes a trial because the game won’t tell you upfront if the weapon or piece of armor you’re buying is able to be equipped by a character or how much it will increase their stat. Again, online FAQ sheets are the order of the day unless you like wasting meseta through experimenting.

The worlds of Phantasy Star II are just as unfriendly as their predecessor, as well. While PSII is a little bit more kind in that it starts you off with a second player character, it quickly becomes clear that it did so just to give the excuse to throw more monsters at you, since the character does not come with a weapon, meaning that she cannot attack until you buy her one. Fortunately, they left enough meseta in your pocket to buy her one at the outset, but why not just trade the meseta for having her start out with a weapon equipped?! Rolf’s given a general idea of what to do at the start, get the Biosystems Lab recorder, but you have no idea how to go about retrieving it, or even where the Lab is! Back when I first played this in my proto-RPG fan days, I thought the first dungeon I discovered was the lab, since it was obviously the first one in my path. During that rental I got no farther and essentially gave up, so I had no way of knowing that the Biosystems Lab was actually A COUPLE dungeons into the game. You’d never have any way of knowing this because although the dungeons do have individual names, they’re never displayed, so you always have to guess where you’re going unless you’re in possession of a map. And by that, I mean a map in the real world, since the game has no such thing to give you.

And the dungeons, wow. I thought Phantasy Star’s were bad because they were first-person corridor affairs with trap doors and multiple levels. They’re a piece of cake, by and large, compared to the monstrosities in Phantasy Star II. The developer team, AM7, must’ve spent all the time they had designing dungeons, because the ones in this game are devilish torture chambers designed to erode the human soul. Dungeons are now third-person, meaning you can see your little guy running around the floor maps. You’d think this would make navigation easier, but nooooo. At least in the original, dungeons were single-file corridors with twists and turns. This change in design opens up dungeon design into new kinds of configurations.You either have to have photographic memory, make your own maps, or use premade maps in order to keep your sanity. There’s an especially dastardly dungeon near the end of the game where you can only progress via falling through holes in the ground. If you fall through the wrong ones, it dumps you at the bottom of the dungeon and you have to climb all the way back up to the top and start over.

And there’s an added element that made me want to tear my hair out. You see, I suppose AM7 wanted to demonstrate some of the Genesis’ flashier abilities, because there’s always an added layer of foreground obscuring your character in Phantasy Star II’s dungeons. It could be piping or mist or sea bubbles; anything to make it more difficult for you to actually see where you’re going. And the maps are so vast and the screen size so small that you’re frequently blindly running into dead ends during maps that could span multiple floors via elevators and holes in the ground. You basically bumble around until you find what you’re looking for, which actually helps keep you from grinding, since you’ll most likely have spent the time you would’ve spent grinding trying to navigate the labyrinthine dungeons. The game is really based around a very cautious, patient play style. You’re supposed to venture out as far as you dare, then retreat back to the city to heal up and try again and again until you’re finally strong enough to make it all the way through a dungeon.  And god help you if Rolf dies, since he’s the one with the dungeon escape spell.

The game features a motley crew of characters; Rudo the Ranger who’s strong and has high HP, Amy the Doctor who has all the advanced healing spells but can’t attack worth a crap, Kain the Wrecker who’s super-effective against machines, etc. etc. The recruitment’s a bit odd since the game metes each party member to you after you visit a new city. Pretty much every time you enter a city for the first time, you need to teleport back to the first city and enter your house, where the new recruit will be waiting for you. They’re introduced at a good pace until near the halfway point in the game where you have access to several cities at once, meaning that you can get half your party members within a few minutes. And they all join at level 1! Swell! An interesting character to note is Shir, a rich girl who pickpockets for thrills. If you have her in your party and enter stores, there’s a chance she will steal something and leave your party. Then you have to go back to Rolf’s house, where she’ll be waiting with the stolen item tucked safely in her inventory. The interesting part about this is that the items she steals are random, dependent on the store you enter and have a possibility of being an item unable to be purchased in the game. Shir is the only way to get Moon Dew in the entire game, an item that allows you to revive party members after they’ve been knocked out. Which is ridiculous, since that means you spend a good deal of the end of the game trying to farm Moon Dews in order to prepare for the final dungeon, because god knows you’ll need it. Honestly, though, you end up using the same four characters in your party for the majority of the game, since most of the other party members either don’t have useful enough techniques or are statistically less powerful than the others. I never even touched Hugh the Biologist. A funny quirk is how whenever you meet a new character, they’ll ask you what you’d rather call them, seeming to almost beg you to rename them. What strange, sycophantic people!

Now aside from all this gameplay stuff, which is a given that it’s going to be hoary and outdated by today’s standards, how is the story? In a word: heartbreaking. Phantasy Star II is one of the few RPGs out there with a pervading sense of sadness throughout. At the start of the game, you’re thrust into a formerly utopian world now thrust into chaos because of actions outside of the average person’s ability to comprehend. At first it seems like typical RPG dialogue when NPCs ask, “Mother Brain is watching over us, right? Then, why do accidents happen?” But really, that sums up an important facet of the story. Everyone on Mota is completely dependent on Mother Brain, like an infant is to… well… you know. Anyone playing this after Phantasy Star will be struck by how infantile the attitudes of the people are in Phantasy Star II. People no longer travel via vehicle because they can just teleport. They don’t travel by ocean anymore because Mother Brain told them not to. They don’t travel through space anymore because there was a shuttle accident and Mother Brain decided it was safer for them not to. Life is so decadent that characters ask, “Why should I work for a living?”  There’s genuine disbelief that Mother Brain, who has been a benevolent tyrant for so long, could ever do anything to harm the people. “The Biosystems Lab is controlled by Mother Brain. It cannot make mistakes!” People are so helpless and soft that once disaster strikes them, they give up the will to live. An NPC says, “Even if those monsters are gone, Mota is still devastated. There’s nothing we can do.” The townspeople frequently say that things that were once possible are now impossible, though only because of the sheer lack of ambition in any of them to do anything about it. Unlike other RPGs where everyone is urging you on to succeed, everyone in Phantasy Star II either refuses to believe anything bad is happening or has given up the will to fight. Rolf and friends go on to achieve things that the average Motavian couldn’t dream of not because they’re special, but because they’re the only ones left who care enough to try. Even then, the whole thing started not because Rolf was a brave hero; he just had a job he was assigned to do.

Phantasy Star II is a tragedy, pure and simple. The people of PSII have a tragic flaw that is their undoing. Even if Rolf and friends manage to save the world, then what? Humans no longer have the drive to stand up on their own two feet, dust themselves off and try again. Early on in the game, there’s a devastating turn of events. A man named Darum is blocking entrance to an important tunnel, killing people and taking their money. You come to find a ransom note in a dungeon, demanding that Darum pay a large sum of meseta if he ever wants to see his daughter Tiem again. When you do rescue Tiem, and bring her to her father, he doesn’t recognize her and holds her up for money. She refuses to give him anything, ashamed of seeing her father reduced to a thug and Darum kills her before understanding who she was. Distraught, he vows that Tiem will not die alone and commits suicide by exploding himself with a bomb. That’s a friggin’ bleak scene, and it’s in a game released in 1989. I won’t spoil the ending of Phantasy Star II, because it’s one of its highlights, but I will say that the game does not end on a typically happy “Yay, we saved the world!” note. Instead, my reaction upon finishing the game was to drop my jaw and mutter, “W-what?”

That isn’t to say that the storytelling blows games like Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger out of the water. Unfortunately, this game was made when stories in games, even RPGs, were still fledgling concepts where developers were taking only timid steps in the right direction. The original Phantasy Star itself was a quantum leap above contemporaries such as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, and again Phantasy Star II is a step above that, showcasing a more complex and well-developed plot. Unfortunately, however, the story is still relatively sparse compared to today’s games. You’ll have to slog through three, maybe four dungeons at a time before the story gives another chunk of the narrative, another carrot on a stick. But I found it to be quite a delicious carrot. The party members, too, are sparsely developed, barely a presence in the story at all after their initial introductions. What Phantasy Star II does have in its favor, however, are the nice, big, colorful anime-style designs it uses in cutscenes to move the story along in a very cinematic fashion. The music is also really quite special. The catalog of Phantasy Star tunes may not be as well-known as Final Fantasy’s, but the music in the franchise is quite unique and stands out as being some of the best you’ll find, especially on the Genesis. The music definitely has that late 1980s anime feel to it. I feel like I should be watching Project A-Ko on the Sci-Fi Channel on Saturday mornings in my pajamas when I listen to it. And the rearrangements of its music are pretty swell, too!

Phantasy Star II was a huge, expansive game when it came out, and also quite pricey. I wish I could find reliable information on it, but it was far and above beyond what we would consider paying for a game nowadays, especially adjusting for inflation. I keep talking about how old-school Phantasy Star II is, but would a remake work? Believe it or not, SEGA already developed one in Japan for the PS2. The game updated the graphics, music and even gameplay of the original Genesis game. It also added more dialogue to characters to help flesh things out in ways the original didn’t. Unfortunately, though, the redesigned characters lost a lot of their original charm, in my opinion, and by some accounts the game is even more difficult than the original. Honestly, any true remake would have to change very fundamental parts of the game, such as the dungeons. They’re just long and tedious and are the biggest hurdle toward accessibility the game has. And since the hardcore crowd would likely bitch out SEGA for touching the dungeon designs, and they’d likely find it too grand an undertaking in the first place, it doesn’t seem like a true modernization of Phantasy Star II is in the cards.

But if you’re playing a game like Phantasy Star II, modern RPG creature comforts are probably not at the top of your list of priorities. Why should anyone give a crap about this 20 year old RPG? Well, for starters, it has one of the most unique, haunting stories of any RPG that’s ever been made. I could probably count the number of RPGs with sad endings (not counting ones with multiple endings) on one hand. Secondly, it’s balls-hard. If you’re one of the ones complaining about how you can play a modern RPG without dying once, then treat yourself to PSII where you’ll be living in fear of the game over screen for pretty much the entirety of the game. And lastly, this game should be at least tried by every serious RPG fan out there. I’m not saying everyone out there has to like Phantasy Star II; it’s far too archaic and unfriendly to garner mass appeal. Instead, people should play around in it and experience a different sort of game, one that doesn’t try to ape Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest blindly. There’s no other RPG out there that’s quite nailed the sort of atmosphere that Phantasy Star has, not Star Ocean, Xenosaga or even Phantasy Star Online/Universe/Portable/0/whatever the fuck they’re calling it lately. I’d truly love to know what a REAL Phantasy Star game, not one based on PSO or Monster Hunter, would look and feel like using modern design ideas and technology. I imagine something achingly beautiful and touching like Skies of Arcadia or Valkyria Chronicles. But just my luck it’d probably just be Final Fantasy X with spaceships.

Do you know who Hayao Miyazaki is? If you’re reading this blog, you should. But just in case you wandered in here accidentally while trying to google lolcats, Here’s the skinny: Hayao Miyazaki is basically the Steven Spielberg of animation in Japan. He makes animated feature films with his production company, Studio Ghibli, and is considered a master at what he does. He’s responsible for such anime classics as Nausicaa, Princess Mononoke and the Oscar-winner Spirited Away, and Japan basically considers him a national treasure.

And I sometimes find it difficult to stand the guy.

Don’t get your feathers ruffled just yet. I adore most of his movies, such as Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Porco Rosso, The Castle of Cagliostro and Kiki’s Delivery Service. It’s the other half I have trouble stomaching. I think Nausicaa is a pretty standard fantasy adventure starring one of the most insufferably optimistic heroines I’ve ever seen.  The character Nausicaa pisses sunshine and farts rainbows. I cant stand it! Castle in the Sky is basically the blueprint for every Japanese RPG ever made, so by the time I saw it, there wasn’t much new for me to glean from its picked-over bones. I don’t really enjoy Princess Mononoke’s setting or the fact that the ending doesn’t do any of the preceding 119 minutes any justice. In fact, it’s a huge problem with Miyazaki’s movies in general. They don’t end; they just stop. You’re lucky if you have even a few minutes of falling action after the climax. And then there’s probably my least favorite: My Neighbor Totoro. It’s a movie aimed at very young children, so I probably wasn’t the target audience when I saw it, but it’s still an aimless creature that tries to get by on cuteness and whimsy in lieu of having story or even the barest shred of conflict. I’m sure if I was a toddler I’d love it. I can’t ever say that Miyazaki’s movies are outright crap. They’re always beautifully, painstakingly animated. But I do occasionally have problems with what Miyazaki chooses to do with all his abundance of talent and resources.

And recently, Miyazaki’s latest yarn, the child-oriented Ponyo, washed up on our shores. Was this a hit or a miss?

Ponyo is about a little boy named Sosuke who lives in a seaside village. His father is busy on a fishing boat and his harried mother takes care of senior citizens, so Sosuke finds ways to entertain himself. One day he happens upon a goldfish he names Ponyo. It seems like an especially clever and expressive fish, and they take a liking to each other. Little does Sosuke know, however, that Ponyo is actually one of the daughters of a sea wizard, who forbids his children from having contact with the surface world. Ponyo decides she wants to become a human and live with Sosuke, defying her father’s wishes. What follows is a test of Ponyo’s and Sosuke’s affections for each other which may hold the fate of the world in the balance.

I say may because honestly, any and all peril in this movie is extremely vaguely defined. The film makes a few references to Ponyo’s straddling between being magic and being human disrupting the balance of nature and the moon crashing down to the earth in response, but it’s never really allowed to take on any sort of dramatic gravity. Ponyo is all about an effervescent, dauntless charm, much like My Neighbor Totoro. However, it’s also more structured than that movie. Ponyo has a good 60 minutes or so where there’s a defined plot that is steadily moving forward. Totoro was largely an 86 minute canvas for the titular forest creature and the little children to have meandering play sessions on. Ponyo resists this for as long as it can, but it does eventually succumb to its younger target audience and just becomes about cute expressions and adorable quirks and lush backdrops. If My Neighbor Totoro was intended for 5-year-olds and Kiki’s Delivery Service for 10-year-olds, I’d say Ponyo is squarely aimed at 7-year-olds.

And 7-year-olds are likely not to question some of the things I find fault with in the film. Again, Miyazaki shows that he’s far less interested in a movie’s end than he is in a movie’s middle. I already mentioned the somewhat dubious attempt at reaching a climax, but even after that, the movie has no idea what it’s supposed to do and just ends abruptly. Granted, it’s done in a fairly adorable way, but that should go without saying for a movie like this. Everything it tries its hand at is done adorably. But I gotta talk about one thing that bothered me as a crusty old guy, and to do that, I gotta venture into spoiler territory for the remainder of the paragraph, so fair warning to all of you! Fujimoto, Ponyo’s father, says that in order for Ponyo to become a real human, Sosuke needs to pledge his love toward her and kiss her. Standard stuff, right? Sosuke does all this and Ponyo becomes a real girl and everyone’s happy! EXCEPT THAT SOSUKE’S, LIKE, FIVE. What on earth does this kid know about anything? Does he really understand the sort of promise and responsibility he’s being saddled with? He’s going to have to be with Ponyo for the rest of his life, otherwise it’ll be sort of cruel to make her a human. I mean, a five year old can maybe take care of a goldfish. But looking after a person is something I wouldn’t trust most people with! I mean, honestly, his mom’s gonna do most of the work clothing and feeding Ponyo. That poor lady’s already running around all over the place having a full-time job and raising a child mostly by herself. Plus, kids that age are just fickle. The movie takes place over the course of a few days. Who’s to say Sosuke won’t get tired of Ponyo, like, a week from then? And then you can’t guarantee they won’t just grow apart over time as they grow up. What’s really sort of unsettling to me about the whole thing is that while it’s Sosuke’s job to kiss Ponyo after everything’s said and done and make her a real girl, he doesn’t seem very interested in doing that. At the end of the day, it’s Ponyo that kisses him during a moment when he’s distracted. I realize this is a kids’ movie and we should all assume that their love is the purest and longest-lasting love of all time, but I’m not sure I bought it.

And while the plot description might immediately bring up Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid as an influence, I’d give equal responsibility to Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. That also featured a somewhat lonely young boy who develops a strong bond toward a creature that doesn’t belong in his world. Hell, Ponyo even heals a wound on Sosuke’s hand when she meets him. There’s also the subtle hints of the difficulties of a home with an absent father. While E.T. is more conflicted in its portrayal of a divorced family, Ponyo paints a more optimistic picture about a household where the father is merely gone a large amount of the time, rather than being completely absent. Sosuke seems to understand and respect this a lot more than his mother. Not surprising that Miyazaki paints a sympathetic picture of a workaholic father, since apparently he was absent for a large amount of his own son’s childhood, working on his films.

Ponyo is an absolutely charming, gorgeous movie. You should really expect nothing less from Studio Ghibli, given the time and money they spend on their projects. The animation’s fluid, the characters varied and attractive to look at, the backgrounds obscenely gorgeous… Really, every backdrop in the movie seems like it was lovingly rendered in colored pencil or something rather than drawn on a computer. There’s a warmth to the film that’s difficult to achieve through digital animation, so kudos to everyone at Ghibli for making a movie just as beautiful, maybe moreso, than Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle. The score’s pretty awesome, too, with a great opening theme sung by an opera singer and a lilting, waltz-like underwater quality permeating through the whole sound. Like most Joe Hisaishi scores, it’s difficult to appreciate separate from the movie, but it’s something that definitely helps elevate the scenes in the movie. What DOESN’T elevate the movie, though, is the awful Radio Disney-style remix of the Japanese credits song, sung by the English voice actors with plenty of phat beatz and auto-tuners. Blech.

And about those English voice actors. What a motley crew. A bizarre mish-mash of Disney Channel stars, Hollywood B-listers and Liam Neeson. Yes, that’s right, Liam Neeson plays Ponyo’s cranky father (natch) and is in the same movie with Miley Cyrus’ little sister, one of those Jonas creatures, Cate Blanchett, Lily Tomlin, Tina Fey, Betty White, Matt Damon and Cloris Leachman. As usual it’s about the most random cast Disney could’ve possibly assembled, but they all do a pretty serviceable job, especially Lily Tomlin who gets to steal the show as a hilariously grumpy old lady. I don’t think either of the kids have a future in acting, but that’s not really an obstacle in a movie like this.

So, really, while this movie is reaching an older audience than My Neighbor Totoro, it’s not older by much. But even so, it’s still mostly a movie that will capture the imagination and attention of older movie-goers who appreciate animation. It’s not as preachy or directionless as some of Miyazaki’s lesser movies, so I feel pretty confident recommending this to people. My one caveat is that if you’re the type of person that can only get into very serious dramas or expects a lot of guns or action, you really have no place here. Ponyo’s a different sort of juvenile than most of the typical summer crowd. While Transformers or G.I. Joe might be juvenile because of their tired bathroom humor or their single-minded pursuit of explosions, Ponyo’s juvenile in that it actually caters itself toward children. And if you have an inner child, you should have fun, too. Just turn off your cynical, thinking mind and let the colors and sounds wash over you like the waves of the ocean~

The Hurt Locker

The tension is thick,

a fearless lead character-

what’s Kate doing here?

–

X-men Origins: Wolverine

All I can say is,

“Adamantium Bullets!?

Just go fuck yourselves!”

–

Shatter

BreakOut meets shooter,

it’s a steal at twice the price;

buy this up right now!

–

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Poor ideas made flesh,

its message is simplistic:

Buy more toys, shit kids~!

–

Red Faction: Guerrilla

Mars, barren and dead.

Don’t mind the terrorist themes;

just go smash some shit.

~Fin~