Change Your Image
isaactheanimator
Reviews
Ahsoka: Part One: Master and Apprentice (2023)
This is dialogue? This is character development? This is acting?
One of the most mysterious questions of Star Wars is when you are creating, writing, and directing a series. Where basically you have all the creative freedom you have, and your writing is just as bland, corporate feeling, and pointless as these watered down spin-off shows by your side? This is some of the worst writing I've seen from Star Wars. Just after Obi-Wan Kenobi. There is absolutely no soul to be found from this episode alone. None of the characters who come on screen feel like their animated counterparts, you don't think Vanessa Marshell could read any of the lines the live action take of Hera could say and neither any of the others. And the plot is absolutely horrendous. The show just tells us this ball map from 500 years ago could help us find a character who went missing a few years ago wit no explanation or any depth. Ahsoka just suddenly stops to tell Sabine that "this isn't about Ezra, it's about preventing another war" with no insight into either characters' perspective. The show offers nothing meaningful except to mildly continue the arc of characters we are only invested in because we knew about it before. This show would at least be a bit more tolerable if all the characters stayed true to their actual personalities and their interactions are actually based on challenging each other's personalities and they tackle questions to their own motivations. I've seen enough. I'm not watching episode 2.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords (2004)
I am genuinely surprised.
This is only my first playthrough with the game. There's still a little more I want to learn about the story with a few more replays. With what I've experienced so far. This is quite possibly the smartest Star Wars story I've ever came across and nothing else even comes close.
Over the past few years, I've been growing burned out of Star Wars. And the new content and fan discussions around it have driven me further than I thought I would ever have in my teenage years. I also had this guilty feeling that maybe Star Wars isn't really that interesting anymore, especially because of how minimized it has been recently as a basic fairy tale story for children by both the makers of the new content and the consumers who defend it constantly.
KOTOR not only brought me back to what I used to feel about Star Wars, it opened it into a completely new direction. It's way better than what I wished before of how I wanted Star Wars to be more complex and self aware about its themes of good and evil. I don't play any RPG, and admittedly am not a fan of it. I admittedly came to this game because I was once a Star Wars fan and I heard this is some of the best storytelling we've not only gotten from Star Wars but of all time. I went through KOTOR the first game and thought it was pretty good. The story, while the main plot was pretty much a retelling of A New Hope with aspects from other movies, did a really good job bringing me in to the Star Wars universe I cannot see any other RPG pull off, and the character work/side quests/ planets are very interesting and you can tell have a lot of idea put into them.
KOTOR 2 takes what the first game was good at and tripled a fraction of it. The story is better, the characters are better, the decision making is much more intriguing in this game than the first because the themes of good vs evil is taken SO MUCH more seriously, and you are more afraid of choosing a good decision that maybe would lead to worse consequences or a friend would lose trust in you. The game has so many aspects about its events and backstories that I couldn't come to a full conclusion on how to really about any of it morally. The movies usually make it clear that the blowup of Alderaan is bad and the blowup of the Death Star is good. I have no idea on what to feel about the wars that happened before the events of this game. The Mandialorian Wars, the Battle of Malachor V. The game gave such a strong theme that no action anyone ever took is great. Even when a character acted on the best intentions, it always ends up horribly in the price of war. It also added so much more depth to the Force than anything I've ever seen. It put more emphasis on what kind of choices you can make with it, such as can you use the Dark Side for the greater good? Or can a Jedi who hasn't fallen do something worse than a Jedi that has fallen. While still keeping the Light vs Dark concept consistent and making sense. Yes, the dark side still consumes you and you will still create/face consequences, but I love the idea that this game came across, that some of the Jedi, including Revan, just HAD to turn to the Dark Side in order to understand how the Sith can be defeated while sacrificing their own goodwill in order to do it. It's even much more complex than that.
All the character monologues, even when they go for a long time, are almost always intriguing and never usually boring, especially when they're backed up by amazing voice acting and storytelling within their dialogue. It especially helped make for some great characters that we barely get to see. Like Darth Sion and Darth Nihilus only showed up for one or two scenes before the climax, but are given so much depth from some of Kreia's monologues that it barely matters and their payoff is worth it.
Kreia is hands down, the most intriguing, and one of the best written characters I have ever seen in Star Wars. She carries the entire game, she's much more intelligent and manipulative than even characters like Palpatine can ever dream to be. Her words of advice are genuinely smart and believable, and her ideas and philosophy of the Force can be applied to much of real life as well, the same reason Empire Strikes Back's themes are so great. Except her philosophy is much more brutal and grey than any of what other movies or EU content taught. Her philosophy is more about which action you take, good or bad, works best for your purpose or others', and depending on which side of the galaxy you're in. Giving a stranger you don't know some money, is that a helpful case or is giving someone what they not have earned 'cheapening' their problem? Her philosophy works like this, it's more about doing the right thing but being fully committed to it without being cheap. If you want to know how to defeat the Sith, act like or become a Sith and then you'll know. You want to understand how powerful or special you are? Look at yourself without your Jedi powers and see how you hold on your own. You hate the Force and it's prophetic will that destroys billions of people for every generation? Work your way towards the rarest, darkest knowledge possible to DESTROY THE FORCE. Kreia thrived on these ideas and always talked about people she knew that thrived on them as well. But you still had your own choice as a player to deny these teachings and reject Kreia as a teacher. Because this game gives perspective, not preach. But her teachings were still the most intriguing part of the game. And I could listen to hours of her all day. She makes for some of the greatest villains ever made, period.
Not even a week before I played this game, I watched a Bad Batch episode and groaned because of the way the episode just turns out that a senator a clone was told to arrest just comes out and simply states her intentions aren't bad without explaining why and suddenly that was enough for a clone to put down his weapon and realize his mistake. That was not what Star Wars is, never was even going back to the first 3 films. Star Wars is not about denial or the quickest road to redemption in a small world. Growth takes time, and redemption is hard for those who struggle too much with good and evil. We all struggle in a harsh world we ourselves can't control. And what we can control, is up for us to decide, we triumph based on whether that decision we make was hard, not just that it was right. It's easy to make a right choice when nothing holds you back. We triumph when Han went back to help Luke in the Battle of Yavin when he thought he didn't want to. Not with Rey defeating Palpatine in the third film, because it was always eventual. Star Wars needs to go back when things really meant something again. It's a story about war. People die and there's never coming back from it. Even in a simplistic adventure, we can't brush it off like nothing serious came out of it. Accept the reality and show it, not dedicate a whole minute of sadness to one rebel who died in battle we never even met or heard nothing special about. KOTOR 2 is something I don't want to be pretentious and say every Star Wars project should be like it, because it's much better than it needed to be and it's too much to compare with any other Star Wars project, but Star Wars should take inspiration from it and follow its teachings. It's the core idea of how you can keep Star Wars interesting and it really took an advantage on what was simplistic about Star Wars. And it knew how to do it without being pretentious or going against anything of what made SW what it was. I hate the "Jedi and Sith are both bad and need to end" concept that's talked about by so many fans, but I'm glad my hate for it is over the way the fans discuss it than how it was originally brought to the table. This game doesn't go by one idea that opposes another, it explores everything and supports/attacks all sides. Every hero and villain has both redeemable and bad qualities, and every one of them has reasonable but flawed motives, And I feel any author or writer should understand this. For what you would complain about Star Wars being a kiddy-ish unchallenging story, this game turns it away from that in every aspect it can, and it deserves the praise for the way it achieved it way more than TLJ does. It's going as the best written Star Wars story I've came across, not even "one of" to be honest, because it set that high of a bar. Empire Strikes Back is a great movie and it gets its point across very well with way less. But the writing with KOTOR 2 generally is smarter and more compelling. Yoda is a great character but now he doesn't even compare to Kreia. Even Revan through only exposition and dialogue is quite possibly more complex than over half the Star Wars characters in the movies. With some flaws, I already consider it a masterpiece. And I'm glad I came across stuff like this later on in my life than sooner. I'm gonna replay the game a few more times to learn some more about the story. The experience from so far is worth it. One of my favorite Star Wars pieces and I can't think of any other SW stuff to reach this level.
Primal: The Primal Theory (2022)
I'm sorry, no, this isn't a misunderstood episode, it's just filler.
I was really surprised at first when I first watched this episode and saw that it was literally going for something different from the original series. It was something I didn't really have a problem with except the episode was just eh and it definitely wastes its time with the beast in the episode that fails to capture the magic of what made Primal so great in Season 1. The beast general motive (from his movements, actions) is incredibly confusing. I'm not sure at all whether he is an intelligent creature or a rapid animal. He gives facial remarks constantly through the episode like he's fully aware he's killing these people for sick pleasure. Except where did this creature really come from? Is the world in modern times filled with different human creatures? Are ones more savage than the other and how does the world build around that? Truth is I don't even want to asks these questions because I know Primal is a straight forward simplistic series. But Primal started in its own fantasy prehistoric universe with no rules, it was allowed to go where it wanted to go and see as many new, crazy ideas as we can and this episode is now suddenly jumping us to the 1800s and introduces us this idea in close to modern times without any clarification on how this world is supposed to work at this time. The horror aspect of this episode is very weak in my opinion. The beast kills everyone except the last 2 characters and they keep standing up every time they take a punch from him. And the fight drags on for way too long because of bad aim. The ending was just basic. It just seems like another one of those generic cases where of course the person at the beginning disagrees with the theme of the story but then skip through the whole episode of action and suddenly he fits the conclusion to it at the end. People are trying to say "Come on, don't dismiss this episode just because it's a filler episode, pay more attention to it and look at the complexity and deep aspects of it" Except there is none of that here. The theme is executed in the really bad cliche that it has really nothing to do with the story only except the beginning and end of the episode. Arguably I can't really say that's the entirety of Primal either. Primal is just generally good at pacing and exploiting emotions out of the characters without the usage of dialogue. I can't say that's one of the biggest accomplishments of the visual medium. That's more of a unique style. And proof that Genndy actually understood his characters without exposition dumping his way through the plot. Primal S2 has been very weak so far tho and I'm genuinely not impressed. The series has been noticeably less character driven than the previous season and it focuses less on the charm of the 2 characters' interactions and more on cliches and moments of wasting time with no communication. What I loved about S1 Episode 9 was completely absent in S2 Episode 3. And I can't really say I have much faith in where S2 is going as much anymore.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch: Battle Scars (2021)
A typical episode; but you know who is in it.
The episode was okay. It did bring me back to Episode 2 of the series than any other filler episode because the episode was more dialogue and character based; but the major aspects of this episode didn't hit all that hard for me. Wrecker's chip felt very anti-climatic. I thought for the whole time they kept on showcasing his headache they were really gonna set a different course for the character. Like have him against the others for the rest of the show or he literally dies; but now looking back it feels rather cheap and unnecessary considering now it's just used for a filler action sequence. Rex was also just... there. He just gives a lot of exposition to what happened in Siege of Mandalore, and he takes the clone's chips out (which imho now just diminishes the stakes of what could happen to these clones than the stakes were already set on a static 'wait til the end' line.) But I honestly don't get much of what he did here. He seemed like you could switch him with any other clone and it wouldn't make a difference. He was a simple plot device to get the characters from Plot A to Plot B as I was expecting in the way this and Mandalorian have expressed the 'go to planet do some shit and leave' formula. Nothing feels like a progression; if all these characters just out of nowhere died at the end I wouldn't be shocked or wanting to see that. Because this is a mediocre, dragging lackluster adventure. Nobody is really doing anything. This show isn't making me feel like these characters aren't likely to survive especially cause this series is tonally down for children. And it's been too many episodes after we haven't seen Crosshair and we still didn't??? Not only is this just an average Clone Wars arc stretched in 16 episodes. It doesn't even try to make the best of it. Every character who meets the Bad Batch always tells them the exact same thing. "We all have to fight back for a purpose" like there's no diverse conception or perspective of the universe. Everyone is structured the same way and this is the problem with the Disney SW universe. It's so stale and has a formulaic approach to everything it touches. I really wish we would've gotten to see a raw progression of how the clones try to hide from the Empire by traveling through rarer places in the galaxy. But they don't make me see the sentence I just said before. They make me see Rebels and Mandalorian again disguised in a Clone Wars spinoff series. And I honestly think Rebels is somewhat a better written series than this because Rebels at least had a more narrative structure. This barely has one. After the first 2 episodes it suddenly stopped knowing where to go and the types of non-filler we get to afterwards is boring. I'm not liking a lot of the characters either. Wrecker now seems to be the dumb comic relief I admired for not being too much of before when he gave a fair share of competency in his team. And Hunter and Echo are pretty generic as just average personified clone troopers. Tech I still kinda like and some with Crosshair but we never see him for more than 2 episodes tho. Because the series backs away from interesting stuff when it doesn't know how to tell stories around them. I'm being so honest with the show as I can. I keep coming back sticking around for more but I don't think I can all that much. Star Wars used to be this thing that wakes me up in bed whenever a new film/TV show would come out and I would stick by it. But it barely has that sort of reason for me anymore. And I still get up anyway because I'm nostalgically tied to it no matter what. But this gives me less of a reason to. I feel for every time there's a potential good story inside something, things like Lucasfilm Animation tend to ignore said potential and go with the safer latter. And I can't really find any sort of current Lucasfilm project that doesn't do that (except some comics I read and that LEGO cartoon series I surprisingly liked as a guilty pleasure) Right now I'm just not feeling it. I wish I can be excited for something again.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch: Rampage (2021)
Star Wars TV will just keep telling the same plots over and over again
When I first read the episode description, I knew exactly what this episode was gonna be about. The Bad Batch go on a side mission to retrieve important information, they find the bounty which turned out not to be a human but a creature??? And then they bring him back and get the information. First it was with the stuck in a planet episode, and then the get some fuel episode, and here we are. After the first episode, it just couldn't know how to keep the pace up. It really makes me feel that Omega was really just brought in because they had to make the series more for kids if they felt they were ever gonna screw up making the Bad Batch more interesting. And they kinda don't all that much. I liked them in the Clone Wars arc because of their tactical advantages. But there doesn't seem to be any tactic work here. The action is either storm in, shoot, or get captured. It's very contrived in a lot of areas and it never made for such creative action. The story seems to be dragging too. The Kamino stuff was interesting to learn and seeing how Crosshair adapts into it was what made the series feel dark and changing for the Clone Wars series. But anything that's with Omega and the BB. It's dull and the exact same stuff I don't like with the Mandalorian. The planets are also very formulaic, but at least you get to see how beautiful it is, am I right???
I really feel I should bring this up because nobody else seems to really say it. But Lucasfilm Animation has never been the same after Clone Wars got cancelled in 2013/4. Every since with Rebels. It struggled to find the same footing it used to have. Even Clone Wars Season 7 struggled. I knew that a lot of things that were changed from the first 2 arcs that were already drafted felt very cheap and done for the sake of cheap fan appeasement. The 3rd arc did feel like it was at its best but even that has a lot of limitations compared to the previous Clone Wars seasons. And a lot of the dialogue felt too recapping of the show's previous establishments. There wasn't anything new or innovative that was coming out and it really went with the bare minimum of what was expected. When LFA does something new, it's only 1 episode every 5 for every season that comes with 15-22 episodes a season. I know TCW wasn't all that perfect and it did started a bit rough, but it did have 15 out of 20 unique ideas. And the animation and action was still very enjoyable at its time. I can't really seem to enjoy a lot of the action or animation here because it's very rare and kind of static. Clone Wars's animation felt exploring. Bad Batch and Rebels sometimes have characters move too much in one shot and they look very static when shooting at things in an action scene.
I don't have no hope for the show whatsoever despite my long rant. I feel from the little confidence I have that it'll still show some good stuff along the way. Every time they do Kamino or Crosshair stuff, I'll be interested. But the Bad Batch plot is just annoying and holding the show back at this point. It could've done so much more but it doesn't.