Change Your Image
ridireoiche
Reviews
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (2024)
Fatally flawed
Part 2 of the problematic, sorely under thought through cardboard world building, bloated to bursting themeparkification of ff7 and the assassination of its characters, locations, dramatic moments, and legacy with no place or time for subtlety hitting the player on the nose with everything as if the writers were scared absolutely anyone in the audience would miss something. It feels like they were only concerned with dozens and dozens of hours of forced side quests that kill the pacing but need to be completed to advance the story or unlock story important character context moments later on and as before introducing bus loads of instantly grating samey forgettable new characters that do nothing for the story but take screen time away from the main party and other story important characters who are unfortunately travelling through the plot in a loop of; go to new place, hit roadblock, help everyone in area, road block opens for completely unrelated reason, progress. There is an average of two hours of narratively inconsequential fluff for every location in this guided tour through ff7 land, some locations twice or trice. The removal of the tongue-in-cheek saturday morning cartoon elements of story convenience found in the original game's story are replaced here by this cloud coo coo land logic that just makes every character seem stupid for going along with it, as if they are acting against their own goals so the events of the original game can play out somewhat close to how they played out before.
With that said as with most ps5 exclusives it looks pretty, the animation is great, and the actors do the best they can with the material they are given, it is hard to find fault there, though cracks do show in the latter half of the game. But damn, given the calibre of the talent involved if only square enix never made the decision to follow the multi-verse fad nonsense and instead stuck firm to a one-to-one remake of the original story with a few modern gaming conventions thrown in to update the game for modern hardware and gaming trends, this trilogy really could have been indomitable and not the puppeteered corpse that it is.
No point lamenting the road not travelled, fundamentally this game fails and misses out on greatness exactly where the previous entry did only twice as hard because it doubles down on all the failings of its predecessor, and that is because of the godawful writing. It is a testament to the strength of the original story that even this game's loose interpretation still connects with people.
Blue Eye Samurai (2023)
A boring waste of a great premise
The self-indulgent cultural appropriation, deliberate lack of diversity in the cast, or lack of representation in this series have all drawn criticism. While legitimate claims of historical accuracy could have mitigated some of those concerns, the series immediately veers away from historical accuracy into alternative history fantasy, eliminating any justification for the show's lack of diversity through the use of " historical realism" arguments. Which makes the bizarre incidence of its positive review bombing even more bizarre.
Blue Eye Samurai is a revenge spectacle that feels like it was written by a horny thirteen-year-old who is just starting to explore samurai and revenge films. It is organised like a patched-together bingo card of clichés, wasting a brilliant premise. Which, if the show weren't so shallow while posing as a serious revenge drama, it could be excused and enjoyed as silly popcorn entertainment like looney toons, the Simpsons, or spongebob.
The story follows the titular blue-eyed samurai, protagonist Mizu and her quest to murder her white father. Though having gotten an idea of the writer's ego, it's likely the kill we didn't see was the important one since it makes the revenge quest and all the pain inflicted pointless likely the protagonist only finds this out at the end in a boring rug pull about how vengeance is never worth the effort.
Despite mizu never having served a Daimyo to be fit to hold the title of Samurai and so not even fitting the criteria to be a Ronin, the show treats Mizu as a skilled Samurai, despite the fact that she has not had real formal training and is a crossdressing superhuman mized race, non-practicing nomadic apprentice swordsmith, and violent criminal.
The Edo period and declining Japanese samurai culture are not sufficiently explored by the show and no depth is given to the writer's own selected historical framework. The Edo period is just a backdrop for the story to take place in front of. The show tries to claim authenticity by drawing attention to what are, at best, poorly implemented in no way subtle smug tourist tidbits.
Rather than employing hand cannons, which had already supplanted the katana by the time the show is set, the plot instead teleports the protagonists across a filthy hellscape absent any decent morality or human compassion, fetishizing the katana and romanticising the "way of the sword".
Rather than the Japanese experience, which permeates authentic entries in the samurai revenge genre, this show is dripping with hollow American-asian dispora perspective, like the writers were trying to guess what a finished puzzle looks like from a handful of pieces at thirty feet.
Though the Netflix marketing team did the show a great disservice by emphasising the show's supposed grounded authenticity, as you find out almost immediately realism and physics rarely apply in the show for the lead characters, with superhuman acts repeatedly excused by the "rule of cool" inviting scrutiny over Mizu's superhuman superiority compared to formally trained pure blooded Japanese. A problematic sign the writers believe people with white blood, like Mizu and Fowler, are superior to their pure blooded Japanese counterparts. Her cutting through everyone and only being repelled by the one character with more white blood than she has is a bit on the nose as far as symbolise goes..
Some argue that the series is insensitive and disrespectful to appropriate elements of Japanese culture and history, focusing on the negative while ignoring the positive. Making it a wonder how this show made it past the censors.
Furthermore, some viewers have condemned the bad writing and absentee character development for being bland, predictable, and without depth, believing that it falls short of the promised authenticity and consistent storytelling in favour of cheap attention seeking in favour of character development, flashbacks are not character development they are devices to offer insight into a character or revelations about the story niether are character development. It is as if the writers expected the audience to fill in the blanks and make their own opinions on key character details. Which they did, so... kudos to the writers for knowing the fans would do that... I guess?
Others, on the other hand, find it difficult to fully immerse themselves in the story since lethal wounds are disregarded and forgotten by the next scene, whereas the same or comparable injuries inflicted on the numerous red shirts throughout the series result in instant death. A red shirt, for example, is struck on the ankle with the butt of a sword and dies instantly a few scenes before Mizu receives her first fatal injury. Mizu, the Half-Japanese series lead, sustains many fatal injuries in the series that are all death sentences but reduced to scratches by the following scene. Injuring your characters is a serious decision and should be considered carefully. Wounds do not bear narrative weight if they are not consistent across all characters and do not persist. By treating grievous wounds as dramatic confetti you make it nearly impossible for an audience to regard any situation as a threat from that point forward eliminating any possible build up of tension in the show. Though if the writers course correct now and Mizu gets hurt, her injuries suddenly persist in season 2, or she suffers a setback to her present strength while surrounded by white people, the writers' anti Japanese bias will be overpowering and undeniable.
It was a major mistake for a story set in the revenge genre, where the protagonist is slowly whittled down physically and emotionally over the course of achieving their revenge resulting in a pyrrhic victory for the protagonist, for the writers have already established Mizu is not in any danger of death or serious harm from literally any injury.
All that said I do really hope Blue Eye Samurai gets a second season so that its fans aren't left on a cliffhanger where they can cling to the belief a beautiful second season was snatched away from them. I'd like to see a second season solely to illustrate that this show is not worth the hype. The fans begging for people to watch this show with false comparisons to superior shows like Arcane and Demon Slayer would sour anyone considering watching blue eye samurai with how desperate its fans are for watch hours and how caustically reactionary they are to real criticism. If you can not find or accept criticism you are not a fan you are a cultist and need to be avoided.
Castlevania: Nocturne (2023)
In all honestly...
...this show made me embarrassed for the support I showed toward the writer's strike. It has taken awhile to find the words to articulate how I feel about this adaptation. And I may still be finding them so this could be a bit long winded, sorry.
As a foreword I think it bares mentioning that the long running Castlevania franchise, games, comics, novels, radio dramas, and so on, have explored so many themes, beats, and styles, over the decades fighting through castlevania to defeat dracula. It is generally accepted in most fandoms that what appeals to one fan might be completely different or even the opposite of what appeals to another. Applied here results in everyone having an idea of what makes Castlevania, castlevania to them. There is nothing wrong with everyone having a different take on what Castlevania is, I would imagine it makes adapting the material a nightmare but this show going with the "if you can't please everyone, please no one" approach, was a poor decision in my opinion and I'll try to voice why i think that below.
The voice actors did what they could with the material they had, and there were moments where the animation shone. Though the profanity felt forced, like children who are finally old enough to not get in trouble for cursing. It did not come across as natural to the characters as it did in the original series.
There is some consensus on certain core aspects of lore and characters in the fandom that are concrete. There is lore to be mined, if you look for it. In the games the characters are not as flat as some may lead you to believe, take Richter he is not a weak featured, weak willed, baby fat, child in a mans body with no charisma as represented in this show. In canon he is supposed to an earnest hero who devoted himself to his families cause without a need for a visit to uncle ben crime alley origin storyland. He trained himself to the peak of human ability, in doing so became the strongest and most magically gifted Belmont in history, by his late teens. His strong drive is both his greatest strength and greatest weakness once he achieves his goal. When the time came to prove himself, Richter willingly risked his life to rescue the woman he loved and fulfill his duty as a Belmont by defeating Dracula. He did it because no one else at the time could, proving why the world needs the Belmonts. An achievement no one else apart from protagonist powered and player controlled Maria could claim, but because of player intervention I don't think that campaign's events are considered entirely canon by the majority.
As for the changes to other characters, they would have been fine if the writers avoided giving everyone more agency than the lead, or resisted undermining the focal protagonist at every turn until he feels like a recurring side character in his own show. The threat posed by the villains yo-yos throughout as well, giving the audience no sense of how dangerous a situation is at any given time. Take out a bunch of vamps, lose to a night creature? Take out a bunch of night creatures have difficulty with one vampire? It is bad continuity.
Belmonts hunt monsters, if everyone can hunt monsters and do it better than the strongest of the Belmonts, then why do the Belmonts exist in the story, why are they a big deal?
If you wanted to make a female driven Castlevania I'd be all for it, some much needed attention focused on Sonia Belmont, ninja Maria, or Shannoa, would be a welcome change. Or an entirely new cast of characters like the Netflix original character of Julia Belmont, even New Annette in an original story divorced from any of the games would have been alright and would not have carried the weight of the game's lore or fan expectations.
One thing that bothered me was how the writing used representation as a crutch to hide its weak, bloated, and frankly lazy writing. The plot follows the characters as they do the same thing over and over: go to place, lose, run away. Adding in bloated unecessary scenes throughout that fail to advance the plot and don'teven qualify as "protagonist/antagonist at rest" the first series excelled at. For the life of me I cannot fathom why the groups being so blatantly used are lauding the show. Are they that starved for representation they will accept insult over nothing... They are getting a condescending pat on the head, and used as a barrier for the writers against honest and valid criticism. They are up in arms about everything, why aren't they making a mountain out of a molehill over this underhanded representation. On top of Netflix writer's history of putting ego before reverence for source material and their recurring assumption they can do better, it just hits as really disingenuous.
Swapping out Annette's bad ending fate with New Tera bothered me not as a fan of castlevania but as a veiwer. It felt like the writers making a dramatic nod to the games but wanted to protect their original character, so they switched it out for another less favoured original character. Disappointingly dismissing the reference they were trying to make in doing so. I can only imagine the plan is for Vampire Tera to take over for Shaft in season three manipulating Richter into reviving bathory after she bites it in the season two finale. This richter lacking the heroic drive of his game counterpart will fill his role in SotN under the delusion vampire Tera is bringing back his mother that he killed, and not bathory until New Annette, ninja Maria, Alucard slap some sense into him.
Tera's psyche fracturing at some point spilting into two personalities one of good Tera, the other vampire Tera, who originally are not aware of the other but will eventually reconcile before taking Maria's place as Alucard's love interest and eventual wife in season four following the netflix version of the events of SotN? Now that I think of it, changing Tera from the priest's daughter to ex-lover is a peculiar and kind of creepy decision.
I've heard the idea to have Richter deal with killing his mother came from one of the writers wanting to convey his grief over losing his father at a young age but it was tonally inappropriate for this protagonist of all the protagonists in the series, and just served to weaken the character and show overall. Having character arcs where the characters start out intenionally unlikeable or weak then grow over time only work if the characters around them can compensate for the drag the weak character brings to the table. If every character is weak or unlikeable then you need to rethink what you are doing.
Last thing, and I admit I could have missed the explanation for this but if the big bad bathory erstats was such a powerful vampire that has been around for so long why didn't she respond to Dracula's summons in the original series? If it was because she was stronger than him and he didn't want to bother her then with her personality wouldn't she have tried to crush him and take his power, Dracula's "the power to fight Satan and win by a wide margin"?
Disenchantment (2018)
A painful amount of talent and potential wasted
This show has some good lessons for writers:
1. Don't introduce elements into your story that you don't have a plan for. If they don't pay off later you disappoint people and they will tune out. On the flip side, don't hint at things that you don't plan to resolve.
2. Go too big to early and you trivialise everything that comes after.
3. Some plot threads are allowed to die at their conclusion, not every element needs to stick around long after its narrative potential has dried up.
4. Continuities, consistent tone, and a sense of time may not matter in goofy stories but if you want your important moments to land emotionally, a cohesive sense of world is critical to audience investment.
5. Showing an awareness of criticism, even in a petty and childish matter, does not dismiss any and all critique of your work.
6. JJAbrams "mystery box" style storytelling hooks people in during the early seasons but it is doomed to failure come the finale, because if you let a question linger long enough without a definitive answer your fans will try to answer the questions themselves and your answer will never be as welcome as the one they came up with.
7. Don't breath your own hype nor let your success seep into your work.
8. Deconstruction of genre only works if it comes from a place of good faith, not insult or bitterness.
9. Most of all, when you cannot handle the plates you are already spinning you do not add more plates to distract from the ones that are wobbling.
10. This one is just common sense, underlings should not be made out to be a bigger threat than their boss.
11. The protagonist should push the plot forward. They should not be dragged along by the plot.
The level of wasted potential for this show was ridiculous. These writers may not have known how to pick a lane, goofy or serious, but they knew how to introduce ideas. If only had any idea what to do with the ideas afterward. This show had ideas that could have made great goofy or serious stories but never had the backbone to follow through. Over the entire duration of the show there was a nagging feeling that something was pulling back hard on the reins and kicking up dirt, stopping any one idea from being explored which led to too many plotlines being introduced and too many plates to keep spinning without enough character investment, depth, development, or time left bring to those plot plates to a satisfying conclusion. At least not without everything falling down and leaving a scramble to make something pretty trypophobic out of all the pieces.