Eric Allen's Blog, page 3

Yikes.

 So.  Last year I wrote four novellas that totaled about 130k words to tell the backstory of several characters and of the world of a project I'd been putting together for a few years before that, which I've tentatively named Carrying the Weight of the World.  As outlined, Carrying the Weight of the World soon became prohibitively huge.  It was going to be a massive, massive story, and would likely have to be split into multiple volumes.  So I thought, hey, why don't I cut these flashbacks I've been writing in the first half of the story, and write them out into more fleshed out stories of their own.  I had a lot of fun doing it.  I think they turned out pretty well, and they let me slim down my outline by a fair margin.  Of course, I had to completely throw out everything I'd written up to that point and start over to remove the flashbacks and incorporate more than a few story elements I'd added in fleshing these stories out, but that was fine.  All part of the process.  

So, anyway, I've been working on Carrying the Weight of the World, on and off, since then, and even with cutting a lot of content and shifting it to the novellas this story is getting pretty damn huge.  I'm on track to hit about 400k words before I'm done, which is absolutely enormous.  This is a story that just refuses to be told in a short 130k words like I want it to.  It's too complex, with too many plotlines and characters, and I may have to cut it up into multiple volumes anyway, even after I cut 130k words of content from it last year.

On the bright side, despite its enormous length, I am really liking how it's turning out.

So, anyway, that's what I've been doing this last year in writing.  I haven't spent the ENTIRE time sitting on my butt and playing videogames.

The Xenosaga Trilogy: twenty years later.

Uh, before we start, I did not intend for this essay to be almost 4000 words long.  Buuuuuut, here we are.  So, yeah.  Oops.  I can really get going when I’m talking about things that I love.  My bad.

 

What is Xenosaga?  It’s a trilogy of games for the PS2, which takes place within the same universe as Xenogears on the PS1, and the Xenoblade Chronicles games on the Wii/Wii-U/Switch.  It’s an epic space opera that’s deeply rooted in philosophy, and the hidden meanings behind the myths that make up religion.  It manages to have religious undertones without being overtly religious.  It merely explores ideas put forth by Christianity from a standpoint of looking at the roots of Christian mythology and examining what sort of sci-fi metaphysical weirdness can be made up to explain them.  

 

You can watch a pretty good fan made trailer for the trilogy to get an idea of what the series is all about here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5icsr...

 

So, one of the side effects of having zero social obligations outside of work for almost two years now is that I’ve had a lot of free time to myself to work through my videogame backlog.  All those games I picked up, thinking hey, this one looks good, maybe I’ll play it sometime.  Yeah, now I’ve played through most of those.  I was sitting there, looking at what was left, and kind of not really feeling like starting any of them.  I mean, I am down to the dregs here.  And, the thought of actually finding something productive to do with my time frightened me, so I thought, what’s a game I really enjoyed that I wouldn’t mind playing again.  And Xenosaga popped into my head.  How long has it been since I played through Xenosaga? 

 

Holy crap, that first game came out in February 2002. 

 

That’s almost twenty freaking years.

 

D’oh.  I’m old.

 

So, I went to my shelf, and grabbed the trilogy, then headed to my closet to dig out my PS2.  As Bandai Namco, who hold the distribution rights to this series, view the trilogy as a financial failure, they have never invested in porting it to any other systems.  It is available on PS2 and PS2 only.  I dusted off my trusty old PS2, and then went to Amazon to buy a PS2 to HDMI converter, because apparently my shiny new TV doesn’t have RCA ports on it.  So, a couple days later when that arrived, I plugged it all in, popped in Xenosaga Episode 1 and… crap.  My PS2 is so old that it no longer reads discs.  So, back to Amazon, how much does a PS2 go for these days.  TWO HUNDRED FREAKING DOLLARS!?!?!  That’s almost as much as they cost when they released over 20 years ago.  What the hell!  Over to Ebay, then.  Not much better.

 

But I was set on replaying these games.  What?  No!  Of course I didn’t spend $200 on a PS2.  I downloaded a freaking emulator, hooked my laptop up to my TV via HDMI, and played with a wireless Xbone controller.

 

So.  A bit of history for this series.  It first began with Xenogears for the PS1.  That was, despite its second disc, my favorite PS1 game.  It did a lot of things I’d never seen, story and character-wise, in a videogame before.  It was kind of more of an adult sort of story, with questions about the meaning of existence, uncovering the truths behind the myths that make up religion, and defining oneself.  It was a game that wasn’t afraid to treat me like an adult instead of a kid.  At one time it was in the running to be Final Fantasy 7, but it was deemed to be to philosophical and religious, and was released as its own thing.  Unfortunately, the team working on the game ran through their entire budget before reaching the end of the game, and when they asked Squaresoft for more, they were given just enough money to slap together a quick visual novel style ending for the game that many people found to be very unsatisfying.  I was annoyed by it, but I loved the story, the characters, and the world so much that I replayed that game several times, looking for all the hidden meanings in everything.  And off course there is that infamous line of text at the end of the credits.  “End of Xenogears Episode 5.”  Whaaaaaaaaat?  There was going to be more of these?  Did I miss four others?  To the fledgling internet, I must know!!!  Yeah, no, they were just pulling a George Lucas and telling a later part of the story first.

 

Fast forward a few years, and it was announced that Tetsuya Takahashi, the creator of Xenogears, had left Squaresoft to form his own company Monolith Soft, and struck a deal with Bandai Namco to produce a six game series taking place within the same universe as Xenogears called Xenosaga.  I was so incredibly hyped for these games.  A continuation of the game that I’d loved so much?  Maybe those 4 missing Xenogears episodes that were teased at the end of the credits?  Hell yeah!  Sign me up!  So, I watched and waited eagerly for the games to release, Watching and rewatching trailers for the game over, and over, and over again, which brings us to 2002 when the first game finally came out.

 

So.  Xenosaga Episode 1.  It was all I had hoped it would be and more.  It’s a completely new story with a lot of the same themes, philosophical ideas, and religious undertones as Xenogears, but with new characters and in a new setting.  An alien race called the Gnosis are slowly but steadily wiping humanity from the galaxy in the distant future, while Shion Uzuki, a software engineer, and our main protagonist, is developing weapons to fight against them.  There are half a dozen different factions, all with different goals, vying for dominance while the end of humanity is visible not too far off on the horizon.  It is truly epic in scope, but doesn’t forget that an epic story is nothing without well developed and sympathetic characters.  There are certain things that tie Saga to Gears, but they’re pretty subtle, and you don’t need to play one to enjoy the other.  There are things like the Zohar, Anima Relics, and the Wave Existence that exist within both stories, etc.

 

So, was the game as good as I remembered it being?  Well, yes and no.  The story and characters are still amazing.  But the English translation is terrible, and the voice acting isn’t much better.  The gameplay and graphics are very dated.  Your character moves at a snail’s pace.  The battle animations are ridiculously long and cannot be skipped or sped up in any way, and it has a lot of sections where there’s just a ton of pointless backtracking toward no real end but making the game longer.  There are also some pretty hefty difficulty spikes early on in the game.  It is not balanced very well AT ALL.  The game was also heavily censored for the English release, removing several scenes deemed to be too intense, and removing a fair quantity of blood.  But oh man, that story and those characters.  I loved it.  Even with the clunky gameplay, bad acting, and terrible translation.  It’s still a great, great game even now, twenty years later.  While playing through it, I was constantly saying to myself, this game is so good.  This game is better than I remembered it being.  Man, I love this game.

 

The game sold pretty well, but not amazingly so.  It made money, but only just.  It also had a lot of criticism.  People didn’t like the way that the story is told through long sections of prerendered CG cutscenes.  There are some very long sections where you’re more watching the game than playing it.  It was also pretty short.  You can do a full completion of the game in under 30 hours.  These two things are pretty typical by today’s standards, but back then, people got pretty annoyed at the number of cutscenes, and the fact that the game wasn’t 60+ hours in length.

 

So.  That brings us to Xenosaga Episode two, which released 2 years later.  I don’t think I have ever been more hyped for anything in my life than I was for this game.  And it did not disappoint me.  It was better than I hoped it would be.  The game also ends with one of the most epic cliffhangers I’ve ever seen in a videogame.  Now, this game is the “controversial” one in the trilogy.  People really seem to HATE this game.  The focus shifts from Shion, the main protagonist in the first game to Jr., who was more of a side character that didn’t really enter into the first game until about halfway through.  And Shion is basically sidelined for a pretty large portion of this game while we delve into Jr.’s backstory.  But, as Jr. was a pretty intriguing character in his own rights, I wasn’t mad at the shift of focus from Shion over to him.  I still really like Shion, she’s my favorite character in the series, but I understood that Jr. really needed to be the focus of this story.  People were angry that instead of cutting down on cutscenes like they wanted, Monolith Soft doubled down and added in far more cutscenes than in the first game.  They also created an entirely new battle and skill system, and whoo-boy, that battle and skill system.

 

To call the battle system complicated would be an understatement.  It is ridiculously complex, and it requires a fair bit of strategy to get through even fights against trash mobs.  Enemies have weak and strong zones in a paper rock scissors sort of thing, and every enemy is different with its weaknesses.  And then there is a break mechanic, and a knockdown mechanic, and a boost to skip enemy turns mechanic that all have to be mastered and utilized or else the game will just completely steamroll you, because it uses all of those things against you at every opportunity.  The game also breaks its own rules on how the battle system functions on several of the boss fights to artificially make the fights more difficult.  It also does an EXTREMELY poor job of explaining how it all works to the player.  I had to look up a guide to explain it to me in detail the first time I played this game, because I was getting slaughtered on just normal trash mobs, much less boss fights.  Luckily you don’t have to remember what each enemy’s weak zones are, because there’s a skill you can unlock that will remember them for each enemy type you encounter after you figure out what its weakness is.  That is, of course, if you can figure out how the skill system works.  The first time I played this game I didn’t even realize that there was a skill system until I was almost halfway through the game.  That is how poorly the game explains things to you.  The skill system is also overly complicated and pretty clunky to use.  The battle system is so unwieldly that it even the simplest of fights can take forever to get through, and boss battles can last upwards of 30-45 mins.  This is not helped by the fact that the battle animations, like in the first game, are extremely slow, with no way to speed them up.  Back in the day, when 3d character models were kind of a new thing, gamers were awed by intricate battle animations.  They were a brand new thing that added to the experience.  Now-a-days, we’ve all seen it and ain’t nobody got time for that no more, but back in the early 2000s, that was just the way that games were made, and nobody complained because we didn’t know better, and we were still being dazzled by the graphics.

 

And so, all of these things kind of pissed a lot of people off, and turned them away from the series.  And even so, I still love the game.  It’s a perfect continuation of the story, delving deeper into the mysteries, while also advancing the plot and the characters.  But, Xenosaga 2 still outsold Xenosaga 1, despite the backlash.  Again, the sales were respectable, but not amazing.  So, as Monolith Soft was gearing up to head into production for the third game in the series, Bandai Namco came to them and told them that the series was underperforming, and they had one game to finish their story. 

 

So, they took the story that would have been Xenosaga 5 and 6 and they crammed them into what would become the Xenosaga Episode 3 that we have today.  It’s pretty blatant that this is the story of two games in one, as there is a very distinct climax and cliffhanger cutting off point that was clearly meant to be the end of game 5.  But what about the story for Xenosaga 3 and 4?  Why, thank you for asking, random imaginary person I made up to ask that question.  The story for what would have been Xenosaga 3 and 4 was stripped down to it’s very, very, very bare bones and released in a six episode visual novel, which was, of course, never officially released outside of Japan. 

 

All together, the visual novel parts add up to being about 90 mins long, and it’s basically just a couple of the voice actors telling you a brief summary of what the games would have been.  It’s pretty unsatisfying, and extremely low budget, if I’m being honest.  The problem is that some elements of the third game do not make any sense at all without having seen this visual novel first.  Shion does a bit of recapping the events that happen between the games, but she doesn’t go into enough detail to make it all gel and make sense.  A lot of it is left to your imagination, which can be pretty annoying.  It wasn’t until years later that I was able to find an English fan translation on youtube, and finally fill myself in on the missing elements of the story.

 

You can find the fan translations I watched here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...

 

Bandai Namco had so little faith in the international sales of this game that they only produced a limited quantity of the English discs.  Basically, if you didn’t preorder this game, you probably never saw it in a store.  And it was never even released officially in Europe.  There are even stories floating around on the internet that people who did preorder it never got their copies, because Bandai Namco didn’t send out enough copies to cover the preorders that some stores had taken for the game.  It was this mess that prompted Nintendo of America to pass on translating and releasing Xenoblade Chronicles, the next game in the Xeno series, until the fan outrage reached epic levels.  And even then, they botched it with a craptastic Gamestop exclusivity deal that managed to piss pretty much everyone off, including Gamestop.

 

Anyway, when this game came out, I was pretty disappointed with it.  I can’t even remember why.  Fifteen years ago me was a freaking idiot.  This game is amazing, and it is now my favorite one of the trilogy.  Now that I know what happens in the year between Xenosaga 2 and 3, the story makes a lot more sense.  The battle and skill systems were simplified, streamlined, and BLESSEDLY sped up.  The graphics were improved upon.  The focus shifts back to Shion as the main protagonist, and man does this game put her through the wringer.

 

There are a few things you’re probably going to notice right off in this game.  The first is the sound design.  For some unfathomable reason, someone thought jacking the volume on your character’s footsteps up to 11 was a great idea.  It’s kind of annoying.  There are also several sections where someone is repeating something endlessly over an intercom in the background and it can get pretty annoying.  The next thing you’ll probably notice is that there are nowhere near as many prerendered CG cutscenes in this game as in the previous two.  This was done to save time and money, and help facilitate cramming two games worth of story into one game.  The first game had something like 7 hours of prerendered cutscenes.  The second had 12.  This one has 3.  Instead, we have rudimentary in engine graphics giving simple motions corresponding with what’s happening, while the story is told through dialog text boxes that are voiced over it.  Oddly enough, for me at least, this made me feel more like I was playing the game rather than watching it.  Strange that such a lowering in quality in the visuals of story scenes would be more immersive than the prerendered cutscenes, eh?

 

This game has far more censoring than either of the two previous games in the trilogy.  And there are some pretty egregious edits here.  The complete removal of blood from the game leads to some hilariously bad scenes where the blood is a big part of what is happening.  A young version of Shion trying to pour her dead mother’s blood back into her because she doesn’t understand what death is and thinks she can fix her by doing so comes to mind.  Imagine a scene where she’s doing that, but her hands are completely empty because the censors removed all the blood.

 

The ending is a little rushed, and it’s pretty open ended.  Things are resolved, and it is a clear ending in the story, but there’s room for more stories if ever they decide to continue it.  But I loved it.  Like I said, after replaying the whole trilogy, this game is now my favorite of the three.   Shion is a great protagonist that goes through so much horrible crap through all three games before she finally comes out the other end stronger and better for it.  She’s not perfect.  She makes mistakes.  Hell, she even joins the villains at one point in the game because she’s so desperate for someone who will show her even a little bit of love and kindness, and accept her for who she is.  It makes her overcoming everything that more impactful. 

 

A character like this would just never exist in modern media.  No female character is allowed to be anything short of perfect these days, which makes them very boring and hard to relate to.  Any big character moments are completely undercut by the fact that they’re never wrong, completely incapable of failure of any sort, and have nothing to really overcome and earn that story moment.  But a character who is suffering from things I’ve suffered from, who is looking for the meaning in her own existence, and who keeps getting beaten down repeatedly over the course of the story, but still finds the strength to stand back up again.  That’s a character who is meaningful to you long after the ending of the story.  That’s going to stick with you.  That’s a character you’re going to remember.  Who is going to teach you things about yourself.  A character that you can stand up and root for when the odds are long, and cheer for when she finally overcomes. 

 

It just really illustrates how completely awful modern media is at the portrayal of strong female characters to me.  A character that doesn’t earn her eventual triumph in the end isn’t a character worth remembering.  For example, if she didn’t have the Star Wars brand attached to her, would you even remember who Rey “Skywalker” even was at this point?  Did the Captain Marvel movie earn the moment when all the past versions of Carol stood back up through showing us what a fallible character she is, and how she’s now overcoming that?  Shion earns it by having a dark and tragic past that is deeply explored throughout the trilogy, being shown to fail time and time again, being visibly beaten down by the horrors of her life, and, when faced with her own death, decides to deny the villain what he wants, something that SHE also wants very much, for the greater good.  Choosing to sacrifice her life, if need be, to do the right thing, instead of the thing that she feels she deserves after all that she’s been through.

 

Do you see the difference?

 

So.  The question is: Is the Xenosaga Trilogy worth playing in 2021? 

 

Yes.  It absolutely is.  With some minor caveats.  It is a great story, about great characters.  It explores some really deep questions about the meaning of existence, and why we go on with our lives.  It delves into interesting questions about religion without pushing an overt religious message down your throat.  The gameplay and graphics are a bit dated.  Gameplay in the third game is more in line with modern JRPGs, while the first two games are pretty clunky, slow, and needlessly complicated to play.  These games have long been near the top of my list for favorite videogames of all time, and replaying them has only reaffirmed to me why they deserve to be there.  They are epic in scope, and emotionally meaningful.  That is, if you can get past the clunky gameplay, bad translation, silly censoring, and questionable acting in the first two games.

 

Now for the bad news.

 

These games were never released on any system but the PS2.  They never sold terribly well, which means there are limited copies existing in the world, especially for the third game.  A full set of all three can run you upwards of $400 these days.  And that is assuming that you have access to a working PS2, which, as I found out, I no longer do.  For most people, the only financially feasible way of playing these games would be to… ahem… sail the high seas, if you know what I mean.  If you can get your hands on copies of the games, or have no compunctions against piracy, I highly recommend them.  They are among my favorite games of all time.

 

(Note that I do not condone piracy, I’m only pointing out that the option exists for those with fewer scruples than me.  Yes, I did emulate the games to play through them this year, but I still own them.  I have the discs sitting on the shelf right over there.  I paid money for them, and I ripped the .ISOs from the discs myself to plug into the emulator.)

 

Also to note, there was a 12 episode anime series made of the first game.  It is extremely low budget, and the story is changed significantly.  It’s just not very good, and it kind of misses the point of the story entirely, so I wouldn’t recommend it.  But those games man.  They are amazing and beautiful.  Go play them, however you’re able to.

Why keeping your promises in writing is important.

 These days there's a lot of buzz about subverting expectations in media, whether it be movies, books, video games, comics, etc.  People want stories that take age old tropes and turn them upside down.  Or, at least, they're told that they want it by people who keep trying to make it happen, and keep failing miserably at it.  There's a time and a place.  Doing something shocking to shake things up can work in fiction, and it can be a powerful storytelling tool when it's used correctly.  UNFORTUNATELY, it rarely is in modern media.  And as I was thinking about this current trend of creators seemingly trying to one up each other on who can come up with the most epic subversion of the audience's expectations, I got to thinking about the negative side of that.  Sure.  Something unexpected happened in the story.  But when it wasn't set up in anyway beforehand, it more often than not comes of as the writer lying to me and breaking promises that they made earlier in the story in order to upset the status quo.  And that got me to thinking about stories that make promises that they either can't keep, or that they never had any intention of keeping, and why it's important to keep your promises as someone telling the story.

So.  I started thinking back on all of the media I've consumed throughout my life for examples of promises not kept.  And I found the perfect example to illustrate my point in an Anime series called Berserk.  No, I'm not talking about that crapfest from 2016.  That one's bad for completely different reasons, namely that it's made by a moron who has no earthly clue how to properly block a scene or tell a story in a visual medium, and it looks cheaper than the first season of RWBY as well as being ugly as sin to look at.  No.  The Berserk series I'm talking about is the one from 1997.  I hate this series.  I HATE this series.  HATE.  I absolutely despise it.  And it's not because it's a bad series or anything, but because it breaks promises that it makes in the first episode in a spectacular way.

The series begins with a grizzled old mercenary with a comically large sword walking into a bar and freaking cutting some guy in half for annoying him.  It's brutal.  It's bloody.  It's dark and edgy without being so to a cliche degree.  In short it was EVERYTHING I was looking for in an anime series back in 1997.  We see this walking force of destruction then hunt down and slaughter a demon while searching for someone he means to avenge himself upon.  It is glorious.  It's an amazing setup for a story.  I was super hyped up for the next episode.  Where would this death metal sentient bloodsplatter go next in his quest for vengeance?  What new and interesting monsters would he face as he hunted down the man he wanted to kill?

Well, screw you~~~!!!  The show never had any intention of telling that story.  It is actively lying to you, the viewer, with this first episode.

So.  Next episode, we see the same man, visibly younger, and with all of the pieces he was missing in the first episode still attached.  Oh.  Okay.  We'll have a short flashback to show who betrayed him and why he wants him dead so badly.

Five episodes later, I was starting to get annoyed, thinking, man, this is a really long flashback, can we get back to the present day now please?

Five more episodes later, I was like.  Crap.  This is the entire series, isn't it?

And it was.  24 of the 25 episodes of this entire series are spent on this flashback.

At the time, I was not familiar with the source manga series that the series was adapted from.  I didn't know anything about it.  All I knew was that I really liked that first episode and I wanted more of that.  I have since found and read the entire manga series (R.I.P. Kentaro Miura, may the afterlife somewhat resemble the Idolmaster games you enjoyed to the point of never finishing your epic series within your lifetime).  The Golden Age Arc, as this flashback is called, is relatively short.  Especially when you compare it to some of the other arcs in the series which span across multiple volumes.  I'd say that there was probably enough material  to fill up maybe 6-7 anime episodes.  Which means, 6-7 episodes of content were stretched to fill up a 24 episode quota.  This leads to some pretty severe pacing problems, and long, loooooooooooong stretches of episodes where nothing interesting is happening.  And all of this while the broken promises of the first episode are hanging over it.  This same story arc was remade into a trilogy of movies almost 15 years later, and though the runtime is shorter, it still suffers from the same pacing issues of a one movie story being stretched into three movies.  Plus the cgi used for some scenes in the movies is absolutely terrible.

The first episode of this series makes promises.  It presents itself as one thing, and then does something completely different.  The show lies to you, and goes off in a completely different direction than the one that it promised in the beginning.

Had I not seen this first episode, I probably would have loved this series.  It's a pretty decent story about a mercenary joining a company, and working his way up through its ranks until being horribly betrayed by the man at its head.  A man he thought was his friend.  But the longer the story dragged on without returning to that original hook in the first episode that so captivated me, the more annoyed and angry I got with it.  It's really irritating for a story to start out as one thing, then flip you the bird and do something completely different after page one.  The story can be objectively good, but I'm still going to hate it because it's not the story I was promised.  The show lied to me, and I'm always going to hold that against it.

I look at a lot of the books, games, movies, and TV I've seen/played recently, and I'm seeing broken promises more and more.  Storytellers are relying on broken promises more and more often these days to subvert expectations and bring shock value to their work.  Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, probably THE piece of media I was most looking forward to last year breaks basically every single promise made by the first book, and a fair few that it makes within itself.  Some of this can be chalked up to the fact that the book was absolutely terribly written, but a lot of it was the author giving the literary equivalent of a double bird to her readers in order to subvert their expectations.  The Name of All Things by Jenn Lyons is a particularly egregious example.  It throws out the first book entirely, and tells a completely unconnected story about a character than was in MAYBE 10 pages of the first book if I'm being generous.  The Last of Us 2, gawd don't even get me started.  The Last Jedi and the Rise of Skywalker, both movies break promises made by the first movie, and they both seem to be in a competition with each other to see which one can make the audience hate them more because of it.  

Game of Thrones.  

Ah, poor Game of Thrones.  

The thing that's really interesting in Game of Thrones is that George R. R. Martin subverts all kinds of expectation, but he does it in a way that both makes sense within the context of the story and the characters as they have been presented thus far, but that also keeps the promises that it makes.  It's masterfully done.  If only he'd masterfully get off his ass, and write the freaking ending already!  Seriously, it's been over 10 years since the last book came out!  That goes completely out the window after about season 5 of the show though, after they ran out of source material to make into the series.  Everything after season 5 is basically glorified fan fiction, and you can really, really see the difference in the way the subversions are handled, and how the writers of the show, without the framework they'd been building upon up to that point, start breaking promises that the story has made.  The broken promises start piling up as they break bigger and more important promises, until the story and the characters are so fundamentally broken that they just can't be saved no matter what they do to try to course correct back.

Anyway, I guess the point of all this rambling and complaining is that stories need integrity.  They need to remain true to themselves.  When they break promises made to the consumer, it isn't interesting or investing.  It's annoying and angering.  When expectations are subverted just so an author can yell, LOOK WHAT I DID, AREN'T I CLEVER" (I'm looking at YOU Rian Johnson!!!) without any setup or payoff other than momentary shock value, it destroys the integrity of the story and the characters, and it makes people who have been enjoying the story angry and annoyed.  I don't know about you, but when someone lies to me, or makes a promise to me and then breaks it, I don't immediately praise them for their bold choice in selective truth telling.  I tell them they're an asshole.  I have been wronged and I want an apology.  Fiction is no different.  When a story promises you one thing and then gives you something completely different then expects you to praise it for breaking its promises, it's not a bold, inventive, or revolutionary choice in storytelling.  It's an author lying to get a few exclamation point emojis out of the people consuming his media.

A story needs to keep its promises or it has no integrity, and without integrity, what is it?  Nothing.  It's absolutely nothing.

Two things that have absolutely nothing to do with each other, I'm sure.

 So, for the last ten years or so, my baby brother (who is now 30) has been living with me.  Basically freeloading off of me.  He chipped in for rent, but his portion was pretty much just a token pittance.  Pretty much his only expense was feeding himself.  I allowed this, because he had nowhere else to go.  My parents are very pissed off at him.  Even still, after ten years.  He had his life made.  He is a freaking genius.  He can do complex calculus and physics problems in his head in seconds.  He got himself a full scholarship to MIT.  And he flunked out in a single semester.  Because he is the world's single most lazy person.  Anyway, he's been working at UPS for the last ten years loading trucks on the graveyard shift for not all that much money, and leeching off of me, because I am pretty much his only financially stable sibling.  Go Gen-X!!! 

But, last year, he got a promotion at UPS.  He's making nearly double what he used to.  And, with two friends, he was finally able to get out on his own place, not leeching off of me, but actually paying his fair share of the rent for the first time in his life.  He moved out last November, and it's been kind of nice to have him gone, to be honest.  His incredible laziness translated to a home that was constantly messy.  Me having to constantly be cleaning up after him because the only time he would ever do it himself was when I stood over him and made him do it, and frankly it was just easier and less stressful to do it myself.  An apartment full of clutter because when he moved in, he never really unpacked, or found places for all of his stuff.  An ungodly pile of shoes blocking my front door, because he would never throw out old shoes once he bought new ones.  Boogers smeared all over the back of my couch.  The dude would even leave half eaten food just lying in the middle of the living room floor.

Aaaaaanyway.  Since he moved out, it's been amazingly easy to keep my home clean.  Like, I hardly even have to do anything now.  There's this huge amount of stress I never realized I was carrying around that's just gone now.  My home is clean all the time.  There's a lot less annoying clutter.  It's infinitely easier to keep things clean.  And it's just so much less stressful now that I don't have to deal with him anymore.  You never notice it until you don't have to deal with it anymore, but having a home that is constantly messy and cluttered is really, REALLY stressful.  Or maybe that's just me, and my OCD a place for everything and everything in its place mentality.  

So, my freeloading brother moved out, and all of a sudden I'm free of a lot of stress and it's super easy to keep things clean.  I'm sure these two things have nothing to do with each other.  

In more entertaining news, one of the two people he moved in with is just as messy as he is.  The other is a meticulous neat freak who is CONSTANTLY flipping his shit.  I mean, this is the setup for a bad sitcom, right?  He came to me and asked how I dealt with my brother yesterday, and I was like, "You knew what he was when you signed the lease with him."  I may, or may not, have added a maniacal laugh afterward.  You'll never know for sure.  For some reason, seeing someone else struggling to deal with what I've been dealing with for the last decade is kind of hilarious to me.  But then, I am kind of an asshole.

Star Trek

So, for Christmas, I was given a bluray set of 10 Star Trek movies.  Which is all of them, excluding the JJ Abrams Kelvin Timeline ones.  Work has been completely ridiculous for, oh, about a year or so now, but I finally found the time to watch through them all again.  It's been a while.  So, I figured I'd post my Star Trek movie rankings.  These are in order best to worst.

1.) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - Seems to be most everyone's favorite Star Trek movie.  Probably because it's one of the best Sci-fi movies ever made, much less a great Star Trek movie.  This movie is extremely tight.  There is not a single wasted second in it.  Every single frame of it serves a purpose to the plot or the characters.  That's a very, very rare thing to find in a movie.  It brings back a kind of silly villain of the week from the TV series and turns him into a nearly unstoppable force of vengeance that is one of the greatest threats that the Enterprise and her crew have ever faced, and delves deep into themes of aging, what it means to be human, and sacrifice.  It's a lot deeper than you might expect from a Star Trek movie.

2.) Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country - This movie is basically the Berlin Wall going down as a Star Trek movie.  I really like it.  It's got some great villains, a really cool space battle, and a lot of political intrigue.  A lot of the characters are forced to look at themselves in a new way, and to change for a better tomorrow.  It was a really great sendoff for the original cast.

3.) Star Trek: First Contact - This one is BY FAR the best of the Next Generation movies.  It also has some of the best acting out of any of the Star Trek movies.  Michael Dorn, Brent Spiner, and Patrick Stewart all give really, really good performances.  A lot of people like to call this one the Wrath of Khan of the TNG movies, and it's not hard to see why.  It's a great story, and brings back an old nemesis of Picard's as the villains, and forces Picard to face himself, and the fact that he is not above anger from having been hurt in the past.  It also has one of the more memorable main music themes of the series.

4.) Star Trek: Nemesis - A lot of people will probably be surprised that this movie is so high up on my list.  It doesn't have a very good reputation amongst fans.  I don't really understand why.  It's a really good movie.  It's probably a lot better than you remember it being.  People just seem to hate this one, and yeah, it's got a few parts that are kind of dumb in it, but what Star Trek movie doesn't?  This one was trying to be another Wrath of Khan, but instead of bringing in a past villain for Picard to face off against, the villain is his clone.  The plot parallels Khan pretty well also.  Villain who wants revenge and has a superweapon that can destroy planets.  Main cast crew member sacrificing himself at the end.  Picard facing defeat for, really, the first time.  If they had just cut out the B4 plotline and tightened it up a bit, and given Shinzon a bit more development as a character, this one might have been even better than First Contact.

5.) Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Normally I hate it when movies take the characters out of the setting that is a large part of what I like about the series, and put them in modern day Earth.  I'm not watching Star Trek to see Star Trek Characters in 1980s San Fransisco.  BUT this movie makes up for it by just being really, really entertaining.  All of the character interactions and reactions to the 1980s are kind of hilarious.  And Spock continuing to attempt to swear throughtout the entire movie, even up to the end, is kind of great.  In the end, the filmmakers used a relatively low budget to get a lot of mileage out of what they had to produce a movie that I really should have hated, but kind of really like instead.

6.) Star Trek III: The Search for Spock -  The Search For Spock is usually cited as one of the "bad" Star Trek movies.  It's kind of a general rule that the even numbered ones are the good ones, and the odd numbered ones are the bad ones.  While that holds true for most of them, it's not so much true for this one.  This isn't a bad movie.  It's just sandwiched between two much better movies.  Coming off of Khan as probably the best villain Star Trek will ever have, the villain of this movie is pretty weak, and the stakes are considerably lower than those of the previous movie as well.  But that doesn't make it a bad movie.  There are just better movies in the series.

7.) Star Trek: The Motion Picture - This would have made an excellent episode of the original series.  Unfortunately, they stretched a plot that would have fit snugly into a 45 min Star Trek episode into a more than 2 hour movie.  There's a good hour of this movie that's just special effects, and the characters reacting to them.  There's actually kind of a funny story behind that.  Roddenberry didn't really know how to make a movie, and wasn't used to using movie grade special effects, so he commissioned just ridiculous numbers of effects shots and spent a crapton of money on them.  And it turned out there were way more of them than were needed, but he spent so much money having them made, that he was damn well going to use them all whether they fit or not.  And so, a good hour of the movie is characters reacting to special effects shots.

8.) Star Trek: Generations -  This is not a very good movie.  I was pretty hyped for this one, being the first of the TNG movies.  The problem with it is that it just feels like a episode of the series, and the inclusion of Kirk was pretty unnecessary, even as a passing of the torch.  They didn't really need to pass the torch, TNG ran for seven freaking years.  It had already run it's series finale.  It was over by the time this movie came out.  No torch passing required here.  We already know who the characters are.  It's got a pretty weak villain with kind of weak motivations, the action is subpar, and the plot is pretty cluttered.

9.) Star Trek: Insurrection - Like Generations, this doesn't feel like a movie.  It feels like an overlong episode of the series.  And not a very good one at that.  It has weak villains, literally NO stakes whatsoever, and it kind of goes against what Picard has chosen to do in similar situations earlier in the series.  He's all full of righteous anger over moving 600 people for the greater good, when he has done that himself more than once in the past.  Plus, sci-fi civilizations who choose to do away with their technology for a simpler life, and then lord it over others like they're so superior for the way they live their lives have ALWAYS annoyed me.  Of all the freaking scripts they could have gone with for Star Trek 9, why this one?  Surely there were better ideas for a freaking Star Trek movie lying around than this?  It's a pretty nothing movie, and definitely the worst of the TNG movies.

10.) Star Trek V: The Final Frontier - This movie is basically Shatner's ego, arrogance, and hubris on full display.  A vanity project that just sort of deflated with a sad farting noise.  It doesn't make sense.  It gets pretty much every character's personality wrong. The special effects were garbage.  They used sets, props and even generic canned music from the TNG series because they ran out of money due to Shatner's mismanaging.  It also breaks continuity with the rest of the series, creating some rather large plot holes.  It pretty much treats everyone but Kirk like crap, and really shows how Shatner sees his costars.  Definitely the worst of the Original Series movies, and also the single worst Star Trek movie ever made.  It's not even entertaining to watch in a so bad it's good sort of way.  It's just bad.  With a lot of really cringe things in it.

Anyway, those are my Star Trek movie rankings, and a bit of what I thought of each movie.

Halo

So, I have mentioned on my blog from time to time that my brother buys me games that he wants me to play, not because I actually want them, but because he wants me to have them.  This time he got me the Halo Master Chief Collection, and Halo 5 for Christmas, and I've finally managed to work my way through all of them.

So, way back in the beforetimes, I bought the original X-box because I wanted to play Knights of the Old Republic.  A Star Wars RPG set in the distant past of the Republic?  That was worth buying a system to me.  Usually it only takes one game I really want to play to shell out for a new system.

Anyway, it was, what 2002?  2003?  So, I had my one game.  And a game console that I didn't really have much use for beyond that.  Then, one night, my friend called me up, and asked if I could come over and keep him company.  He'd said something extremely stupid to the girl he was dating (who he eventually married) and she had dumped him.  He needed something to take his mind off of it.  So, knowing that he liked shooter games, I suggested I bring my Xbox over, and we go rent Halo from the Blockbuster that was like 3 blocks away from his house.

At the time, I sucked at shooters HARDCORE.  (still do, kind of)  I couldn't really do much but throw myself on enemy bullets and make sure the ground was good and soaked with my blood.  But, seeing as how it was to cheer him up, rather than for my own enjoyment, we went and rented it.  And then we proceeded to play through the entire campaign in split screen co-op on his 21 inch CRT TV.  We kind of had a blast.  Even though he was pretty much carrying my dead body through the entire game.  We were both drawn in by the story of the game.  It was a very cool sci-fi universe, and it did some pretty awesome things, story-wise that we'd never really seen before, especially not in a shooter video game.  We were pretty surprised that a shooter would have such a deep and rich story.

So, anyway, he made up with his future wife the next day, and we went on with our lives.  And that was pretty much the end of my experience with Halo.  I never really picked up the rest of the games, because I don't really play shooters, and I suck at them.  So, even though I was extremely interested in the story, I didn't have anyone to piggyback my worthless ass through the story campaigns on the rest of the games, so, I just sort of skipped them.

Well, with my brother buying me a whole bunch of shooters lately, I've come to suck somewhat less at them, and was able to get through all 7 Halo games on normal difficulty, except for 4, because that one was exceptionally hard.  I did most of that one on easy.  So, here are some brief thoughts on the series now that I've made my way through them all.  

Halo -  I pretty much already said my peace about this one in my intro above.

Halo 2 - I understand that a lot of people really love this game.  It's considered to be one of, if not THE best of the series.  But, to me.  It kind of felt like the Matrix sequels.  Like they didn't expect the first one to do so well, and then were faced with a, oh crap, now we have to make another one, what do we do now sort of situation.  The story is really rambling, and kind of goes way off the rails.  It doesn't really have much of a decisive ending either.  It just sort of ends.  The additions of new weapons, and some improvements to gameplay and graphics are nice, but the story just kind of felt like it didn't know what it was even supposed to be.  It has a lot of filler missions that are pretty much just there to pad the game.  They make you play as the Arbiter for several missions, and I kind of didn't care.  Most of his missions just dragged on FOREVER and were really boring.  And then after this game he kind of just disappears from the story entirely. He's in like, one mission at the beginning of Halo 3, and then that's it until they bring him back near the end of 5.  It was okay, but it had a lot of problems with the story that made it somewhat less enjoyable to me than the first one.

Halo 3 - This one was much better than 2.  The story is a lot more coherent, and it has an actual ending.  The gameplay has been further improved upon, and there's lots of new goodies to play with.  This one feels a lot more like the first game, story-wise.  And though the ending is pretty open ended, I felt it was pretty good.  A great way to end the story.  And then 4 more games came out.

Halo 3: ODST - Okay, I REALLY liked this one.  This is the first of two spinoff games that take place during the events of the main trilogy, focusing on different characters and events.  You play as a pretty entertaining cast of characters from a unit that's dropping into the beginning of the fight on Earth at the beginning of Halo 2.  It has a really entertaining cast of characters, and it gives you a new perspective on the war with the Covenant, that of the normal soldiers, rather than super cyborgs in indestructible power armor.

Halo Reach - This one is definitely my favorite of the bunch.  It's the other spinoff game that Bungie made, and it was their last contribution to the series before selling off the rights so they could go work on something new, which would eventually become Destiny.  Like with ODST, this one has a really entertaining cast of characters.  You play as another Spartan attempting to fight off the Covenant invasion of Reach, just before the events of the first game.  This one feels a lot more epic than any of the others that came before.  You're fighting a war that you know you're going to lose, because you already know that the planet is going to be destroyed.  Your job is to get data on where the first Halo is located to the ship from the first game before the planet goes boom.  It's this desperate fight through overwhelming odds, sacrificing team member after team member until there's just one guy left to hand the data off, and then sacrifice himself so that the ship can get away.

Halo 4 - I don't like this one.  It's probably the worst one of the entire series.  You can really, really tell that it was not made by the same people.  They changed the look of the enemies to make them look weird and more generic.  The level design is terrible, and the weapons are not balanced at all.  And they upped the difficulty considerably, and turned all of the enemies into ridiculous bullet sponges.  Enemies you could take down with a few well placed shots in previous games, you can empty three or four entire clips of ammo into and they'll still keep coming.  I found that guns were basically useless in this game.  The only things that really took enemies down were grenades or a succession of melee attacks.  It was ridiculous.  Shooting guns in your shooter game is the least efficient way of getting through the game.  Additionally, your shields are made of paper, and they take.  WAY.  TOO.  LONG.  to recharge.  And then there's the story.  It feels like fanfic.  Probably because it is.  It contradicts preestablished lore about the Forerunners.  It just goes completely off the rails in the complete wrong direction.  It's just not a very well made game, and it's really, really not a good story, or a worthy continuation of where we left off at the end of Halo 3.

Halo 5: Guardians - The gameplay of this game is VASTLY improved over Halo 4, and it has a lot of little quality of life changes that make it a lot easier and funner to play.  The enemies are no longer indestructible like they were in Halo 4, which is a plus.  The problem is when you get to the story.  Oi.  The story.  Okay, first of all, it's not a direct continuation.  I was pretty lost at the beginning, wondering what the hell is happening.  After looking it up, I found that there are several books that come between Halo 4 and 5 that 5 assumes you read.  I should never, ever have to read supplemental material to know what is happening in the story of the main line series.  That is just BAD storytelling.  But it gets WORSE.  This was sold as a game where the Master Chief has gone rogue and you are sent out to hunt him down.  It was built up to be this huge, epic confrontation between him and the guy you play as.  And the marketing just flat out lied about ALL OF IT.  Next, you only play as the Master Chief in like 3 missions of the 15 or so.  This is a main line game in the series.  It should be mostly from the POV of the main protagonist of the series.  You want to give me a game about Locke.  Fine.  Don't call it Halo 5!  Because it's NOT.  Just call it Halo Guardians.  And then the story just continues to shatter preestablished lore and continuity and really shows the people writing this crap do not have the first clue as to what they're doing. It might have made a pretty good sci-fi story... if it wasn't Halo, and at the same time, shitting all over Halo.  I spent most of the story just saying aloud, "What?  Really?  Oh come on!"  But it's still a better game than Halo 4.

So, anyway my rankings for the series, best to worst, go like this:

Halo Reach

Halo 3: ODST

Halo 

Halo 3

Halo 2

Halo 5: Guardians

Halo 4.

And people say masks don't work...

So, for the last year or so, I've been wearing a mask at all times in public.  I'm a mailman.  I can't avoid interacting with people, as hard as I try not to.  As much as I strongly radiate the "I really don't want to talk to you, please go away" vibe, there's always someone who can't take a hint.  But I have a pretty heavy duty mask that I wear at work or whenever I need to go to the store.

It's been about a year now.  I haven't gotten Covid.  But I also haven't gotten any other sickness.  I normally get sick 3-4 times a year, ranging from minor colds to strep throat.  It's an added bonus to working a job where you come into contact with a lot of people.  Anyone who works in customer service probably knows exactly what I'm talking about.  But, this last year, I haven't been sick once.  Not one single time.  

You see all these people screaming about their rights, and how masks don't work, and oh, I can't breathe with it on, or some other BS like that.  Well.  There's some proof for you that they work.  I haven't gotten Covid, despite working through the entire year coming into close contact with people on a daily basis.  And I haven't gotten any other sickness from it either.  Also, my heavy duty mask filters out allergens, so I had the most amazing, nearly allergy free summer last year.  I kind of want to wear it at work for the rest of my life now.  I can deal with less impactful allergies, and never getting sick.

How subverting expectations can utterly destroy pacing and momentum within a story.

 So, the two big things in fiction these days are wokeness and subverting expectation.  There's nothing inherently wrong with either of them when they're used in ways that enhance stories, rather than taking away from them.  The problem is that they're rarely used in ways that enhance stories, and more often than not, in ways that take away from stories.  I thought about writing an essay on how substituting Woke for personality, motivation, character drama, meaningful character arcs, meaningful character relationships, and characters striving to be better people, makes for less meaningful and impactful stories after reading the first book in Star Wars: The High Republic.  But I figured that as a straight, middle-aged, white guy, that would present me with many and various opportunities to put my foot in my mouth. And mere days after finishing that book, I got to the climax of a game called Trails of Cold Steel III.  Or rather, the faux climax, because SUBVERTING EXPECTATIONS *creepy oohing sound* and I figured, yeah, that one's more up my alley to talk about.

Subverting expectations in a story is not a new thing.  It's been around for ages.  Literally.  But I think the man most responsible for it coming into the public consciousness in modern times is George R. R. Martin.  Ned Stark lost his head *spoilers* and the entire world lost their minds.  Now EVERYTHING has to subvert your expectations, no matter if it makes sense for it to do so or not.  I've had books rejected by publishers and agents because they didn't subvert expectations enough.  I've heard stories of established, well known authors running into the same problem.  Every movie, every TV series, every book, every video game; they ALL have to do it now, because, beside Wokeness, it's the big thing right now in fiction.

I think the point where I realized that it was starting to become more of a destructive force in the world of fiction, rather than one that was keeping things fresh, was when I started looking back on why I wasn't quite so excited for new Star Wars movies anymore.  I started looking at the Disney made Star Wars films, trying to find the exact point where I started to lose interest.  I really liked The Force Awakens.  I thought it was a good set up for the rest of the trilogy, despite being a soft reboot of the original Star Wars.  Rogue One is one of my favorite Star Wars movies of all time.  It reminds me of lazing around on Saturday afternoons after my chores were done, watching old war movies with my dad.  My dad and I are very, very different people, and we share exactly ONE interest and ONE interest alone, old war movies.  Not only was it an old war movie, it was also a STAR WARS movie, and a pretty good one too.

Then I looked at The Last Jedi, and there it was.  First of all.  Luke Skywalker was my hero when I was growing up.  He was my idol.  He was who I wanted to be.  I dressed up as Luke Skywalker for Halloween for like 6 years in a row.  Seeing the way he was treated in this movie really did not sit well with me.  They took my hero--MY HERO--and they did THAT to him.  Boy, that sure subverted my expectations.  When he showed up in The Mandalorian *spoilers* to save the day at the end, I was so happy.  I was a little misty-eyed.  He was back. My hero was back to being a hero.  He was only on screen for two or three minutes, and the CGI de-aging they did on Mark Hamill was a bit shoddy, but there he was, on screen, being the hero I wanted to see in The Last Jedi.

Even in the lead up to The Last Jedi, I wasn't really feeling it.  Something in the trailers felt off to me, and I've never really been able to explain why, until now when I went back and watched them before writing this essay.  The trailers show very little of anything.  It was as though the ones who edited them together just did not know how to market the movie, and so they took a bunch of random clips that looked cool and strung them together.  But that's what they do for all trailers, you say.  No.  Not so much.  They usually try to string a narrative through the trailer to give you an idea of what the movie is about, and there was none of that here.  You saw the same thing with the Wonder Woman 1984 trailers.  It's pretty clear that the marketing team just didn't have any clue how they were supposed to market that movie to fans, just like the marketing team on The Last Jedi.

So, watching the movie, you have a writer/director who basically took EVERYTHING and flipped it upside down in order to subvert your expectations as the audience.  It feels like he spitefully took everything people liked, or everything people were expecting to see in the next movie, and tore it up, flipping it all around, just so he could watch our expressions when it happened.  Sure.  Fine.  Whatever.  But then, they had to follow it up with another movie, and that movie just didn't have anywhere to go from there.  He'd taken everything that was STAR WARS about it, torn it up, and thrown it out, and they had to find some way to somehow make a satisfying conclusion out of it.  *spoilers* They didn't.  Now the new trilogy feels like a three act story with two act ones and no act two.  All in the name of subverting expectations for the sake of subverting expectations, and not really for any other visible or tangible reason.  This one guy who wanted to shake everything up, completely derailed STAR WARS, just so he could subvert our expectations in one movie.

Okay, so, let's get on to the thing that prompted me to write this essay.  Trails of Cold Steel III.  So, there's this video game series called The Legend of Heroes.  It had an original trilogy back in the PS2 era, and then the series continued on through various platforms with the Trails in the Sky trilogy, Two Crossbell games, the 4 Trails of Cold Steel games, and then upcoming next chapter of the story which hasn't been given an official English name yet.  Each subset in the main series is it's own story, but they all take place in the same world, and they start to overlap quite a bit as they go on. I've been following this series for decades now, and the latest game Trails of Cold Steel IV just came out a couple months ago in English, so I figured I should get my butt in gear and finish up Trails of Cold Steel III so I could eventually start on it.

These are all extremely long games.  They're very dialog and cutscene heavy, focusing more on storytelling and character development most times than gameplay, which is not for everyone, but as I play games just for the story it's great for me.  So there I am, 90 hours into Trails of Cold Steel III, and ermagerd, an apocalyptic event threatens.  I storm into an underground demonic castle, to destroy an ancient evil that will turn the 800,000 people in the city above into mindless, undead drones.  All 37 million playable characters from all 3 Trails of Cold Steel games show up to fight.  It's this hugely epic moment.  They all storm the castle, breaking up into teams to fight their way through.  There's super awesome, completely amazing music playing.  This is it.  This is the final dungeon in the game.  You can feel it.  The way the story has come together at this point, the way all the characters have gathered to fight this threat, the music, the pacing, the way the story is told.  This is it.  This is the end of the game.  You fight this amazingly hard boss, which makes you make use of pretty much every single character that came into the castle with you, fighting it off in waves, and then climbing into your giant robots to finish it off.  This boss fight is so epic and difficult that it takes almost an hour to fight through it.

And then the game just keeps going.

And going.

And going.

And going.

It builds up to ANOTHER climax 15 hours later.  Where you... storm an evil demonic castle... gather all 37 million playable characters from all 3 games... and even more characters from previous games before them...  fight your way through... with really epic music... to fight another hugely difficult boss battle... to stop another, bigger apocalyptic event... and it completely falls flat because we already had the climax that the entire story was building toward, and this just comes out of nowhere.  It doesn't feel as epic.  It doesn't feel as exhilarating.  It doesn't feel as meaningful.  It just feels tacked onto the end so that the writers could use that first apocalypse to subvert my expectations of what the end of the game was going to be.  Frankly, I was kind of just really bored, and I wanted it to be over by the time I got to it, and it felt more like a chore than a fun and amazing conclusion, because in subverting my expectations for what the ending was going to be, they completely destroyed the pacing of the story, and the blew out all of the momentum that was carrying it forward at the 80% line, leaving nothing for the conclusion.

It was that point where I started to get really annoyed with my expectations having been subverted.  What the entire story seemed to be building up to as the huge climactic ending of the game wasn't.  And then the story just kept going.  And then there was a second, even bigger climax later.  So the entire pacing of the story led up to this first ending, but it wasn't the end, and the game just goes on kind of aimlessly for FIFTEEN MORE HOURS, before you get to the REAL ending.

Yes.  My expectations were subverted.

And they only had to completely destroy all semblance of pacing and momentum within the story to do it.

The subversion works in Game of Thrones (at least in the books and the earlier seasons) because the entire story isn't building toward these moments of subversion as climactic events.  They come as shocks because you don't expect this character to die, and certainly not in this way, but the story as a whole keeps its momentum, and keeps rolling forward, building up steam, rather than losing it.  The things that come later feel more meaningful, because the point of the story was not to subvert expectations, but to tell a story that was not dependent solely upon the shock value of the subversion.  But when you look at things like The Last Jedi and Trails of Cold Steel III, the subversion is the point of the subversion, not because it makes the story more interesting.  It kills all forward momentum in the plot.  It destroys characters.  It makes the things that come later feel less meaningful than they otherwise would have been.

So, I guess it all boils down to this point.  Subversion can be a powerful storytelling tool when it is used correctly to enhance the momentum of the story.  Subversion for the sake of subversion, more often than not just destroys the pacing and momentum of the story instead.

The Stand - CBS

 Okay, The Stand is probably my favorite Stephen King book.  I first read it more than 30 years ago.  I loved it then.  I still love it now.  I even love the original ABC miniseries.  (I seem to be somewhat in the minority on that) I felt that it did a very good job of condensing the massive epic into a coherent and generally enjoyable TV adaptation.  I attribute this, mainly, to the fact that King, himself, was the one to write the screenplay.  Events and characters were cut.  Things were changed quite a bit.  The sex, language, and violence were toned down to a 1990s network TV level.  But it worked.  It managed to tell the core of the story, about the characters that mattered, in a very good, and satisfying way.

So, I was pretty excited when I heard plans around 2010 to make a big screen version of The Stand, possibly split into multiple movies, and probably directed by Ben Affleck.  The man's kind of a crap actor, but he's actually a pretty good writer and director.  Rumors came and went, and eventually that project was passed from Affleck to others, and morphed into a new miniseries for CBS All Access.  I was fine with this, as I already subscribe to the service (on and off between seasons) for Star Trek, among other things.  And it meant that it would both have a decent budget, and be able to include some of the more "R rated" things from the book.

I've watched the first two episodes, which are the only two that are currently out to the general public, though there are some professional reviewers who have been allowed to watch the entire series.  I have to say, it's kind of not doing it for me.  The biggest problem I have is that it is VERY dependent upon you already knowing what is happening for literally anything to make sense.  If you have not already read the book, or seen the ABC miniseries, you will have no idea what is going on AT ALL.

Rather than giving you all of the very necessary parts of the story dealing with the virus wiping out most of humanity up front, (which is, in my opinion, the best part of the story) we start at what is basically the midpoint of the book.  It's not explained where we are.  Why these people are cleaning up dead bodies.  Where any of these people came from.  Why they are here.  Or really, what happened.  There are a few offhand comments about the end of the world.  But that's it.  That's all the exposition we get.  We are then treated to a series of flashbacks for two sets of characters.  Harold, being the only one of them we have seen before.  It flips between characters we don't know, unless we already know the story from other sources, in different situations with a disease sort of in the background.  We're never really shown what this disease is doing, how fast it's spreading, how many people it's killing.  You just see a few random people coughing, and then, all of a sudden, everyone's dead, and, unless you already know what's happening, you have no idea why or how any of it happened.  It's like it's trying to follow the format of Lost.  Where you have the events taking place in the present on the island, and then flashbacks to all of the character development and events that brought the survivors to where they are in the present.  This worked for Lost, because both the present day and the flashbacks were compelling, and didn't rush things.  The events in the flashbacks complimented what was happening in the present day, and the two stories would interweave extremely well.  In The Stand it's very jumbled, discordant.  We never spend enough time in either the present day, or the flashbacks to really get a feel for who these people are, where they are, or what's happening around them.  It's just not very well written or edited together.  You can really see the production values in the show, but the writing and editing are so terrible that it doesn't even matter.

This is something that the original miniseries, and especially the book, did very well.  The horror came from how quickly the disease spread, how deadly it was, and how we saw it killing so many people through the eyes of the characters that survived it.  I'd argue that the first third of the book dealing with the plague and the death it caused is far scarier than anything else that takes place later on in the story, and a hell of a lot more important to the characters and the overall story than the makers of this new miniseries are giving it credit for.

After sitting through two episodes of it, I think I'm done.  I don't want to watch any more of this.  The makers of this show have actually made me not want to watch anymore of one of my favorite stories in this world.  It's THAT bad.  I can't even imagine what watching this series must be like to someone who doesn't already know what's going on.  They must be soooooo confused.  I've read reviews of later episodes that have yet to be released to the general public, and it seems that things actually get even MORE confused the deeper into the series you get.  I just don't really care to watch any more than I already have.  This series is a pretty profound object lesson in how to take something great and utterly destroy it.  If the writing was better, things were explained a bit more and the flashback better linked to the present, and if the editing was considerably better, and if the scale and scope of the superflu were better shown to us in the flashback, this series might be watchable.  As it is in its current state, it's a mess that is both boring and confusing.

Cybermeh 2077

 So, Cyberpunk 2077 finally came out.  That was a thing that happened.  Ever since this game was announced you've had people on the internet gushing about how great it's going to be, how it's going to transcend gaming and storytelling.  How it's going to transform the way studios make games going forward.  And blah, blah, blah, blah, BLAH.  And god forbid you happen to say that you didn't really get it, or thought it just looked okay, nothing world changing or anything.  And god help you if you ever uttered one disparaging word about the game or the developer.  These people were worshiping a game that they had never played, and had seen relatively little information about.  How exactly does that happen?

Anyway, I preordered the game like a year an a half ago and completely forgot that I did until it popped up on my PS4 to predowload.  It was a game I was mildly interested in.  I like the Witcher games, so I figured it would at least be a decently put together game, with an interesting story and some memorable character.  I have never been a member of the Cult of Cyberpunk, and, frankly, I never really saw what the big deal was.  I may have watched a trailer or something once, but I don't remember if I did.  I didn't follow news of the game.  I, frankly, didn't really care all that much about it other than it being a new game from a studio that has made games that I liked in the past.  I say these things so that you know I'm being completely unbiased here.  I didn't care enough about the game for my non-existent hype to bias me either way, for or against it.  I'm looking at it purely as someone who randomly picked it up and thought, eh, it'll kill a few hours.

Okay.  First thing.  I played this game on a PS4 pro, which I swapped an SSD into when I bought it.  Not the most powerful console in the universe to be playing this game on, true, but it's got enough oomph to it that it should have played this game without too many framerate issues.  Even still, the game plays like garbage.  The graphics are blurry.  There are problems with NPCs populating slowly so they're just kind of randomly appearing in any area you step into while you're there.  (kind of like a MMO in a hub area)  If there is literally ANY action on the screen AT ALL the framrate drops to about 20 fps.  This is driving.  Walking.  Running.  Action setpieces.  Cutscenes.  Moving the camera during a conversation.  And NPCs walking through the background.  If you're not sitting still and talking to someone who is also sitting still, your framerate is going to drop considerably.  And the more things that are happening on the screen, the worse it gets.  I cannot even imagine trying to get this game to work on a base model PS4, if the pro can barely handle it.

Second, the controls are garbage in this game.  I can't speak for how well the game handles on Xbox or PC, but on PS4 they are complete crap.  Driving is an absolute nightmare.  I literally cannot get behind the wheel without killing several random pedestrians, and destroying huge amounts of property.  So just walk, you say?  Yeah.  I tried that.  The problem is that you are REQUIRED to drive to certain locations, and stop the car exactly on a predetermined marker before the next event in the story will trigger.  The car HAS to hit the mark, or you cannot progress in the story.  You HAVE to drive, even though it's impossible to control.  Aiming is difficult and unresponsive, even after jacking up the sensitivity to the max.  Hit detection is all over the place.  Stealth detection is all over the place.  Combat feels very clunky.  Games of this type will usually have dedicated buttons for swapping out weapons.  This game does not.  They'll usually allow aiming while in cover.  This game does not.  They'll usually allow for fluid shooting from cover and returning to cover.  This game does not.  You have to pause the action to use most abilities, to change weapons, to switch from guns to melee.  It does not handle well, and it's just not very enjoyable to fight the control scheme while trying to play the game.

In addition to running very poorly on PS4, and having absolutely broken controls, the game is full of glitches and bugs that, at times, make it unplayable.  There were about a dozen and a half times when a glitch or bug completely broke the game for me, making it impossible to progress in the story.  I had to reload from my most recent checkpoint, and cross my fingers that it wasn't still glitched.  Sometimes I had to reload more than once to get the game to progress. There are countless graphical glitches, from floating characters, to characters only partially loading in, to characters gliding along instead of walking, textures not loading properly, or at all.  My car once fell through the street and was suddenly inside of a building that I never figured out how to leave and had to reload from the last checkpoint on.  I had a lot of audio glitches as well.  The music either playing really fast or really slow.  Dialog either playing really fast or really slow.  Weird popping crackling sounds when some characters were supposed to be speaking.  I mean, the game was delayed almost a year.  I think I really could have done with another year.  This game is absolutely broken.  I got the digital version of the game, so the day one patch was already included with the download.  In addition to that already included day one patch, I have downloaded nearly 50GB of further patches since release, and NONE of these issues were fixed by them.  

Yeah, but what about the story, you ask.  That was amazing, right?  Yeah, not so much.  In addition to being rather short.  It only took me 25 hours or so to get through.  It's kind of boring.  And generic.  THIS is the amazing, transformative story people have been hyping up for what, 7 or 8 years now?  I'm sorry.  I'm just not feeling it.  Most of the characters are either really boring, or really annoying.  Even the ones that aren't all that bad often overstay their welcome.  I really wanted to like Keanu Reeves, but I just could not.  It's just a very cookie-cutter, unimaginative story set in a world that might be amazing if it wasn't so buggy it was literally falling in on itself. 

But those sidequests though, you could do those for another 300 hours, right?  Three problems with that.  First of all, the game runs so poorly on my PS4 pro that it literally crashes every 10-15 mins beyond recovery.  I got in the habit of manually saving after literally every single action I did.  Talk to that guy. Save.  Drive there.  Save.  Shoot those guys.  Save.  Shoot their friends.  Save.  Shoot the bigger, badder boss-like guy.  Save.  So why would I want to punish myself by attempting to do any side content in this game?  Second.  I did play a few side quests.  And they were not very good.  Like bottom of the barrel, repetitive, MMO fetch quest type things that just weren't very fun, and didn't have interesting stories to go along with them.  And third, I don't actually like sidequests.  Every now and then a game will come along that I love so much that I want to spend every minute I can with these characters and world.  Xenoblade Chronicles 2, for instance.  I literally did EVERYTHING that it was possible to do in that game, because I loved it so much.  Games like that are like once a decade for me.  I do not care about side content.  Give me an amazing main story experience or F off.

So, all in all, the game is an absolute mess.  And even if it ran well and functioned, it has deeper problems with it, like just boring or unlikable characters, and a story that just isn't very good or engaging at all.  I did not like it.  And I would not recommend it to anyone.  

I give Cyberpunk 2077 3/10.  If it functioned and didn't have so many bugs and glitches, I'd probably bump that up to 5/10.  But that is not the world we live in, so 3/10 it is.