Clannad Review ( Part Deux )

So we went over that Clannad, the first season was fairly disappointing. It was filled with tons of filler, half the characters were forgettable, and was a horrible successor to Kanon. So they go ahead and release the second season, something which... if it hadn't come, Clannad would have been a complete catastrophic failure. However, considering this is based on a Dating Simulator, it was clear the story didn't end where Clannad did, so it's clear that Clannad wasn't meant to end when it did, so this is by no means a savior chapter, but just a continuation.

So it starts off Nagisa getting past an illness which eventually makes her lose her chance to pass the 11th grade, and also lose out on being with Tomoya. Tomoya moves out of Nagisa's house and into his own house where they end up living with each other and he gets a job to pay for the place. Honestly, this is a very nice change of pace because it's kind of like showing the growth of a character; learning the new jobs, learning responsibility, watching their relationship grow.... all in exchange for every single side character that we knew. That's right, every single character is pretty much gone: Kyou, Ryou, Tomoyo, Ichinose... Forget you ever knew them cause you got about 2 episodes for them, which further cements what a waste of time their 'arcs' were in Season 1.

*SPOILERS ARE TO BE HAD*
*IF YOU WISH TO WATCH THIS. DO NOT READ*

So within a few episodes we find out that Nagisa and Tomoya are going to be getting married which eventually leads to her being pregnant.

Actually, I'm going to stop right there because this is something that kind of bugged me about this whole love. I always thought that the relationship they had was just going really slow; I never saw them kiss. They always just hung out like friends, she cooked for him. No cuddling, no kissing, no nothing....  And hey, she gets pregnant.

Wait what? They never kissed ONCE in the entire anime and she's pregnant which means they've been fucking. So me as a viewer feels kind of cheated--- afterall these are BASED off of a dating simulator so clearly it's a romance anime yet they leave out the kiss? That's pretty important if you ask me. But moving on.

Yes she's pregnant now. However Nagisa has been going on life with an illness which makes her weak. The illness has no name, no real description, it just shows up randomly, makes her sick, and... makes life suck. No doctor can cure it, no one knows what it is and... yup. It sucks.

Oh and another thing about these kinds of sicknesses in media? They kill. Yes, Nagisa dies during child birth and you can imagine how sad this is. You see, I came into this anime knowing it's sad and that it was much worse than Clannad. And knowing this, I figured this would happen and it's pretty deep. I definitely am already more interested in this season 10 times than the first season. In my opinion, compared to this... it failed catastrophically.  So Nagisa dies giving birth to their child Ushio, which promptly flashforwards 5 years.

Tomoya is in a deep depression and Nagisa's parents are raising Ushio while he pretty much suffers in deep depression. He works long hours, drinks and is slowly becoming his own father. Something that I kind of never mentioned. There's this thing about Tomoya and his father... he hates him and it's kind of hard to understand why. He kinda just tells him to shut up, yells at him, and is just a huge asshole to him even though his father just acts like a nice man... I never saw it.  But anyways, he's becoming his father and eventually the parents plan a vacation which is actually just them tricking Tomoya into watching her for a week and bonding with her which is planned beautifully.


*END SPOILERS*

I wont go into anymore detail but this season definitely saved the entire anime and it's just a shame that you have to sit through 24 episodes of absolute shit just to enjoy this and it ends really fucking sad too. However Clannad suffers from Japanese Ending Syndrome* where every anime ends like shit because apparently Japanese have no idea how to end an anime.... but that's always something to get over.




* I coined this term because seriously, every Anime ends like shit.

Capcom

Oh Capcom. You people are adorable in how you just keep trying. You try and try and try again, and for some reason people keep flocking back to you. It's kind of interesting if you ask me...  that people will continue to bash you, boycott you, rant about you.... and then you release another Street Fighter add-on that outsells the previous Street Fighter add-on. You KNOW this happens, you KNOW it pisses us off, yet you clearly do not care. It kind of puts a unique perspective on things because for so long were we under this impression that the consumer is your biggest concern*, like when we walk into Walmart, Target, Costco... and you want to return something that's outside the return date, you KNOW that if you complain hard enough, they will still take that return BECAUSE they want you to be happy so you'll continue to shop for them. We assume that a game developer will be the same way; we are the ones buying your game.


Not Capcom though. Capcom takes it a step forward, they deliberately do things in bad business just to make money. Of course they're TRYING to make money, I'm not saying they aren't. Afterall, Capcom is a business first and a..... friend... next? However all of this is pretty common sense now. This is all pretty much common knowledge that any person who knows something will tell you...  So where exactly am I going with this?

Well recently there was a survey for the worst Company in the world and I would like to put out there that, I believe the real candidate for this would either have to be: Capcom or Square Enix. Well, I suppose if this was just in the gaming world, I mean. And I'll get into Square Enix another time... this is devoted to Capcom. And I don't want this to be just a big long rant about how much I hate Capcom; I actually don't hate them... I just want to humor myself with how low this company has become.

Devil May Cry pretty much is a series I never really got into. The first game was kind of a big thing with how awesome the combat was, how cool Dante was, and how stylish everything was. It was a very unique game and it was a big thing. Capcom did something right for something that originally was nothing more than just a mistake considering it began was Resident Evil 4. And to me this game remains a classic and easily the best in the series. But one thing you need to understand about Devil May Cry is it's an arcade like fighter; it's story is paper thin, it's development is next-to-nothing, and it's pretty much just a show-off game. It has nothing to offer in terms of story... hell, if we were to take Devil May Cry 3 with the Vergil relationship to Dante, and then move onto Devil May Cry 1, you'd think the hidden potentional there for something real was completely missed as Neo Angelo** ( I think that was his name ) is just a mutated Vergil and you fight him like he's just some random enemy. There could have been something much bigger here.

But besides all that, they of course had to continue the story on.... so they made DMC2, 3 and eventually 4.

What I find funny about these games are just how.... poor the focus is. The second game literally shat all over everything the first had, so they decided on a prequel. Which is funny because to have a prequel just means that Capcom is fully aware that DMC had no where to go, so let's give him a deep backstory! And yeah... it kind of worked, but it was still not enough to make him interesting.... so they decided to give the game a new lead: Nero.

Now my point with this game actually has two sides: Capcom did a very good idea and at the same time did not. Letting Ninja Theory take care of their series pretty much gave Dante a fresh new start, giving him an actual personality and character to develop as right now he was just a cardboard cut-out. To start these new games with the same Dante would draw confusion thinking it's the same reality; it wouldn't work. However the fan reaction has been across the board negative. Even the original Devil May Cry producer hated the idea. And yet... Capcom doesn't care, they continue on. But this is small if you ask me.

Can anyone tell me if this series still exists? I mean really, I can see why people think they're trying to kill off Megaman because.... so far all he's done lately is get cancelled and appear in other games ( even as a mockery ). Just the way Capcom is handling this guy amazes me. I UNDERSTAND that the idea of MML3 on the 3DS is absolutely stupid; the handheld pretty much bombed and there's little potential to make their money back but clearly there IS demand for this game. I honestly do think the 100k petition was stupid since it was a Facebook petition, however it filled pretty quickly and still grows and I've heard plenty of people who wanted this game to come... Capcom there are other methods out there for your game.

But you don't care.

Street Fighter is pretty much what makes Capcom tick however. Within the last 5 years Capcom has made SF4 and Super SF4, SFxT, MvC3, UMvC3. And whats funny with all these games are they all do exactly what pisses us off: DLC on the disc, paid extra characters, and rerelease of the same exact game you purchased 60 dollars for with a few extra add-ons rendering your purchase completely inane. To me as a player, I am scared to purchase a fighter of theirs.... I was pretty big into MvC3 and now it's useless to me because no one is online because of UMvC3. SF4? Probably empty. Does Capcom care? Nah, because us fans just buy the next game... and with EVO out there with SF and MvC being the biggest things there, of course we're going to keep buying them. It's been around for so long, that it's imbedded into us and the community. And what gets me is... CAPCOM KNOWS THIS.
























I guess if I had to tl;dr this entire thing it would be:


Capcom knows you want their games. Capcom knows they can abuse you and your wallet. Capcom doesn't care else they would address this.... But they are still doing exactly what we hate.


*You know, cause without them they kinda wouldn't exist.

** Pardon me if I am inaccurate with this... it's been a long time.

Why Star Ocean 2 is the Best RPG Ever

So I'm just going to do you all a favor. I'm going to post a link to Amazon where you can purchase this game. If at the end of this review you haven't already purchased the game, you are a disgrace to the RPG community and to the human race; yes it is that serious.


Star Ocean: The Second Story ( PS1 )

Star Ocean: Second Evolution ( PSP )

There you go, I did all the dirty work for you. I solved the "But Romalia! This game is out of print, how am I suppose to play this! Well, you have two options: PSP which is like 10 dollars and PS1 which is like 20. So expense, availability, and access are already out of the question as excuses for purchasing this game. Now, unless you're one of those people who like... get welfare and you get JUST enough money to feed your 6 kids, you can stop here ( but honestly, I'd just starve one of those kids because this is a fun game ).


Anyways! Star Ocean 2. It's the sequel to the Enix game Star Ocean on the SNES which was never released in America. It follows the son of the characters: Claude who, well.... stubbornly decided to check out this anomaly on a planet which everyone kept screaming "Don't fucking go!", but he did anyways and it got him transported to this planet which he immediately meets your second main character: Rena. Rena happens to be the strange young magical girl of unknown origins.

Lemme just say, the worst part about this game is the first 30 minutes of it. Claude is an idiot, Rena is a cliche, and it's nothing but talk-talk-talk. So what I do is save RIGHT after leaving this area because it's pretty much where the fun begins. It suffers from, what I like to call, "Slow RPG Intro syndrome" where the first 30 minutes.... is just nothing but "OH MY GOD... JUST GET TO THE FUCKING POINT".

So skipping this, you start off.. and right away you notice something: The world music is fucking amazing. No seriously, this is easily the best world music I've ever heard of in any game. Listen for yourself:

The entire sound piece is one full piece of music. It doesn't repeat. And the more it goes on, the more epic it sounds. It's completely orchestrated... something I don't think I've ever seen in quality in any RPG. It's truly remarkable the amount of effort and quality that goes into this one song... Well, there's ALSO the 2nd world map music as well, which.... not as good, but still just as good in terms of effort.

So the battle system is pretty simple. It's an Action RPG which you hit X to attack, L1&2/R1&2 for skills. You choose any person in a team of four to control and everyone controls differently in terms of skills and attack patterns, and trust me.... One of the most fun aspects of this game is trying out different characters. What I love most about this battle system is it's not TRYING to be complicated, it's literally just mashing X and watching your character just destroy everything. Later in the game, you could equip Bunny shoes to run 5 times faster and just do laps around the enemies... It's so fun.


Now I mentioned 'trying out different characters' because this game is unique in that each time you play you can get different characters. For starters, I ALSO said "two main characters", because you can either have Claude as the main character or Rena. Both stories play out relatively the same, a handful of cutscenes are different... but who you choose decides on what characters will join you later on: Rena gets you Dias the swordsman and Claude gets you Leon the magician. But aside from that you also do private actions which can get you Ashton or Opera, assuming you do them in the right order, or if you visit a town early enough you'll get Precis instead of Bowman. And if you get Opera, you can get her boyfriend Ernest*. But each time you play, you have so many different methods of obtaining different characters that it's a different experience each time you play!

Skills make a HUGE part of the game. They alter how your character grows, like for example in the picture above 'Functionality' raises your STR, DEX, AGL, and INT for 20 levels, and below those you gain Combat Skills which affect the way your character behaves in combat: Feinting, Parrying, Casting faster, Cancelling attacks, Hitting weak spots for more damage. Each time you level up you gain Skill points which can go to any of these ( 40ish ) skills, and how you decide to accumulate will decide how your character grows. And IF you know what you're doing, you can break the game and DESTROY your enemies with these skills.

Something else skills give you: Item Creation commands. And these things are what make the game fun: Art, Customize, Metalwork, Compounding, Alchemy, Survival, Machinery, etc. They ALL help you if you use them correctly and once again, can help break the game. For example, before you're even 20% done with the game, you can make a weapon with about 1099 attack ( you can buy a weapon with about 150 ), which will pretty much one-shot every enemy and some bosses til near the end of the game. And this is how you get your weapons ( and best weapons ) for all your characters... from Minerals which you VERY easily ( for the most part ) obtain.


Leveling in this game so fun. You have 255 levels and by the time you beat the game, you'll be around level 120, which opens up a bonus dungeon with enemies MUCH harder than you've ever fought before. Each level in the bonus dungeon has higher level of difficulty much higher than the last one and as you progress, you start to grow levels much and much quicker while also obtaining godlke armor to pimp your characters out with. Each time you finish a level in this, you truly feel like you've accomplished something since each level contains a puzzle and challenge to get through them. I would say this is probably half of the games entertainment right here.

Now you might be saying... "Wow, so far you've said nothing but how easy this game is to break. Where's the challenge?", which is fair... this game is veeeery easily broken**, however with a simple private action, you can make the final boss harder than the boss of the bonus dungeon BY FAR, and even your best armors and weapons will still be a huge challenge.



Now if at this point you haven't already ordered the game. I apologize for your tastes being so awful, because what I just described to you was the best RPG. And what's funny was, I didn't even MENTION the story***, because honestly, when an RPG is already this fun without mention of a story, you're in for a ride and it's definitely something that I believe no one should ever pass up. I stumbled on this game by complete accident, it was purchased on a whim and I was completely hooked from Day 1.

The game was re-released on PSP. The translations are better****, the combat was changed a bit, voice overs were added, and a character was added. Honestly, I think the original was better, but I still enjoyed the PSP port. So do yourself a favor and help yourself to either one of them; you will thank me.


* Though I only got him once. I honestly think he's useless.

** IF you know what you're doing. If you DON'T know what you're doing, then you will very easily miss a lot and the game will be very challenging.

*** The Story actually kind of sucks... Haha

**** The Translations might be better but half of them felt completely needless and unnecessary.

Gurren Lagann Review

So like usual, this review will have spoilers. If you don't like spoilers, then quit reading reviews. Because it's kind of stupid to read someones opinion of an anime without going into detail of why they like it or don't like it. But that is neither here nor there. Let's jump right into this!

So Gurren Lagann. I've heard a lot about this and like usual, I ignored it BECAUSE people wouldn't shut up about it. It's kind of strange how the natural reaction to popularity is to go the other direction, it does this with music, video games, movies, tv shows... With enough popularity, it's no surprise people hate Obama!*, however work has been extremely boring and during my down time, I am able to pull up some Youtube and I decided, rather than search for something, I'll just watch this. And so I did... and I have to say, I can see why people enjoy this show.

The story centers about two people:

Kamina

This guy is easily what makes the anime interesting. He is the guy you want to be. He leads Team Gurren and managed to help break out of the underground caves with his little brother and in doing so hi-jacked an enemy mecha so he can fight back. Kamina pretty much embodies hope, bravery, and dreams. And by embody, I mean these three words describe him perfectly. That's all he does is dream, hope, and achieves these with his bravery. His entire philosophy is 'if there's a small chance of it happening, i'll make it happen' and despite all odds of failure, he will always succeed. He never runs from a fight, he never backs down a challenge, and he refuses to ever admit defeat. And of course, he has his catch phrases of "Just who the hell do you think I am?" and a few others... Now with all this said, you'd ASSUME with a character like this, there's no WAY there's any bad in this anime.

I'm going to say this once more. SPOILERS. <spoiler>

Well, he kinda dies 1/3 of the way through the anime. Something that... to me... ruined pretty much all motivation of continuing considering he pretty much held the entire show together

</spoiler>

Simon

Pronounced 'Sih'mohn', this is Kamina's younger brother. And my god is he just one big trope for half the anime. He's the "I don't have the courage" trope. He spends literally half the anime doubting himself, worrying, whining, and just plain getting in the way. It's because of Kamina's long morale boosting speeches does Simon ever do anything, and right after he'll just revert back to the way he was; just getting in the way. To sum him up in the first half, it would be "Big bro. I'm scared!", if it weren't for Kamina's incredible charisma. This kid, by himself, would make me turn the anime off. He was just that annoying.

<spoiler>

So after Kamina dies, Simon takes over as the lead of Team Gurren and also the main character of the anime. So, OF COURSE, he has to drop this entire whiny attitude, cause even the writers are aware that we're annoyed of this shit. So what do they do? Give us 4 more episodes of even whinier and more self-loathing shit where he wallows in self pity over Kamina's death. And FINALLY gets over it, with like... little reason other than just "Yea, ok, I'm over it."**

</spoiler>

7 years later, he's now Kamina's age. Which pretty much takes all those tropes we just had to deal with and throw them out the window thankfully, and he eventually grows into an interesting character! Truthfully, he almost feels like a completely new character the way he COMPLETELY reverted his entire personality after this. And let's just say, it's very nice to see this.... 

There are two others who the story centers around: Nia and Yoko. But to give an analysis on these two would just be silly because they're such underdeveloped characters that you really would be wasting your time. Honestly, you could just look at a picture of the two and know exactly what and who they are: 

Yoko wears extremely revealing clothes and wields a huge gun. Her personality is pretty shallow and that's about it.

Nia is the sweetest person in the world and everyone loves her. She isn't knowledgeable, but this doesn't stop her from trying. And she has long hair....

To be fair, I liked Nia. She just came out of no where and kind of helped Simon grow as a character, and without her.... I feel Simon would have been completely empty and pointless to the anime. But Nia's character is just so underdeveloped that I have a hard time growing attached to her outside of just sympathy. And that's pretty disappointing considering I DO like her a lot.

< SPOILERS >

To sum up Gurren Lagann, it's pretty much just that story you had with your friend when you were 13 years old, playing with your action figures. You kept trying to make everything more interesting by one-upping everything your friend did. The entire story is just that, "You know what would be awesome is if the characters were like... these underground people and like.... they busted out!"

"Yeah! And then these people in big machines attack them. And they STEAL it from them! Like, almost effortlessly!"

"Oh my god, yeah. And then they combine these machines and become even stronger!"

"And then we take over an even BIGGER machine and it becomes their base!"

"AND THEN THE MOON IS ABOUT TO CRASH INTO THE PLANET AND THEY USE THOSE MACHINES TO STOP IT"

"Yeah and they stop the galaxy from invading with even BIGGER machines"

"YEAH AND THEN THEY BECOME AS BIG AS THE GALAXY AND FIGHT AGAINST THE OTHER MECHA AS BIG AS THE GALAXY AND THROW GALAXIES AT EACH OTHER"

< /SPOILER >

Gurren Lagann is pretty much an anime where ANYTHING can happen for almost no reason. It happens because it's really cool and we like cool. Like, mechas combining in ways that make no sense and healing themselves, mechas powering just from motivation, mechas growing in power just because you just happen to be more confident in yourself, growing technologically more advanced within mere days of just crawling out of the ground, etc. And this is pretty much why the reason the anime works. It WANTS to be a cliche. It WANTS to yell out these awesome names of Attacking Moves that are completely silly, but gets the job done.

This entire anime sounds like something a child thought up, and after episode 17, you start to notice that the tone of the anime grows too loud and it starts to go from Hope to Absurd and it goes downhill. I guess your suspense of disbelief stops ignoring the flaws and starts saying "Okay seriously, this is just going too far" and I have to say.... the ending of it all was just... terrible. And for an anime that honestly goes out of its way to be cliche, I'm not surprised.

All-in-all, I liked it  but I definitely wouldn't rewatch it. If you happen to have the time, nothing to watch, and feel like wasting some time, I'd definitely put it on. It's pretty fun.