God help me but I’ve started playing Skyrim.
I got 100% achievements after 400 hours played on Oblivion, though, so I think I’ve got the completist experience already covered as far as the Elder Scrolls series goes. I don’t really need to be the top baker, hooker, and air conditioner repairman in all the land (along with my day job of adventurer).
Things I will avoid: alchemy, blacksmithing, fugly people. This should cut down on the number of quests I’ll need to do. Here’s hoping.
A Little Sister’s All You Need reminds me a fair bit of Oreimo (a.k.a. My Little Sister Can’t Be This Cute) in that watching it reveals unexpected depths that are not captured by a mere plot synopsis or trailer. The bare facts are as follows: this comedy tells the story of a 20 year old light novel writer with a strong and irrational sexual fetish for little sister characters. He – thank god – does not have a little sister, but a teenage step-brother, a very small handful of friends, and an editor who rides his ass about meeting his deadlines.
Unlike Oreimo, the show does not even offer an incoherent defense of the protagonist’s turn-on. Every single character tells him that his fetish is disgusting. Despite that, they still associate with him anyway. I suppose he’s decent enough when he’s not loudly bemoaning not having a little sister to have sex with, plus of his three friends, one is a fellow light novelist who’s envious of his talent, another is also a light novelist with the same publisher who is an extreme fan of his work (enough that she’s very frank about wanting to sleep with him), and the last is a former university classmate who probably has a buried thing for him from days gone by. Which is to say that there are plausible reasons for this group of people to be hanging out and this setting is not an aggressively stupid harem anime setup.
Anyway, it’s hard to articulate what this show is and even harder to say what about it appeals to me. I had assumed it was just the latest nadir the anime industry had sunk to (a show about a guy who writes creepy stories about having incestuous sex with younger sisters), but there’s something there beyond the occasional chuckle the show gets out of me. There’s an undercurrent of unrequited longing – not necessarily sexual – that runs through the relationships between this circle of friends. Each of them wants something that they can’t have, and I’m hopeful that the show can continue playing out the trial of Tantalus in the context of Japanese twentysomethings going through life feeling that there’s just one thing missing and everything would be better if they just had what was lacking.
This is what I hope the show will be about, but I don’t actually know if that’s what the show will be focusing on as there were only two episodes up when I watched last night. In fact, I’m still not even sure what the show’s really about. What does it want to say, beyond that it wants to show what happens in the lives of this group of people? I have no idea.
So this is not a ringing endorsement of the show, but a qualified FYI. I think there could be something there and I hope I’ll be proven right.
I just got the Legend of Korra video game. Turns out it’s pretty short and I’m almost at the end. It’s sadly another so-so video game tie-in product. What’s frustrating is that I can clearly see the game it could be if enough time and money had been put in.
The story starts two weeks after the series finale with Korra fighting a new bad guy from the Spirit World, but that plot is basically just an excuse to have Korra fight the gangsters and Equalists that she did in the TV show. You visit Republic City, Air Temple Island, the South Pole, and the Spirit World, but they’re all just environments for fighting in. There’s a separate pro-bending mode that you can unlock, but it’s more frustrating than fun to play.
Basically, the twin spirits of cheapness and half-assedness hang over the whole production. Everywhere I turn I’m confronted by the fact that this isn’t actually the world from the show, but a backdrop where I can sort of pretend I’m playing the Avatar. The streets are empty except for people trying to beat you up, and invisible walls prevent you from going anywhere except where the designer wants you. Just to drive home how lazy the design is, you actually break pots to recharge your chi – a cliche of game mechanics so old that if it were human it would already have kids old enough to talk.
However, it’s not like the game is actively awful, just rather disappointing when considering it against what a video game of this property could have been. The actual voice actors from the show are playing their characters and there are even original cartoon cut scenes (though not from the same animation studio used by the cartoon). The bending is kind of neat in the beginning and it’s actually rather fun the first time you have to fight simultaneously against three different types of benders.
There are enough hints of a better game scattered throughout this one that fans of the show will find themselves asking “what if”. What if this game had gotten a proper release? What if it had been an open world or semi-open world RPG like Dragon’s Dogma where you walk the busy streets of Republic City and talk to characters from the show and do Avatar quests to increase harmony and fight bad guys and jump from roof to roof laughing with glee at the powers you command? What if you had gotten all that? Because that would have been great.