antibrainrotcrusader

[antibrainrotcrusader]

Essay: Connecting Zootopia, Up, Little Prince, Rise of The Guardians

Children’s animated movies have many similarities, the biggest one being the theme of dreams and following your dreams. It is a theme that does not only inspire children, but it also moves adults and often makes them cry. One of the movies that explore the theme of dreams is “The Little Prince”. It’s an animated movie directed by Mark Osborne, based on the best-selling French novel by Antoine De Saint. Other movies include “Rise Of The Guardians”, which is directed by Peter Ramsey; “Zootopia”, directed by Rich Moore;  and the classic movie that everyone loves: “Up”, directed by Pete Docter. 

The Little Prince starts with the narrator telling the audience about an event from his childhood. He explains how the adults didn’t understand the drawing he made, which was of a Boa constrictor that just ate an elephant. Unfortunately, the adults mistook the snake for a hat, so the narrator explained that it is not a hat, but rather a boa constrictor that ate an elephant. The adults’ reactions were negative, and they told the narrator to grow up. This shows how society always crushes the images in a dreamer’s head, steering them towards the dull and boring adult life that is nearly void from imagination and dreams. The Little Prince, like all other children’s movies, refers to mature themes subtly. One mature theme that backs up the theme of Dreams, would be manipulation or deceive. As the Little Prince’s companion, Fox, has said: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.” and “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” The Fox means to teach the audience as well as other characters to keep their hearts and minds open because the eye is deceiving. Later the director gives us an example of what the Fox has said in action, as the Little Prince has stopped listening to his heart and been deceived by many ideas drilled into his mind by the adults. That shows the audience how easily a person can lose sense of his or her purpose when they let people crush their dreams. 

Rise Of The Guardians introduces the idea of fear before all else, drilling into the audience’s mind how manipulative it can be. Jack Frost, like the Little Prince, has lost sense of his purpose. But unlike the Little Prince, he lost sense of his purpose because of the fear that no one will see him and he will be forgotten. He lost sense of his purpose because he is afraid his dream (which is to be believed in and seen by children) will never come true. When the children of the world stop believing in the rest of the guardians, Jack begins to see that even the most powerful and most famous people can and will be forgotten at some point, but it’s up to them for how long they’ll be remembered. That puts Jack Frost’s fear at ease, and he starts to seek out his true purpose that made him a guardian in the first place. He teams up with the children who slowly begin to believe again, so as to defeat Pitch Black. In the end, Jack discovers that his very existence is because of everything the children believe in, as Santa (called North, in the movie) says: “...Watch over the children of the world, to guard them with your life, their hopes their wishes and their dreams, for they are all that we have, all that we are, and all we will ever be.” That sentence means to explain to the audience about how the children’s wishes hopes and dreams make up the Guardians’ existence; which, in a sense, means that the children’s dreams are protecting them. 

In Zootopia, the whole plot of the movie revolves around dreams and dreaming. At the beginning of the movie, Judy Hopps is shown as a little bunny that dreams to be nothing more than a police officer who will make the world a better place, but her dream gets turned down not only by all of the society but also by her very cautious parents. They try to put Judy off her dream in a very gentle but absurd way, trying to tell her how she gains ultimate happiness: “We gave up on our dreams, and we settled.” Mr Hopps says, and Mrs Hopps agrees. “It’s great to have dreams, as long as you don’t believe in them too much,” she says. Of course, Judy only shrugs off her parents’ words, not taking them seriously as they are afraid of lots of things. A couple years later, Judy achieves her dream and goes on to find out that - surprise- “Zootopia, where anyone can be anything!” is a statement far from true. Her boss gives her parking duty while he gives all the other officers important missions. Judy protests only to be turned down, until after a series of highly unlikely but very lucky events happen to Judy’s advantage, and she is given a mission by one condition: she is to resign if she doesn’t succeed in solving it after forty-eight hours. Judy accepts the condition and finds herself an exceptionally smart (but lawfully deceitful) companion who helps her. As the forty-eight hours get closer to ending, she gets visibly stressed and desperate because of the fear of losing her dream job. Judy slowly loses sight of her true purpose because of that fear, like the Little Prince and Jack Frost. Even after her mission ends and she gets to keep her job, she doesn’t recall why she joined the police force in the first place. She makes a foolish mistake which sparks fear and anger all around Zootopia, and it costs her her new friendship. She decides to give up on her dream for the better good, as it had caused chaos. Then as Judy starts to “settle” as her parents had advised her from the start, she makes a discovery that changes the way she has seen things after fear took over, and she recovers her light-hearted spirit and decides to follow her dreams once again. This teaches the audience that mistakes can be made, and even if they cannot be fixed, they can be forgiven. This also teaches the audience that even when they feel like giving up on their dreams, they will find a way to continue and make it happen.

Up begins with showing the life of a young Carl Fredricksen, how he idolizes the adventurer Charles F Muntz and how he aspires to be an adventurer like him. Carl finds a girl his age, who also admires Charles F Muntz, and the two form an adorable friendship that leads to their marriage later on. The director shows how the two dreamed of going on adventures, specifically in Paradise falls, and how they slowly forgot about that dream as they aged. That is to show how, in real life, most adults forget their dreams as time goes by. After Carl’s wife dies, he feels guilty for not making the dream of going on an adventure in Paradise falls happen, so he decides to do just that. He gives up many things along the way for the sake of this long-dead dream, and at one point he was even ready to sacrifice his life. The moment before Carl realizes his mistake for dwelling in the past, Russel tells him in a voice that shows his vulnerability: “You gave away Kevin, you just gave her away.” That is to show how childhood dreams affect people throughout their lives and even up until adulthood, and it can even make them sacrifice things or lose them unwillingly, which is why dreams shouldn’t be taken so lightly. After taking an emotional journey in the past through a scrapbook his deceased wife has made long ago, he realizes that his wife was happy until the very end, and she wouldn’t want him to sacrifice everything for her dream. Carl then decides to give up on the childhood dream he had hung onto for so long, as Judy did in Zootopia, for the greater good. He instead goes on to save Russel and Kevin.

The Little Prince, Rise Of The Guardians, Zootopia, and Up connect to one another even as they are separate movies with separate ideas. In the end, children’s movies have many things in common, and they teach the audience many things, like following their dreams and not taking others’ dreams so lightly. And they even teach the audience some things that are beyond young children’s understanding, like being controlled by fear, or losing sight of one’s identity and purpose in life, and even sometimes… death, and the loss of loved ones.

[antibrainrotcrusader]

Review of: Who Can Define Popularity? by 탁본

I did my best to make this review as spoiler-free as possible, even though the story's strongest points are unrelated to its predictability.

I did not expect much from "Who Can Define Popularity". Initially, I thought the story concept seemed a bit cheesy. Overweight guy transforms himself and his life, and a chance encounter makes a handsome guy obsessed with him! And then what? They play a game of push and pull until they finally get together, then the main character's dark past gets exposed and their relationship goes into jeopardy! Oh no! Yeah... no. I hope this doesn't count as a spoiler, but that is not what happens at all.

The male leads are incredibly narcissistic. They're both really beautiful and aware of it which is okay, but for the first duration where the author was still introducing characters... they were so full of themselves it was comedic. I thought that the rest of the story would be very shallow, since the character felt about as deep as a pancake. Flat. I ended up briefly dropping the story and rating it 3/10, until I reflected a bit on why I thought the story was so bad... then decided to give it another chance. I am very glad I decided to give this beautiful story another chance.

First of all, the characters are not very unique, but that is not a negative point. It is the character relationships which are what make the story special. As the story progresses, the relationships unfold very beautifully, with characters building each other up and growing together because of the relationships they build. Even side characters were made to learn from each other. It felt refreshing to read a story with average people (even if their looks or wealth aren't average) which had no tragedy or drama, rather it was an entertaining story about young adults growing as people. The characters get a 6/10 from me, but the character interactions are 9/10.

The art-style was very fitting for the story. It was both beautiful and cute. It was funny, heartwarming (and melting and breaking), and entertaining. It also was quite different from the usual art-style in this genre which I appreciated, but it might not suit everyone's tastes. Regardless, I give it a 10/10.

The plot was good, but I struggle to find anything about it that would make me want to recommend others to read it. The pacing of the story was really nice. At first I read 10 chapters thinking they were less (and that's when I dropped it because I thought the characters and story were too shallow to go on), and when I picked it up again, I read 60 more and finished the story before realising it. My only complaint is that I wanted to read more before the story was concluded, but the ending was satisfying, so this is not a point of criticism. The story itself gets a 7/10 from me.

I started reading this expecting a romance, but reading it felt more like reading a comedy and slice of life with some romance. The romance was a significant part of the story, and there is definitely more than enough of it for the story to be a romance, but, building the romance was not the only focus of the story. I loved that.

[antibrainrotcrusader]

So, uh, Netflix Avatar, huh? Yeah. I guess I'll make a really long post about it because ATLA brainrot has is a cornerstone of my personality at this point.

So.

It's okay. B, maybe a C+.

That's it.

Now for the spoilers:

The biggest issue with the Netflix version is the pacing. Scenes come out of nowhere and many of the episodes are disjointed. Example: Aang escaping from Zuko's ship. We see him getting the key and going "aha!", and in the next scene he's in Zuko's room. And then he just runs out, no fun acrobatics or fights, and immediately they go to the Southern Air Temple where he sees Gyatso's corpse, goes into the Avatar state, and then sees Gyatso being really cheesy, comes out of it, and resolves that conflict. Nothing seems to lead into anything. The characters don't get to breathe.

The show's worst mistake (aside from Iroh fucking murdering Zhao) is its' first one: they start in the past. Instead of immediately introducing us to our main characters and dropping us into a world where we have a perfect dynamic where Aang doesn't know the current state of the world and Katara and Sokka don't know about the past, thus allowing for seamless and organic worldbuilding and exposition, they just... tell us. "Hey, this is what happened, ok, time for Aang!" There's no mystery, no intrigue, just a stream of information being shoved down the audience's throats and then onto the next set piece.

The visuals are for the most part great, but like with most Netflix productions, they just don't have great art direction. It feels like a video game cinematic, where everything is meant to be Maximum Cool - and none of the environments get to breathe. It's like they have tight indoor sets (with some great set design) and then they have a bunch of trailer shots. It's oozing with a kind of very superficial love.

Netflix still doesn't know how to do lighting, and with how disjointed the scenes are, the locations end up feeling like a parade of sets rather than actual cities or forests or temples. As for the costumes, Netflix still doesn't know how to do costumes that look like they're meant to be actually worn, so many of the characters seem weirdly uncomfortable, like they're afraid of creasing their pristine costumes.

The acting is decent to good, for the most part. I can't tell if the weaker moments come down to the actors or the direction and editing, but if I had to guess, I'd say the latter. Iroh and Katara are the weakest, Sokka is the most consistent, Zuko hits the mark most of the time, and Aang is okay. I liked Suki (though... she was weirdly horny? Like?) but Yue just fell kind of flat.

The tight fight choreography of the original is replaced with a bunch of spinny moves and Marvel fighting, though there are some moments of good choreography, like the Agni Kai between Ozai and Zuko (there's a million things I could say about how bad it was thematically, but this post is overly long already.) There's an actually hilarious moment in the first episode when Zuko is shooting down Aang, and he does jazz hands to charge up his attack.

Then there's the characters. Everybody feels very static - Zuko especially gets to have very little agency. A great example of that is the scene in which Iroh tells Lieutenant Jee the story of Zuko's scar.

In the original, it's a very intimate affair, and he doesn't lead the crew into any conclusions. Here, Iroh straight up tells the crew "you are the 41st, he saved your lives" and then the crew shows Zuko some love. A nice moment, but it feels unearned, when contrasted with the perfection of The Storm. In The Storm, Zuko's words and actions directly contradict each other, and Iroh's story gives the crew (and the audience) context as to why, which makes Zuko a compelling character. We get to piece it out along with them. Here - Iroh just flat out says it. He just says it, multiple times, to hammer in the point that hey, Zuko is Good Actually.

And then there's Iroh. You remember the kindly but powerful man who you can see gently nudging Zuko to his own conclusions? No, he's a pretty insecure dude who just tells Zuko that his daddy doesn't love him a lot and then he kills Zhao. Yeah. Iroh just plain kills Zhao dead. Why?

Iroh's characterization also makes Zuko come off as dumb - not just clueless and deluded, no, actually stupid. He constantly gets told that Iroh loves him and his dad doesn't, and he doesn't have any good answers for that, so he just... keeps on keeping on, I guess? This version of Zuko isn't conflicted and willfully ignorant like the OG, he's just... kind of stupid. He's not very compelling.

In the original, Zuko is well aware of Azula's status as the golden child. It motivates him - he twists it around to mean that he, through constant struggle, can become even stronger than her, than anyone. Here, Zhao tells him that "no, ur dad likes her better tee hee" and it's presented as some kind of a revelation. And then Iroh kills Zhao. I'm sorry I keep bringing that up, but it's just such an unforgiveable thematic fuckup that I have to. In the original, Zhao falls victim to his hubris, and Zuko gets to demonstrate his underlying compassion and nobility when he offers his hand to Zhao. Then we get some ambiguity in Zhao: does he refuse Zuko's hand because of his pride, or is it his final honorable action to not drag Zuko down with him? A mix of both? It's a great ending to his character. Here, he tries to backstab Zuko and then Iroh, who just sort of stood off to the side for five minutes, goes "oh well, it's murderin' time :)"

They mess with the worldbuilding in ways that didn't really need to be messed with. The Ice Moon "brings the spirit world and the mortal world closer together"? Give me a break. That's something you made up, as opposed to the millenia of cultural relevance that the Solstice has. That's bad, guys. You replaced something real with something you just hastily made up. There's a lot of that. We DID NOT need any backstory for Koh, for one. And Katara and Sokka certainly didn't need to be captured by Koh. I could go on and on, but again, this post is already way too long.

It's, um, very disappointing. A lot of telling and not very much showing, and I feel like all of the characters just... sort of end up in the same place they started out in. I feel like we don't see any of the characters grow: they're just told over and over again how they need to grow and what they need to do.

To sum it up: Netflix Avatar is a mile wide, but an inch deep.

[antibrainrotcrusader]

Review of: Akudama Drive

Going into Akudama Drive, I did not know much about it other than: 1) It's set in a dystopian society 2) The art is killer 3) A lot of people I know love it So my expectations weren't very high. I went in for the pretty art and animation, and stayed for the pretty art and animation. And Swindler. And the creepy rabbit and shark TV brainwashing program. That's pretty much it.

First, I'll list everything I loved about the show. I found the animation to be super consistent. It never disappointed me, and that's why if I rated my anime based on the art purely, I'd be giving Akudama Drive a 10/10 without hesitation. I also loved the soundtrack, they certainly felt unique enough that I did not dare skip the opening song, and stayed until after the ending song multiple times. It's an interesting pairing with the anime itself. Had this been a slice-of-life, the pairing would make a lot more sense. I loved it this way though, it made it feel like the anime wanted it known that this story doesn't want to be "just action" or "just cool". The music gets a 7/10 from me.

I also loved how our main character is a girl in her 20's. She's an ordinary person, with no tragic past, and no specific character traits that would mark her for the danger she gets thrown into later on (other than her honesty and kindness). It was incredibly refreshing to see in anime. She was not sexualised, but she also wasn't bland in terms of her character design. I enjoyed the moments Swindler was on screen. It worked perfectly for (what I felt like) the anime was trying to tell it's viewers: anyone can fall into the "wrong" path easily. Allowing people to judge those that fall into darkness with such absolutism will probably ruin a society. Example from the show? The executioners.

Oh the executioners. The way I feel about them is very mixed. They were shown as typical "heroes" for the first few times they appeared on screen. And then that seemed to shift to them... being evil? I did not like it. It could've been done a LOT better. I think the producers themselves might have also had mixed feelings. There is a clear shift in tone where the show changes it's direction and goes off the rails. In the first half, the executioners were developed a bit more, and one of them (the young apprentice) seemed to have more growth waiting for her at the second half of the show. But, of course, there wasn't. And so we lost sense of who the executioners are and what they are. The anime just wanted them to be branded as the "bad people" and it was left at that.

The Kanto plot was also a bit of a disappointment for me. Surely the technologically advanced city of the future that literally does not care or need physical existence anymore can do better than... putting an entire virtual city inside the bodies of children....? Right? It felt extremely far-fetched. As Hacker said (SPOILER ALERT):

"What a crazy twist, right? A world inside a supercomputer... who would've thought Kanto would be some overused sci-fi trope?"

If only the show's awareness of it's own tropes went anywhere. Note to story writers: making a character break the fourth wall and voice the future criticisms of your viewers is NOT good writing and it is NOT going to make those criticisms disappear or be less relevant. Breaking fourth walls is in and of itself not always a great thing to do in a story so focused in it's own world and separated from the viewer.

But you know what? The ending makes everything worth it!! Not. There is a single scene that I LOVE, and it is Swindler's last confrontation with the executioners. They surround her and stuff happens and then she says "zamamiro", and I love it. I died fangirling, and then died trying not to be sad. Lol. It's stuck with me now, such an iconic scene. Other than that, the ending wasn't that great.

Overall, I enjoyed the show, but I wish I could've seen another Akudama Drive. The Akudama Drive the first half introduced seemed like it would be amazing, not only a must-watch for the season, but BEYOND that. The Akudama Drive I was left with made me feel glad that it ended so short and stopped wasting my time. 6.5/10 and not lower for Swindler <3

[antibrainrotcrusader]

People really need to realise that “media can affect real life” doesn’t mean “this character does bad things so people will read that and start doing bad things” and actually means “ideas in fiction especially stereotypes about minority groups can affect how the reader views those groups, an authors implicit prejudices can be passed on to readers”

[antibrainrotcrusader]

Review of: ID Invaded

The reason I decided to watch ID:Invaded was because of it's soundtrack. It completely hooked me, and so after several hours of listening to the music, I finally started watching the anime. My first impression was this: the animation is stunning, the mystery is intoxicating, and this world is completely new and unfamiliar. I was excited to see where the show would go from there, and how the characters would grow, but it didn't seem to move forward much. I will begin to discuss some major plot points that will spoil the show. Read below at your own risk.

Sure, we had our field specialist Hondomachi go from an innocent character to a cunning and cold murderer, but I would hardly count that as character growth since it seemed like the sudden growth was caused by nothing. It was like, she was caught by the perforator and then she decided to grow up and become the cunning character she is. The only other character with any real growth is Sakaido, or Akihito Narihisago, the only reason I'm giving this show 6/10 and not 3/10 is because of Narihisago. As a detective, it's been implied that he often focused more on his work rather than his family. When his daughter falls victim to the challenger, and his wife commits suicide, Narihisago realises how he took the time with his family for granted. Eaten up by guilt and anger, he finds and kills the challenger... then ends up imprisoned. Interesting, right? Why is a police officer going to jail for killing a murderer? They never explained why, it was almost like they expected us to know why. Okay, fine. Later on however, Narihisago kills the challenger in Kiki Asukai's Id well, and it was classified as self-defence, here are the differences between those two occurences: Narihisago had no proof for the challenger being who he is when he was in Asukai's Id, his daughter was not a victim to the challenger yet, he invited the challenger to a physical fight, he got injured during the fight. Does his inviting the challenger to the fight and getting injured justify how he killed the challenger any more than when he shot him after his daughter's death? No! Moving on from this point, the death of Narihisago's family takes a huge toll on him, and he ends up working for the Kura as a "brilliant detective" and that ruins his mental health even more. When he enters Kiki Asukai's well, we see him go back to his old life, doing all the things he regretted not doing before, while still denying reality. We see him heal, grow, and become a different person from the man who drove serial killers to suicide.

Other than Hondomachi and Narihisago, there are no characters with any real personality, I did not relate to them, I do not care about them, they just seem pitiful and bland. One might ask "but what about Tamotsu Fukuda?" (if they remembered his name, that is), and the answer is this: he is not pitiful or boring, he is just poorly written. A serial killer who drills holes in other people's heads, because he drilled a hole in his own head, because the world feels incomplete, and because he has arithmomania. How does this follow exactly? I do not know. Nobody needs to know, it's just a nice little backstory to make us sympathise with a serial killer, and to give him an advantage to other characters so he can become Hondomachi's knight in shining armor!

Now, what about Kiki Asukai, if she's so important, how can she be so bland? Well it's because Kiki Asukai is not Kiki Asukai. She's a damsel in distress, with so much power she cannot handle. She's Lucy from Elfen Lied, mixed with the archetype of the damsel in distress, fitting for an anime that is so focused on Freud's theory of Id, but it is to be expected that a story that puts so much focus on a character must personalise that character, because archetypes do not have personality. Kiki Asukai is barely a character, even the scene where she leaves the Mizuhanome is so heavily influenced on Elfen Lied's Lucy. Of course, it is more than acceptable to be influenced, this is not plagiarism, but the fact that they did not try to be creative in how Kiki Asukai was walking outside the Mizuhanome and made it so that she was reacting exactly the way Lucy was, means the show has no originality whatsoever when it comes to Kiki Asukai.

To conclude, the music is amazing, the animation is impressive, the idea is great, but the execution was one character away from being an absolute failure.

[antibrainrotcrusader]

Review of: Gravity directed by Alfonso Cuarón

The movie directed by Alfonso Cuarón “Gravity” is about a woman, Dr Ryan Stone, on a space mission to apply a medical imagery device she invented. Ryan is the mission specialist, accompanied by lieutenant Matt Kowalski and the space crew. Her skills were for some unfathomable reason thought to be so vital to the mission’s success that NASA had her go through six months of extensive space training instead of sending another more experienced specialist to install the medical device. However that is not to say that I don’t admire her intelligence and adaptability to the traumatic situation she was placed in. She is likely the most courageous and independent woman in a movie featuring a female protagonist, having a highly admirable profession and inventing a device so important it would be recognised by NASA, and then not having any romantic interests throughout the entire movie, and surviving a series of catastrophic events in space that all had extremely low chances of survival. Ryan somehow survived collisions with spacecraft debris, being low on oxygen, running out of fuel, nearly being burned alive, drowning on Earth, and more unfortunate incidents.

I felt that the film’s plot was too absurd for reality, and perhaps that was the director’s intention, to exaggerate and emphasize on how we mere humans on Earth cannot imagine how terrifyingly large the universe really is compared to ourselves. We do not value oxygen, air, gravity, or even the solid ground beneath our feet. The size of space and its lack of substance may feel like a safe haven compared to Earth at times, but it holds more dangers and mysteries than the human mind can grasp. We humans are demeaned against the immense universe, our existence trivial no matter how miraculous. Earth is the true safe haven, protecting us from the rest of the uncontrollable vicious world.  Although some plot points left me doubtful about the story’s quality, I was paralysed from the intensity of every little movement and moment of speech in the film. Even the mere act of breathing felt so intense that I was trapped in the movie’s action. 

At the beginning of the movie I was doubtful about Ryan’s abilities to the point that I started feeling pessimistic about her situation. I kept wondering if she really will somehow manage to survive, and Matt Kowalski’s repetition of “I have a bad feeling about this mission” did not help my skepticality. Although it is irrational to feel superstitious because of what Matt Kowalski said lightheartedly, I could later see that the director used that repeated line to foreshadow the movie’s events and to arise doubt in the audience. Add to that the fact that Ryan is not an expert on space, her chances of survival compared to that of the rest of the crew plummets down. The movie easily kept me hooked until the very end, with it’s exhilarating depiction of space and its comparison to the relevance of humans. I found that the disasters Ryan was exposed to can be similar in trauma to disasters people experience daily on Earth. No matter how unlikely it is for us to make it through the day, we can try and succeed in doing so. The world is big, cruel, and powerful, but somehow we as a species have managed to survive so far; and perhaps that’s simply good luck, but it is likely because we are a powerful species, not in brute strength, but with wits and the knowledge we collect on the world we live in. 

This movie highlights how the human species in incomparable in strength to the world, but the knowledge we collect and improve on is our saving weapon. That is why I would recommend this movie to year 12 students, especially as that’s the stage when we try navigating our importance in the world.

[antibrainrotcrusader]

Black Myth: Wukong Review

Black Myth: Wukong is a visually stunning game, with great bosses, and fantastic fighting elements. The rich Chinese culture it intertwines with only adds to its beauty. The game is sort of a follow up of the novel Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en, and even has references to characters and events that take place in the book. It's a great game full of rich culture, but may lead some to confusion if they're not familiar with the novel. Some reviewers have even done some research to understand who Sun Wukong is and why certain events are as important as they are.

The opening scene is beautiful. Taking you directly in front of the Giant Spirit God, the Four Heavenly Kings, and the massive Heavenly Army. After a disagreement and fight between Sun Wukong and Erlang Shen, you are now a different monkey. The Destined One. Meaning you must find the six relics from Wukong and hopefully revive Sun Wukong. Though there isn't much of a play-by-play story, the animations that play within the six chapters are absolutely amazing and done in different styles of animation. They also do a great job of explaining the background of that chapter's villain.

Wukong isn't a soulslike game. It may seem like it at first, but the game plays more like traditional action games. The game is a lot more forgiving, but isn't too easy where its as if you can just button mash and win. The game lets you swap armor, weapons and even lets you have access to a handful of spells. The game can quickly become strategy based, as you also have a mana meter, focus meter, stamina bar, and obviously health. Attacks and moves take stamina, spells will take your mana, meaning you need to do combos in order to be the most effective during combat, especially during boss fights. There's also cooldowns for certain spells, so you also need to strategize on whether or not you absolutely need to use transformation, which allows you to become the powerful creatures you've defeated. There's plenty more mechanics that you must use for yourself to truly grasp how much you could possibly plan for a battle against a boss, including resource management.

The levels also have enemies within it, so you aren't just battling boss after boss. Though I wish invisible walls weren't the fix to a lot of exploration, it definitely still feels like a massive world. It has a very wide-linear design, one obvious path you must take to advance the story, however there is some exploration available, usually for extra loot or enemies that can give you a special Spirit Skill, Curio items, or chests to upgrade your health, stamina or mana.

Though there is plenty good, there are also plenty of odd, and bad things. Personally, I have not had any performance issues, however there have been reports of people falling through the ground, experiencing performance issues, and crashes. Even when they're running RTX 4090s, these things should not be issues, but alas they are reported in other reviews of the game, so we must dock some points.

The developer, Game Science has had some very questionable things come out of it. The first being a report from IGN, rightfully questioning the developer's history of sexism and other comments made by employees. The second being a very strange google document for content creators, highlighting the do's and don'ts. The list containing

"Do NOT include politics, violence, nudity, feminist propaganda, fetishization, and other content that instigates negative discourse.

Do NOT use trigger words such as 'quarantine' or 'isolation' or 'COVID-19'

Do NOT discuss content related to China's game industry policies, opinions, news, etc."

Personally, these issues also make it hard for me to be able to give this otherwise beautiful game an amazing score. Censoring topics deemed as "feminist propaganda" and a past of hurtful comments from employees that work at the company, I have to bring the score down.

Our final score for Black Myth: Wukong is a 6/10. An otherwise beautiful story, linked with Chinese culture, backed by a developer full of a rough history in just its decade of existence.

[antibrainrotcrusader]

A Shadow of the Colossus Review

by DustyIsForever This is a review. It's about a video game, which is a kind of movie you watch with your hands.

In 2012, Shadow of the Colossus became the first thing I ever saved money to buy. After watching the “Nerd³ Plays” video where he calls it a “perfect game,” I began to daydream about it obsessively. I stuck the facetious label “Ye Olde Jar o Talents” on a mason jar and brought it to school so I could beg my classmates for funds. This worked, however incredulous it was, but I didn’t buy the game. I didn’t buy the game for years, and even after that I didn’t play it for at least a few months. It was like an old Russian novel to me: something that always existed in the future for which I could never consider myself prepared. And then I did play it and it was great.

You can either read it here or on a published Docs page. But be careful. It's pretty long.

This is a review of Shadow of the Colossus. It will contain spoilers. I first played the game a long time ago, but I went back to it a few times over the years. Recently I watched a close friend play it. We had some conversations about it. Soon, I’d like to see my wife play it as well. She can’t read this review yet because she is, incredibly, going to be playing totally blind. You can imagine how rare it is to play something like Shadow of the Colossus without knowing anything about it beforehand.

As I promised not long ago, I'm going to start writing essay-reviews of many games I enjoy. But first, I'd like to elaborate on my method. I have a particular framework for expressing my opinions of these games that I've developed as an alternative to a 10/10, 5/5, 40/40, 100/100, or other numerical art goodness judgment system. The aim is to provide the foolish satisfaction of a number score while cutting back on its pitfalls and biases. Number scores are unhelpful. In a 10/10 system, one finds that a 10 means that the reviewer idolizes the work, a 9, 8, or even a 7 can mean that they enjoyed it, and anything below that might mean that they disliked it, hated it, thought it was tedious, or simply misunderstood it. Opinions don’t fit neatly on a graduated, linear scale. Our value judgments are relative, as in: I liked this more than that; never absolute in the way numbers would suggest. We know this but pretend otherwise. How fun to bestow a cherished piece of art the honor of your perfect number! We're all pleased to think that our opinion is intelligent. My goal is to indulge that, but with restraint.

The first principle of my system is that I only bother rating games that I already know I love. Though there is surely as much to be learned from "bad" art as "good" art, I want to avoid negativity. Also, I find it’s easier to assign a score with restraint and thoughtfulness when a bad score isn't in consideration at all. It also means that I, as a critic, produce fewer reviews overall, which should make each review more characteristic and the overall corpus more consistent.

My second principle is that the highest number I'll use is three. Mr. Ebert was onto something when he made the alluring choice of knocking the tail off of the five-star format. It made all of his ratings look smarter. Five stars was for the common people; real intellectuals expressed their taste in the glamorous new fashion of four. Now it's my turn. I've one-upped the fallen old man, who once failed to appreciate John Carpenter's The Thing (1982). I dare to fly with merely three. And no halfsies, either. No point to it if I’m going to decide to give a game a one-and-a-half because that would be a six-point system in disguise, wouldn’t it?

My final principle is borrowed in part from Famitsu's thing where they divide scores into parts that can be treated either separately or summed. They do that with four reviewers. In my case, I cannot judge the work from the perspective of multiple people (I am only one person). Instead, I split my score into two numbers representing two priorities. That’s two numbers ranging zero to three, written X-Y. For instance, Shadow of the Colossus is a 1-2 game.

The first number, on a scale of zero to three, represents the aesthetic merits of the game. This can include everything experienced by the player. It may consider the art direction, the sound and music, and the narrative design. It also may refer to the dynamics of the design and the "choreography" of interaction, in a very formalist sense borrowed in part from Graeme Kirkpatrick's Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game. Interactive design is just as much a part of the media content of a game as the audiovisual presentation.

To be less academic—I like to summarize the first number as the question: "does it make me cry?" because it captures that it's often a sentimental thing. High-scoring games on the first number tend to be tearjerkers.

Why should Shadow of the Colossus get a one out of three in this category? Well, a one isn't really a low score in the conventional sense. My system is built to specify why a game is great. A zero would mean "this game is great, but it has nothing to do with the aesthetics." I consider Shadow of the Colossus to be aesthetically great, just not as aesthetically great as a few other games.

I like to call the other score “does it blow my mind?” to highlight that it pertains to games that impress me. Expect more elaboration when I get to the second half of the review.

When I first made up this system years ago, I tried to list a bunch of old favorites as examples. At that time, I stamped a 2-1 on Shadow of the Colossus. Mark the difference! It means that now I appreciate its technical achievement more but have tempered my feelings about its content. This change of opinion came to me when I recently watched a close friend play through the game for the first time, hanging out over her shoulder. The banter we shared dampened the emotion of the experience—for example, she already knew Agro was going to fall off a cliff sooner or later and by the time she did, it affected her more like the punchline to a drawn-out joke. I was a little offended. Her more detached play experience exposed some of the game’s weaknesses to me.

In 2012, Shadow of the Colossus became the first thing I ever saved money to buy. After watching the “Nerd³ Plays” video where he calls it a “perfect game,” I began to daydream about it obsessively. I stuck the facetious label “Ye Olde Jar o Talents” on a mason jar and brought it to school so I could beg my classmates for funds. This worked, however incredulous it was, but I didn’t buy the game. I didn’t buy the game for years, and even after that I didn’t play it for at least a few months. It was like an old Russian novel to me: something that always existed in the future for which I could never consider myself prepared. And then I did play it and it was great.

My original rating of two reflected the beautiful score and the sublime desolation of the game, which inhabited me then as it does now. When I take a walk in the woods, I am visited once more by the mystery of “To the Ancient Land.” It’s a good season in my life to return to the game. I’m in a forest often.

But unrelated to my time in forests, I’ve spent the last year thinking a lot about fantasy. I fell out with it some years ago and only recently began rehabilitating my affection for it. Shadow of the Colossus belongs to that estranged clade of fantasy, the fairy tale, which has become my favorite.

Fairy tales are mysterious but well-patterned, made from a pool of common morphologies, which folklorist Vladimir Propp called “functions” with perhaps excessive precision. A glancing comparison will hopefully show how much like a fairy tale Shadow of the Colossus really is. Propp’s functions came originally from his syntax of Russian folk stories. Shadow of the Colossus is neither Russian nor folk, through it deploys several such functions in an identifiable and properly consecutive fashion:

Absentation, interdiction, and violation all before the prologue is over

Trickery as Dormin tells Wander what must be done to revive Mono

Departure, as Wander begins the quest to slay the colossi, and various functions of the Donor, who is also Dormin

Quite a bit of struggle and branding as Wander does his colossus-slaying and dishevels himself gradually with dark magic

Pursuit (by Lord Emon)

And then the punishment and reward are cleverly reversed, because of course in this special video game that people who don’t call all video games art sometimes deign to call art, Wander was in error all along.

I think that to leave the analysis at that would be a failure to appreciate the particular flavor of this story. There are many video game stories where the player character ends up ethically compromised for some narrative effect, but the aesthetic appeal of Shadow of the Colossus is grossly different from, say, Spec Ops: the Line. Wander is more like Hamlet; he retains his hero-ness the whole way through, yet still the fate of his quest is doomed by circumstance.

What he must do is awful and painful to him, but he’s stuck on this path. The closing of the door to the bridge out of the Forbidden Lands is a literalization of this. The inciting events of his journey—the superstitious sacrifice of an innocent girl—make his goals noble from the start, and because he does not have the information to understand the cost of his deeds until it is too late, we cannot say that he is ever malicious. The player is clued in that something is wrong through visual suggestions that Wander does not necessarily see or understand, including the doves and ominous shadow-people which gather at the Shrine of Worship. These devices are not employed in any way that comments specifically on the medium of video games; nothing about them is procedural. They are very conventional vectors of good old-fashioned dramatic irony.

Furthermore, we don’t textually know at all that Dormin is evil. The antagonist Lord Emon who opposes Dormin and Wander is possibly responsible for Mono’s death. He reminds us, if we have played ICO, of the people who unjustly imprison that game’s hero on account of his “cursed” horns. Once we abandon the idea that the Lord Emon narrator/antagonist character is a trustworthy authority, we lose the only voice telling us that Dormin is dangerous. And at the end of the tale Dormin, surprisingly, keeps all of his promises to Wander: Mono is revived and Wander’s body is returned to him. He even gets his horsey back! Very sweet. And the final scenes, which play out leisurely beside the scrolling credits column, show a bright and sun-dappled garden. Mono, robed in her white gown, comforts baby Wander while surrounded by wildlife and green trees. A fawn appears. The imagery is positively lousy with symbols of innocence and spring.

And, if we’re going to permit ourselves to get biblical, isn’t it a little like a reverse Genesis? Wander follows the instructions of a higher power despite a warning from Lord Emon, who has special knowledge. As a result, a woman is saved from her “cursed fate” and the only way out is permanently closed, trapping the woman and the revived hero in the garden of paradise.

Shadow of the Colossus tells a tragic and subversive story, but it does it entirely within the syntax of its folktalesy story genre. It doesn’t have the flavor of subversiveness which comments on other works or the conventions of its own medium. To understand Undertale’s project, you need to be familiar with other JRPGs. Shadow of the Colossus would preserve its message in any medium.

This point isn’t really doing anything to bump my score up or down, but it’s a line of thinking I’ve revisited many times while writing about this game. I think that what really took Shadow of the Colossus from a two down to a one was the inconsistency between encounter designs.

My friend caught on quickly to the first several colossi, even prevailing where I remember having stumbled (my younger self was completely stymied by the sixth, called “Barba” by fans). But as the latter half of the game wore on, she spent more and more time running in circles. Numbers nine, eleven, and twelve all exasperated her. Each of them involves a special trick that must be discovered before they can be made vulnerable. Colossus number eleven, for example, is covered in armor that can only be broken by using a torch to chase it off of a cliff. But no other encounter shows you that there’s anything you can hold in your hands besides the sword and bow you start with. To even get the torch, you need to stand on a plinth holding up a brazier such that the colossus charges at you and knocks the torch loose. But my friend did not even realize that the plinths were climbable; they can only be grabbed from the sides, which is difficult to see and execute when you’re constantly charged at by an enemy that stuns you on the ground for a few whole seconds whenever it hits you. The tedium was too much, and the game lost its magic and atmosphere. The battle against the last colossus was pretty disheartening. No sense of an emotional climax came through. Instead, as I watched my friend fall over and over from its hands and shoulders and whatnot with all the tenacity of a lint-covered novelty sticky hand, I could only hope desperately that she wouldn’t put the game down right then and there.

In some moments, it’s plain to see that Shadow of the Colossus is testing the player’s patience with purpose and meaning. Each encounter culminates with Wander clutching to fur, often on the head of the colossus, holding on just long enough to get a good stab. The colossi shake and Wander dangles on, unable to get a steady hit. It’s frustrating to have to wait for a tiny window of opportunity to land a blow, but this is clearly by design. If the fight could be ended as soon as the player got into stabbing position, the anticipation would resolve too quickly. Giving the player sweaty palms, making them really clench the trigger button, serves to procedurally convey the ordeal Wander faces on-screen. You hold on (to the controller) to hold on (for dear life) in a very successful bit of hand-to-screen parallelism.

But at other times, the game slips away into pointless futility. In many fights, the trick that makes the colossus vulnerable is only effective for a short time, so the player must hurry to seize the opportunity. Often, the time window just isn’t long enough, and the player is compelled to retry, but the novelty of discovering the trick has already disappeared. The ninth colossus’s arena is huge, and when you knock it onto its side, you have to maneuver over to the far side of its body every time. It’s fiddly and protracted, and it’s a case where the game inadequately reacts to the player executing on what should feel like the turning point of the battle. It took my friend about four tries to ascend this colossus successfully. And it’s a turtle, so it isn’t even that tall. Really lame.

My own remembered experience, rooted in some British guy’s twelve-year-old YouTube video, is very different from the one shared with that friend of mine. I saw a game denuded of its majesty by our ongoing joke that Agro would be the final boss; a joke between pals on the proverbial gamer couch. A couch that, if it were not replaced in our case by the deep phenomenological chasm of several US states of distance and a Discord RTC, would be evocative of the one shared by Misters Cheadle and Sandler in the film Reign Over Me.

It’s a largely forgotten film, but consensus says it’s surprisingly well-regarded: Metacritic awards it an impressive 8.5 user score, which it labels “universal acclaim.” Adam Sandler plays a traumatized man who, after losing his family in 9/11, quits his dental career and whittles his days scootering around, playing the drums, and remodeling his kitchen over and over. Don Cheadle is his former college roommate, a successful dentist with a family, who runs into him late one night. The two rekindle their friendship and are both healed for it. This involves a lot of Shadow of the Colossus.

When Don Cheadle first sees Sandler, he can’t get him to stop and talk. Their second encounter happens when Cheadle drops off his daughter at a friend’s house. He intends to go back home to his wife to spend quality time solving a puzzle with her. Suddenly, Sandler flies by on his scooter. So instead, Cheadle gets him to stop and talk. He asks if Sandler is “practicing,” by which he means “practicing dentistry.”

“I’m practicing all the time, up in the valley. Took down twelve of the colossus so far” “The valley? What is that, is that a medical complex or something?” “It’s more… like another dimension. You take a journey, you discover yourself.” (Reign Over Me, 13:50)

He gets Sandler to sit down for Starbucks, where Sandler violates assorted social norms as per a 2007 movie’s notion of a traumatized person. Sandler acts as if he doesn’t remember Cheadle but they make conversation regardless and before you know it, Cheadle is at this guy’s apartment.

Cheadle needs to use the bathroom. Sad music begins to play. Cheadle briefly glimpses a room with furniture covered in sheets—evidence that this man once had a family. Then there’s a mournful-looking shot where the camera stares straight down Sandler’s darkened hall and distantly we see his TV. He’s climbing the first Colossus. That’s a funny thing to do if you’ve finished three quarters of the game. I guess he has more than one save file. So that he can practice more, of course.

As the movie goes on, the two intertwine into each other’s life in a conventionally dramatic way. Sandler is a broken man who throws tantrums and lacks responsibility and ropes Cheadle into a Mel Brooks marathon showing on the night Cheadle’s father dies, and in turn, Cheadle suffers various embarrassments to his career and family because he has compassion for his friend. And sometimes we get to see more Shadow of the Colossus, which Sandler often calls “Shadows” of the Colossus.

In its second appearance, Sandler is fighting the fifth Colossus—my favorite—and Cheadle takes the controller. We get a montage. He can’t put it down. Sandler teases Cheadle, he says he’s addicted (to Shadow of the Colossus). Cheadle jumps to his feet, paces around the couch in frustration: he demands one more try. He refuses Sandler’s suggestion to stop and “let it soak in,” he’s determined to get it this time. Number fifteen falls and Cheadle pumps his fist, shouting “co-lo-ssussss!” in a funny voice. The montage ends, and with it goes our brief window into an otherworld where playing Shadow of the Colossus actually looks like that.

Or, hey, that’s not so fair. Maybe, for Mr. Adam Sandler, playing Shadow of the Colossus is about practicing each fight over and over and pumping your fist triumphantly when you finally win. Maybe he got a New Game Plus save file when he picked it up on eBay that let him fight the colossi out of order. For his character—who, as I’ve neglected to mention, is named Charlie Fineman—the game is supposed to be a metaphor for 9/11, of course.

Back in ‘07, Kotaku managed to get in touch with Jeremy Roush, who worked as an editor for Reign Over Me. Apparently, the role of Shadow of the Colossus in the film was inspired by Roush’s father.

The Vietnam War left his father 100 percent mentally disabled with post-traumatic stress disorder... Unable to work, he spent the days and evenings watching sci-fi thriller Aliens over and over again until he actually had to buy a new VHS tape. "Aliens is a thinly veiled kind of Vietnam veteran kind of story," Roush explains, "and watching it is a way of thinking about it without telling yourself you are thinking about it." The movie was visceral therapy for his father… Refusing to accept the death of loved ones. Seeking out an escape from that truth. Giants falling in slow motion. "You could see where someone who was dealing with 9/11 would be engrossed by a giant that keeps collapsing over and over again," he says. Charlie's therapy was Shadow of the Colossus. (Ashcraft p.2)

Roush, who was responsible for the idea to include the game in the movie, had thought seriously about the thematics. In Reign Over Me, Charlie Fineman’s fixation on Shadow of the Colossus is a deliberate symbol of his grief, boxed into a safe and distant replica of tragedy which he can watch himself overcome again and again on the plasma TV.

Later on in the film, Cheadle manages to drag Sandler to weekly therapist sessions, but they go nowhere. Sandler refuses to speak about his family and leaves each session after just a few minutes. But he does say “I like to play Colossus!” (Reign, 1:13:29). In this movie’s understanding of mentally ill people, or at least in Roush’s, PTSD sufferers seek out proxy-triggers to act out the procedure of grieving with none of the pain. I think that I preferred the movie before I learned this. It just doesn’t make as much sense to say that the colossi are all supposed to be, like, the twin towers. Isn’t that bizarre? I mean, I had just assumed that the game was more broadly supposed to be a parallel to the ordeal of overcoming grief, and that the colossi were the grief. Grief is like a colossus, or like colossi, because it can feel so much bigger than the griever, so invincible and enduring. That’s why it was so strange to me that he never makes it further through the game over the course of the movie. In the very last scene, when he’s in his new and well-lit apartment, do you know what he’s doing? He’s playing it again, but he’s back to number thirteen. I really expected him to finish the game by the end, which would parallelize his grief struggle with a struggle to take down the colossi. It would represent something. However, the truth is that the colossus encounters are supposed to be 9/11, and he’s mentally recreating a facsimile of 9/11 every time he plays the game. Infinite, furry World Trade Centers getting stabbed by Adam Sandler over and over.

Sorry, that might have been a digression in poor taste. You didn’t expect to read a review of Reign Over Me within this review of Shadow of the Colossus and it was a little deceptive of me to jam it in there. But I thought about it so much, you have to understand! It’s fascinating to me how I could arrive at such a different interpretation of the movie than was apparently intended. The same difference goes for the game itself: Mr. Roush definitely got the gist of Shadow of the Colossus, but he applied the game to the movie in such a different way than I would have.

Let’s talk about the technical side of things instead for a short while. A nice palate-cleanser. It might seem unbalanced to devote one half of the score system to technology that is seldom appreciated by the audience—this score is more than that. Perhaps you were left confused when I didn’t explain it in much detail earlier, back when I was still laying out the way the system works. The slogan “does it blow my mind?” suggests that this category seeks to appreciate the craft of game development. A good example of something non-technological that “blows my mind” would be the dialogue system in Hades; the incredible effort of writing such a massive script and then organizing it so cleverly certainly does blow my mind, speaking as a game developer and a very slow writer.

Shadow of the Colossus is an exceptionally technically impressive game that deserves more than the 1 I assigned it on the spot so long ago. Through optimization, fakery, and creativity, it packs in the most sophisticated graphics the PlayStation 2 can handle, including HDR lighting, self-shading, long-distance level-of-detail mesh transitions, real-time fur rendering, volumetric particles, and anisotropic light scattering. Most of these practices were considered next-gen at the time of the game’s release. Some of them still feel shiny and new in 2024.

Team ICO accomplished this through ingenuity and strict scoping. Out of any of my sources, I learned the most about it here. Of particular interest to me is the usage of procedural animation and inverse kinematics, of which I’m a big fan. If you are one of the few beautiful souls in this loving universe who have read my blog(s) before, you know that I’ve been working on and off for a long time on a project that relies heavily on inverse kinematics called Flower Pot. The inexpensive algorithm I use in my own work, called FABRIK, was not published until 2011. Furthermore, Shadow of the Colossus has very complex character models and needs to clearly telegraph the movements of the player character and the colossi. For this reason it also dynamically combines animation data keyframed by an animator with the movements computed by the inverse kinematics algorithms. They did this on a CPU that clocked at about 294 megahertz (see Diefendorff).

I won’t reproduce diagrams here because they’re already available in the translated article on Léna Piquet’s website, which I linked above and which may also be found in my sources. To be honest, there is less for me to write in this section of the review because there is not much new to say. The achievements and process of Team ICO have been extensively documented and explained, much more than almost any other game. What is especially unique about Shadow of the Colossus is that much of this dissection and documentation has been done by outsiders: fans who never had access to the team or their materials.

Of particular note is Nomad Colossus. I found a Fandom wiki article about this guy. It says, “Nomad Colossus is a well-known figure in The Shadow of The Colossus community. He's most well-known for his insane dedication to the game and downright jaw-dropping data-mining” (Team Ico Wiki). Passionate! But the article has no comments. Yet on the other hand, a skim of the community message log page shows that at least a dozen users have worked on this wiki within the last several months. A tantalizing window into a community, or one of a million lost corners of the internet? I cannot rightfully say.

Nomad Colossus uploaded their first Shadow of the Colossus-related YouTube video in April of 2010, four and a half years post-release. It’s been much longer than that since Breath of the Wild came out and I’m still surprised whenever I see someone running it in an emulator. The video is titled “Shadow of the Colossus - Through the entrance,” and it shows Wander on horseback in an area normally inaccessible except in cutscenes: the north bridge into the central shrine. He rides Agro through the narrow gate passage on the other end of the bridge. The path continues into a void for a long ways, but the horse stops as if running into a wall.

Since then, Nomad Colossus has published 346 videos (if I’m counting correctly) pertaining to Shadow of the Colossus, prying at it with camera hacks, model viewers, and data manipulation. He reveals mountains and plains and islands and ruins all inaccessible in normal play. Their work, comprising so many short, uncommentated videos, can be engaged with as a companion book to the game; Nomad gradually turns the elusive horizons of the Forbidden Lands back into data, into geometry stored in a file system. Numbers on computers permit no mysteries. A number is autological; before being applied to another end it represents only itself. A number is atomic, it has no secret compartments. Through the efforts of explorers like Nomad Colossus and their emulators, no pit has been left unaccounted for on the DVD-ROM. Nomad renders Shadow of the Colossus into a wholly unmysterious object. This is not a criticism of their work.

At the same time, the game continues to support an incredible abundance of perceived mystery. After all, this was why Nomad Colossus’s work began. The so-called Secret Seekers and their famous thread on the PSN forums were dedicated to unearthing what they imagined to be the mother-of-all easter eggs. They began with intense clue-hunting and then moved on to the less speculative arts of boundary breaking and data mining, albeit after dozens of pages of effusive discussion. The intentions behind the game’s design were a favorite topic. Their style of discourse was dense with wild, associative connections; the possibility of subtextual hints by means of biblical allusion was on the table before even the end of the first post (Quest for the Last Big Secret). “Fumito Ueda is infamous for his attention to the most minute, intricate detail,” this post says. But to say he is infamous for this—does that not suggest the consensus of many people? I suspect that the Ueda these individuals imagined was not an accurate model of the real one. There was no secret last colossus, after all.

These are only a few of many voices on the internet professing all kinds of opinions about the game, its content, its intentions and meanings and forms. A quick survey will show substantial diversity of interpretation: I found a passionate review on the “patientgamers” subreddit decrying Shadow of the Colossus as “one of the worst games I’ve ever played” for its “non-existent story” and “Genuinely awful clunky movement and controls” (AstraFuckingGooGoo). In “Shadow of the Colossus: a Retrospective View,” NoobFeed user BrunoBRS calls the game “a love story, of what limits can a man go for his loved one, but it is, most importantly, the tale of David and Goliath” in a passage of lavish praise for “what he truly believes is the greatest game of all time” (BrunoBRS). The similarly-titled “Shadow of the Colossus: A Retrospective,” an article on The Boss Key, calls it “a game all about and only about killing the boss monsters as a means to an end” (Koop). “Shadow of the Colossus Retrospective– A Tragically Beautiful Love Story,” brought to us by Taylor Lyles on DualShockers, says it’s “so much more than just a boss rush game; it is the story of a boy who cared so much for someone he loved that unleashed all sorts of hellish things to save her” (Lyles). Shadow of the Colossus retrospectives are, as they say, like assholes: everybody has one. I am included. Shades of consensus and contradiction are to be found in abundance in each discussion of the game.

And what of my own opinions? They depend on a perceived counter-opinion in many ways. My revised scoring suggests how I remember my past self. In my discussion of the aesthetic content of the game, I call for a new perspective that de-emphasizes the notion that Shadow of the Colossus deliberately works to subvert a convention of the medium of video games. But couldn’t I be accused of failing to establish that this notion existed in the first place? Let me provide an example of that notion, at least. Here’s another retrospective. It has the word “retrospective” in its title. It’s called “START/SELECT: Consuming Loneliness: A ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ Retrospective,” and it was written by Mac Riga for the Georgetown University student newspaper. Here’s Riga’s take:

Team Ico sought to make a game that laid bare the contradiction of video games. It held up this beautiful medium, the pinnacle of self-isolation and escapism yet one that fosters empathy and self-reflection more than any other, and begged the player to wrestle with that irony — to come to their own conclusions about what it means to be alone, what it means to consume video games and what it means to do both simultaneously. (Riga)

This is surprising. Riga isn’t talking about the moral irony of monster-slaying in video games, which is more or less the topic of the counter-opinion I imagined myself to be opposing. But he is saying that Shadow of the Colossus is trying to engage in conversation with a convention of the medium of games, and to me that was the important part. For Riga, it’s a game about “self-isolation” and “empathy.”

Maybe it would be helpful to check what Fumito Ueda has to say. Even if you’re the type to faithfully invoke The Death of the Author, you might still agree, I hope, that discovering the designer’s intent will provide a reference against which to compare other views.

“I’ve never thought that “cruelty” is something forbidden in video games. Video games seem to require cruelty as a means of expression, and that being the case, I wanted to try and present my own take on cruelty. That was really the seed idea of Shadow of the Colossus.” (Ueda)

Here in a 2005 interview with CONTINUE magazine, Ueda casts Shadow of the Colossus as a game about cruelty inspired by the cruelty he sees as required in games. My analysis is thrown into doubt even further! It was intended as a deconstruction all along. But wait—Fumito Ueda from 2019 might be here to save me.

Was the overall aim of SOTC to question why it is that most games are about killing and how we have grown so comfortable doing so in a virtual existence? Fumito Ueda: I play games where violence is a factor myself, so I do not dismiss such games. However, through the production of Shadow of the Colossus, I started having doubts about simply “feeling good by beating monsters” and “getting a sense of accomplishment”. I tried thinking if there were any other choices for different kinds of expression, then ended up with such settings and rules as a result. Rather than try to deliberately create some sort of antithesis, I focused more on the consistency of the design as a product and differentiation (from other products). (Taylor)

Apologies for another long block quote; I really think the context is worth leaving in here because it helps to illustrate that, while Ueda is not exactly contradicting himself, different circumstances have prompted two answers with very different implications. The interviewer in the latter source seems to be aligned with the popular view that the game narrative is chiefly an exploration of morality. Which I do not disagree with, either: I should reiterate that my disagreement is with the view that the game narrative is specifically an exploration of morality in the medium of video games. The interviewer suggests that by saying that “most games are about killing.” Ueda seems to dismiss the idea by going on to say that the game was not crafted as “some sort of antithesis,” but that those themes emerged simply by trying to make a unique story. But in the former interview, Ueda asserts that he was “inspired” by the prevalence of “cruelty” in games. We are deprived of an authorial view where we might find stability; such a thing would have protected us, maybe, from the wild menagerie of contrasting views we face instead.

And could it be possible, if you would excuse the sudden break, that Reign Over Me (2007) starring Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle might not have always been actively trying to frame Shadow of the Colossus as a pseudo-Freudian stand-in for 9/11? More importantly, do we have any meaningful way to be sure? No, I think it’s more likely that suggestive forces have moved in with us permanently and that their furniture is too numerous and heavy for us to kick them out. It is impossible to speak on the aesthetics of a work, especially one so widely critiqued as Shadow of the Colossus, without necessarily speaking on what was spoken before. It is impossible to even play the game without encountering these extratextual conversations.

When I watched my friend play Shadow of the Colossus for the first time, I must have already been faintly aware of this phenomenon. The process of finding an appropriate emulator and an appropriate ROM led her through websites already saturated with extratextual content that suggested certain ideas of the game content. She had heard me speak of the game before. She had already listened to much of its music, accompanied on YouTube by comments. Being someone interested in games herself, she had certainly already encountered discussions of the game content like this one. She knew damn well that Agro would fall off that bridge. From all of this it is clear to me that the “extratext” was always inescapable. If she were to encounter the game truly without prior knowledge it would still not have “saved” her because she would just discover the extratext afterwards.

And what of my wife? My poor sweet wife? Just as no dry beach is spared from the tide, she too will be inundated by extratext that will indelibly shape how she receives and interprets the game content. She will not be a source of a “pure” opinion, but only another source of interpretation. She will never play Shadow of the Colossus as it was when it came out in 2005.

The space in consideration is a “consensus blob.” It has no hard boundaries, but it has gradients. Within the blob there are many shades of interpretation, but few overt contradictions except when comparing extremes. The blob is uncentered because there is no single “correct” or most stable interpretation. Areas of the blob give the appearance of a “consensus,” a shared notion or common interpretation, but really the gradient is everywhere and always-changing, like an amoeba. Even the creator of the art object can sway from point to point in the blob, forgetting wherever it was they started. The consensus is heraclitean. The extratext is absolutely inseparable from the text.

Really, we shouldn’t be miffed about it. Shadow of the Colossus can be about a lot of things, it’s not like we need a single definitive analysis. It will be a joy to watch my wife play, and I will be delighted to see what she thinks. I’m sure it will be new and exciting.

Overall, I give Reign Over Me a strong 6/10.

Sources

AstraFuckingGooGoo. “Shadow of the Colossus (PS4)- one of the worst games I’ve ever played.” r/patientgamers. https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/ujnx5q/shadow_of_the_colossus_ps4_one_of_the_worst_games/. Accessed 8 Aug. 2024.

Binder, Mike, dir. 2007. Reign over Me. Screenplay by Mike Binder. Columbia Pictures.

BrunoBRS. “Shadow of the Colossus: a Retrospective View”. Noobfeed. 27 Sep. 2011. https://www.noobfeed.com/features/160/shadow-of-the-colossus-a-retrospective-view

Diefendorff, Keith. “Sony’s Emotionally Charged Chip.” Microprocessor Report, vol. 13, no. 5.

Koop, Brandon. “Shadow of the Colossus: A Retrospective.” The Boss Key, 10 Apr. 2014, https://bradenkoop.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/shadow-of-the-colossus-a-retrospective/.

Lyles, Taylor. “Shadow of the Colossus Retrospective -- A Tragically Beautiful Love Story.” DualShockers, 26 Jan. 2018, https://www.dualshockers.com/shadow-of-the-colossus-retrospective/.

Metacritic. Reign over Me. https://www.metacritic.com/movie/reign-over-me/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2024.

“Nomad Colossus.” Team Ico Wiki, https://teamico.fandom.com/wiki/Nomad_Colossus.  Accessed 8 Aug. 2024.

Peeren, Esther. “Compelling Memory: 9/11 and the Work of Mourning in Mike Binder’s Reign Over Me.” Cultural Critique, vol. 92, no. 1, Dec. 2016, pp. 57–83. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2016.a617380.

Piquet, Léna, translator. “The Making of ‘Shadow of the Colossus.’” Froyok, Dec. 2007, https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/2772150/175939_PUBLISHED_Peeren_617380.pdf.

Quest for the Last Big Secret / Mysteries of SotC. PlayStation Community Forums, archived May 2013. http://web.archive.org/web/20130505104658/http://community.us.playstation.com/t5/Shadow-of-the-Colossus-PS2/Quest-for-the-Last-Big-Secret-Mysteries-of-SotC/td-p/20178777

Riga, Mac. “START/SELECT: Consuming Loneliness: A ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ Retrospective.” The Hoya, https://thehoya.com/guide/start-select-consuming-loneliness-a-shadow-of-the-colossus-retrospective/. Accessed 12 Aug. 2024.

Taylor, Jay. “Interview Extra: Fumito Ueda (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian).” Cane and Rinse, 27 Aug. 2019, https://caneandrinse.com/fumito-ueda-interview/.

Ueda, Fumito. Interview for CONTINUE Magazine, vol. 25., 2005. Translated by shmuplations, https://shmuplations.com/ueda/. Accessed 13 Aug. 2024.

[antibrainrotcrusader]

Review of: Whiplash directed by Damien Chazelle

Whiplash is a film directed by Damien Chazelle. The movie is an exaggeration of Chazelle’s experiences in a competitive high school jazz band, telling the story of a 19 year-old boy with dreams of becoming a phenomenal jazz drummer like Buddy Rich. Watching the movie changed my perspective on jazz music, now making it seem more intense than I’ve ever thought it was. Like many other people, I thought that the jazz genre is a calming genre, and that it is one of the least violent music genres. However, seeing Andrew struggle to match his abusive teacher’s expectations made me realise otherwise. 

The beginning of the movie lead me to think that I’ll be watching a drummer in an intense environment, but I didn’t expect that intense environment to be a jazz band. It was obvious to me how Andrew’s dreams and expectations were sugar-coated, and as soon as Terence Fletcher entered the scene, Andrew got a punch in the gut by the ugly truth: to progress and become a great artist, he’ll have to abandon so many important things. Even in the real world, people face such big challenges to achieve greatness, but paying an abnormally large price for that greatness. For instance, bodybuilders damage their muscles for their body to repair them, and they spend massive amounts of money for their diets, and they dedicate all their time to their profession. Even though musical struggle is not usually depicted to be physical, that is exactly what happens. I expected that Fletcher would be some kind of antagonist in the story, and I was right. Soon enough, things got brutally violent, with Fletcher throwing offensive insults and chairs at Andrew, and Andrew keeping quiet and accepting Fletcher’s behaviour as if it was the norm. It irritated me to no extent, watching Andrew taking the abuse with no complaint, and instead pushing himself to do better and improve his skills. 

Throughout all of the movie I waited for Andrew to leave the band or for Fletcher to meet the fate he deserves: to be prosecuted for his violent methods of improving his students’ skills. Eventually, Andrew was kicked out of the band by Fletcher for playing badly because of some extreme injuries. I pitied Andrew for having his dismissal from the band be so public, and I knew that Fletcher thought kicking Andrew out of the band was the right decision. I disagreed with that choice to the point where I wanted Andrew to prove his worth once again, but seeing that getting kicked out of the band would be a huge disappointment to Andrew, I knew that Andrew would most probably quit drumming unless Fletcher himself asked him to come back. It saddened me how quickly Andrew’s dream died, but I was impressed by how the movie portrayed reality without making it seem like a tragic fairytale where the hero faces challenges bravely, falls down, then gets back up stronger.

I was extremely concerned by the end of the film, where Andrew literally drums his sweat tears and blood once again, going back to playing the drums after partially healing both physically and emotionally from the violent training he was put through before. Fletcher finally accepts Andrew and acknowledges high achievements, and is led to believe that his abusive methods work in making elite artists. What disgusts me about that is Fletcher is not completely wrong to believe that. If Fletcher wasn’t such a bully, Andrew wouldn’t push himself to do better, instead he’d be content with his initial musical skills, and he’d never get to fully achieve his dream of being as good as Buddy Rich. What made the ending more unsettling is the fact that Andrew’s story is common, if exaggerated. People in all professions are faced with a similar situation, a dream they want to achieve and a strict mentor who sometimes crosses the lines. Although it is obviously morally wrong, it is how great artists are born; beauty is pain and pain beauty, but shouldn’t there be a limit to that? How can society accept such behaviour as the norm, but fight against all other kinds of abuse? By the time Fletcher is satisfied with Andrew’s drumming, Andrew had paid a tremendous price for his greatness, and I was still confused as to why Fletcher couldn’t have improved his students’ abilities without abusing them. Is all greatness only truly achieved through pain and violence? And do Fletcher’s motives justify why he could get away with his actions? 

[antibrainrotcrusader]

Review of: More Than This by Patrick Ness

More Than This is a novel written by Patrick Ness. The main character-Seth Wearing- thought he had nothing in the world; that he was alone. After committing suicide on a cold stormy day in the ocean, he wakes up in his childhood home, half-naked, alive, and completely truly alone. Being put in a place where he actually had nothing, knows nothing, but is somehow alive, made him appreciate the life he had abandoned. He slowly began to learn that his life wasn’t as bad as he thought it was, that he took a lot of things for granted, and ignored others because it didn’t fit in with how bad everything felt.

From the beginning, Ness extracts my sympathy for Seth as he shows the scene where Seth dies. Seth struggles to stay alive, so much so that I would’ve never thought he chose that fate for himself. Seth is frightened by death, but he is more afraid of being alone. Ness perfectly describes the feeling of loneliness and depression by comparing Seth’s half-conscious state to an unplugged electronic device, and in a way, it is also accurate to humanity’s current state. When I came back to the beginning of the book after finishing it, I realised how close the description was to what people feel when they’ve been disconnected after being online for a long time. Even when he regains complete consciousness, he doesn’t accept that he is alone, and for good reason; we humans are social animals. According to an article on Psychology Today, “when our need for social relationships is not met, we fall apart mentally, and even physically.” Loneliness is a feeling everybody has experienced at least once; we are not strangers to it. The only difference is that Seth wasn’t only feeling lonely; he was literally alone. He talked to himself to fill the silence and loneliness, which may have been a sign of his falling apart, and it may have been what was keeping him together. He was in a world he believed he knew nothing about, and he had nothing to guide him but his instincts. I admired how he didn’t stop him from trying to live; and when he did, I couldn’t blame him. 

When Seth finally found people, he’d already accepted that he is alone in the world, it almost seemed like he doesn’t mind the loneliness as he tells himself “it isn’t the most unfamiliar feeling in the world.” He kept questioning his friends’ existence, even though they were real in every sense that matters. If I was in his place, I would’ve been the same. Dying only to wake up uninjured and alive is bound to make anyone question their own existence. Finding out that the brother he knew for most of his life was fabricated by a program and that the real version of him has died long before would only make him question the existence of everything else. So why shouldn’t he be suspicious? 

Even though the story started grimly, it ended on a much happier note. Not only does he stop being suspicious of his friends’ existence, and overcomes his loneliness, but he also learns the value of life. “Now that I know there’s more? I want to have more. If there really is more to life, I want to live all of it. And why shouldn’t all of us? Don’t we deserve that?” While it can sound like Seth is just being greedy, what he is saying makes a lot of sense. It’s a notion that everyone should follow; why settle for one thing when you can have more? Why stick to what you have if it’s bleak and dreary? We have the power to lead happy, fulfilling lives, if we let ourselves. I find it especially inspirational, how Seth changed from wanting to escape his own life, to wanting it back and more. It is why this would not only be an entertaining read for year 12 students, but it’ll also be a great source of inspiration to live the best lives they can.