Hey, I know that my writing output has slowed considerably in 2021, down from three posts in the first half of January to… well… one (really great) article since then. It’s not that I don’t have ideas – I’ve got a Retrospective planned for months and ready to go as soon as I get time to dedicate to watching the franchise again, and I wanted to write about Gamestonk back when that was in the news. Unfortunately, since mid-January my life has be complete chaos and making time for writing hasn’t been realistic. Not only that, but I’m the sort of writer who needs to have a creative spark in order to make any sort of progress and so I haven’t even had the time for inspiration. It’s only in the last few weeks that I’ve gotten some of that creative spark back, so here I am writing a bit of a reflection on what I’ve been up to lately to stretch some of those creative juices. Hopefully I will be able to dedicate more time in the near future to bring posts to life.
So what really pushed this stressful period of my life into overdrive? Well, first of all, my wife and I bought a house… so that was a break-neck month and a half of stress getting finances in order, dealing with lawyers, banks, mortgage brokers, etc to make that work, not to mention that we then had to co-ordinate the actual move in the middle of a snow storm (have I mentioned before that I live in Canada?).
As if that wasn’t enough to deal with, a week before we moved in my wife decided she wanted to get a puppy. And not just any puppy – a Belgian Malinois puppy. Freaking John Wick 3 attack dog puppy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we have had our attentions fully on him since to ensure that he is properly trained and have had to get a trainer to help. This alone has kept my hands full and away from the keyboard, since basically my entire day gets dedicated to either work or keeping him from getting into trouble until bedtime where I might get an hour of free time if I’m lucky. So, uh, yeah maybe you can see why there haven’t been many posts lately.
Good thing the little bastard is so damn cute though.
That said, it hasn’t been all work for me. I do get a bit of downtime while the dog naps, but that has mostly been dedicated to painting miniatures. I started getting into Warhammer 40,000 again last year and have been expanding my Adepta Sororitas army with some of the new models they received recently. I’m really happy with how they’ve been turning out and can’t wait for COVID to be over so I can get them on the tabletop. Since moving into the new house, my huge pile of shame is now readily available to me so I’m trying to work away at it (which is also nice because I’m on a very tight budget now, so miniature purchases are extremely low priority).
Mortifiers
Battle Sisters squad and an Imagifier
The uncontested centerpiece of the army and probably the best mini I have ever painted, The Triumph of St. Katherine.
Other than that, most of my free time has gone towards reading. Having finished the 2000ad Humble Bundle, I’ve moved on to other comics. First was Strontium Dog, one of 2000ad’s classic, flagship franchises. I bought and read the original series run, which is available in the five volumes of S/D Agency Files. Volume 1 is rough, pulpy fun, but the series really hits its stride in volumes 2 through 4. These stories are incredible, I heartily recommend reading them and getting drawn into the dangerous universe of Johnny Alpha, Wulf Sternhammer and Durham Red. Unfortunately, it all comes to a sticky end with volume 5, the aptly (if unsubtly) titled “The Final Solution” which brought the original series to a close. I am really mixed on it. I feel like it may have worked eventually but feels unearned and rushed at this point in Johnny Alpha’s story, especially the villains’ place in the story. It’s too bad, Strontium Dog has never recovered since then, with every attempt to follow-up or retcon this ending being half-baked and not measuring up to the original run. C’est la vie, even if it’s not the best ending, sometimes it’s just best to allow characters to rest.
Speaking of which, I followed-up on the other four volumes of Judge Anderson: The Psi Files. Volume 1 is just as great as volume 2, showing a more philosophical, rebellious and downright weird side of Justice Department than we get from Judge Dredd. However, things go completely off the rails in volumes 3 and 4. I’d like to know what drugs Alan Grant was on in the late 80s and early 90s because some of the stories he comes up with here are insane. While some of the more philosophical ones are at least interesting, none are satisfying and some are at odds with established characters such as Chief Judge Volt or make no sense (you’re telling me most of the children of MC1 disappear or die and this never gets brought up again…?). Meanwhile volume 4 hinges entirely on one epic storyline about a psychic virus… which ultimately makes no sense. So Judge Anderson dreams she’s on Deadworld? Okay, but how does this leave a psychic virus in her head? And how does this psychic virus even spread? And how are they even supposed to figure out the very fine details which end up defeating it at the last second? It all makes no sense and ruins what could have been an interesting storyline which feels like a prototype for the apocalyptic Day of Chaos which would come years later. Luckily, volume 5 turns things around with far breezier storylines, although it’s still a far cry from the series’ heyday in the early 80s.
Finally, I’ve recently started the Attack on Titan manga, having picked up a huge bundle off Humble a couple months ago. I’ve got a love-hate relationship with this series, having seen the first two seasons of the anime and a couple episodes of the third before dropping off of it. It’s at the point where I might even make a “Attack on Titan is Kind of Trash” in the near future, depending on how the manga shakes out. If it’s as frustrating as the anime was for me? Hoo boy, you can count on it. I’m on volume 2 currently and it has been very close to the anime so I’d say count on it.*
Anyway, that’s my life these past few months. I’m hoping to get back into writing a bit more regularly, but it all depends on how life shakes out and if the dog’s training becomes less of an overwhelming situation in my life. Fingers crossed that I can bring this latest Retrospective series to life soon and maybe even come out with a couple writing projects I’ve been plugging away at… we’ll see.
*Post-script: So I’ve binged through a couple dozen volumes of Attack on Titan in the past few days and I’m not so sure about this being worthy of a Trash post. I legitimately enjoy this manga and most of my complaints are going to be nitpicks in comparison to all the praise I have for this story. I don’t want “____ is Kind of Trash” to turn into a hyperbolic, nitpicky complaint platform, I want it to be for popular media that I legitimately did not like or that I think are massively overrated. I will be watching the anime after I finish the manga, so maybe there will still be a post for the anime, since I was unimpressed by the first two seasons, but they’d really have to drop the ball for it to qualify. I guess we’ll see.
*Post-post-script: Oh. Oh my. I may have spoken too soon. Attack on Titan‘s final arc can only really be equated to a Game of Thrones Season 8 level disaster.
Godzilla vs. Kong was easily the most excited I have been for a movie since… well, since right before Covid-19 hit and delayed A Quiet Place: Part II indefinitely. Most of the Monsterverse films are little more than disposable fun (except for the 2014 Godzilla, which is a straight-up great blockbuster as far as I’m concerned), but I got hyped regardless and found myself entertained as I watched the big gorilla and the big lizard punch each other on-screen. To the surprise of no one, Godzilla vs. Kong‘s human characters feel superfluous, which led to the common refrain of “well it’s a kaiju movie, of course the human characters suck!” This feels like a total cop-out though, because not only are there several good human characters in the long history of the Godzilla and Kong franchises, but we had a solid human cast in Godzilla 2014. Think about it – we don’t get any giant monsters until about forty minutes in and Godzilla himself doesn’t show up until nearly an hour has passed. The humans have to hold up the entirety of that first hour and the film doesn’t suffer because of it – can you imagine that with one of the more recent Monsterverse movies? So what happened? How did we get from the grounded human drama of Godzilla 2014 to the melodrama and camp of the latter-Monsterverse? Let’s examine each of these movies in turn and see how the human characters were handled there.
Oh, and in case it wasn’t obvious?
Alright, with that said, let’s get into this…
Godzilla (2014)
At the time of its release, one of the big controversies with Godzilla 2014 (which I’m just going to refer to as “Godzilla” from here on for simplicity’s sake) was that Bryan Cranston’s Joe Brody shouldn’t have been killed off and that they should have killed the film’s actual main character, Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Ford Brody, instead. The reasoning for this is because Joe was a far more compelling character than Ford, which is hard to deny – he’s a broken man driven to self-destructive obsession to try to understand the unexplained nuclear reactor meltdown which killed his wife a decade and a half ago. There’s some good family drama early on where he and Ford reluctantly reconnect and try to uncover what caused the reactor disaster. Cranston puts his everything into this role, and the writing is interesting enough to carry the film on its own long before any kaiju appears on-screen. However, as soon as the first MUTO emerges and Joe dies, Ford takes over and is characterized as a dull, lawful good soldier. I can see how this would be a big come-down from Joe’s more compelling characterization, but I feel like this was an underrated narrative decision which ultimately made Godzilla a stronger film overall.
The best and most distinctive part of Godzilla is that it frames the kaiju action at a human level. The monsters are enormous, rarely able to fit into the frame and they are so gargantuan and unstoppable that the lives and cares of humans are unworthy of their attention. Some of the most memorable scenes in this film are just random humans trying to survive the destruction going on around them, with the audience’s full understanding that it is all unintentional collateral damage. For example, the tsunami in Hawaii or Godzilla going through the Golden Gate Bridge aren’t particularly crucial moments in the plot, but they get so much focus because they show the scale of the devastation that these monsters can unintentionally cause from a human perspective. In this kind of narrative, you need someone on the ground level who would have to be in the vicinity of the monsters in order to progress the story and Ford works perfectly in this regard. Think about it – what would Joe have done to improve the plot if he didn’t die? He’s not a soldier; at most he would be working with Monarch to try to stop the MUTOs. In order to keep Joe in this film, we would either require more dull expository scenes with Monarch (which would hurt this film’s pacing), or he’d have to be awkwardly shunted to the background of the film in order to preserve the narrative direction. Ultimately, killing him off was the most efficient solution – unfortunate, but necessary to preserve the pacing of the narrative.
On the other side of the narrative, we have Ken Watanabe as Dr. Serizawa. He isn’t really a main character per se, instead acting as more of a mouthpiece to deliver exposition and, perhaps unintentionally, deliver memes straight to the audience. He’s in the movie just enough to let us know what’s going on and who we should be rooting for, but he doesn’t make a huge impression. He’s functional and unobtrusive.
That said, Godzilla‘s biggest sin would be how badly it wastes Elizabeth Olsen’s Elle Brody. Like… seriously? You got Elizabeth Olsen (who had just received critical acclaim for Martha Marcy May Marlene and was poised for superstardom in the MCU) and then trapped her in a forgettable role as Ford’s wife. She barely even appears in the movie, but there’s no good reason for this to be the case. She’s a freaking nurse caught in the big showdown in San Francisco, you’re telling me you can’t find something for her to do? Especially in the early hours of the attack in San Francisco, before Ford is even on-site, she should be treating victims, avoiding falling buildings, etc.
Godzilla‘s human characters aren’t the most compelling out there, but you can see that they’re interesting enough to carry a good chunk of the film by themselves and provide a strong narrative grounding which only serves to make the overall film stronger. The monsters are still the main draw, but the humans don’t feel like they’re actively robbing us of anything interesting. It strikes by far the best balance in the entire Monsterverse and looking back it really is shocking how bad the human characters have become in comparison.
Kong: Skull Island
Kong: Skull Island starts out promisingly enough, introducing us to a large and colourful cast of human characters. They’re all clear archetypes (Tom Hiddleston’s your action hero, Brie Larson’s your tough leading lady, Samuel L. Jackson’s your Vietnam squad leader, John Goodman’s your shady, desperate scientist), but they’re interesting enough to give us people to care about and get the plot moving forward. The problem with Skull Island is that these characters don’t really go anywhere beyond these basic archetypes. Once the characters end up on Skull Island, they have little to no development to speak of, with the only real exception being that Samuel L. Jackson’s Preston Packard goes kill-crazy (which is particularly notable because it is implied to be due to PTSD from the Vietnam War which leads to this breakdown, providing some well-trodden political commentary on the film’s 70s backdrop). The lack of development is particularly disappointing with Tom Hiddleston’s Conrad and Brie Larson’s Weaver – you’d think they’d at least give their leading duo something to do other than just look cool, but nope.
Luckily, Kong manages to get away with having such a disposable human cast by treating them as, well, disposable. The cast gets quickly whittled down one-by-one in fun ways at a quick pace. Like Godzilla, Kong: Skull Island wastes several of its talented actors, but I’m less annoyed about it here because Kong seems to understand the how high-profile its cast is and revels in killing them off unexpectedly. If anyone feels truly wasted it would be John Goodman, but he gets a funny and memorable death which helps make up for it. That’s not even mentioning Shea Whigham who, as a recent viral tweet stated, has one of the funniest death scenes ever. It almost feels like a disrespectful way to off one of the most colourful characters in the film, but it’s so funny that it is hard to hold it against the movie.
Kong also has one ace up its sleeve in the human character department and that’s John C. Reilly’s Hank Marlowe. He gets by far the most interesting characterization as a World War II fighter pilot who gets stranded on the island with a Japanese soldier and is instantly endearing to us with his fun personality, capability and desperation to get home to his wife and son who has hasn’t seen in almost thirty years. Seeing him reuniting with his family at the end is surprisingly poignant for a film that is almost entirely breakneck-paced action up to that point.
Kong: Skull Island represents the best and worst of human characters in a kaiju film. On the one hand, the cast is undeveloped and exist mainly to be killed off in fun ways, but on the other hand they’re just interesting enough to carry the plot forward, shuffle us along to a lot of entertaining action sequences and don’t feel like they’re detracting us from the good stuff (Kong kicking ass). While developing a couple more cast members would make the narrative resonate more, this is around the baseline of what you could consider “acceptable” for a broad-appeal adventure movie.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters
The number one complaint about Godzilla was that the title monster didn’t show up nearly enough. King of the Monsters came along to try to right that, but the end result leaves me so mixed. On the one hand, this is a fundamentally flawed film, but it might be my favourite entry in the Monsterverse and is the best 5/10 movie I’ve ever seen by far. At the very center of King of the Monsters‘ flaws are those human characters, which are probably the worst in the franchise in some ways.
King of the Monsters has more of an epic, globe-trotting scale compared to Godzilla‘s grounded and human-level scope. This necessitates a larger cast of soldiers and scientists who are constantly giving exposition dumps to explain what big disaster is going on at any one time, which they make sure to constantly update us on. As if this wasn’t enough by itself, we also have family melodrama between Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga and Millie Bobbie Brown (I could not tell you their actual characters’ names for the life of me), who are caught up in a bio-terrorist plot to unleash monsters across the world. This family drama has the potential to be compelling – their son was killed in the attack on San Francisco and it has caused them to grow estranged from each other. Kyle Chandler blames Godzilla for his son’s death and wants to destroy all the monsters, whereas Vera Farmiga uses their loss as motivation to try to save the world. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t explore their relationship any further than that. There’s just no time for human drama with all the action going on and it ends up serving as a way to have a fractured family caught on opposite sides of the conflict.
Serizawa also returns to lead the scientists and he’s about as functional here as he was there. His heroic sacrifice resonates because we’re familiar with the character and he seems like a good person who wants to do the right thing, although he still isn’t very well-developed. As for the rest of the characters, they are a bunch of nobodies. Like, don’t get me wrong, there’s a bunch of people we see a whole lot on the Argo: the lady commander/pilot, the smart alec, O’Shea Jackson Jr.’s soldier character, and probably a couple other nobodies that I’m forgetting because they were all so pointless. Oh and Sally Hawkins reprises her role from the first movie as well, but she was so forgettable there that I didn’t even realize she wasn’t in this as a stunt-casting due to her role in The Shape of Water. Oh, and she gets unceremoniously stepped on early in the film, making her character’s entire existence feel even more hollow.
Unlike Kong: Skull Island, King of the Monsters sticks to Godzilla‘s more serious tone, making these characters all just so dull to watch and entirely forgettable. For example, there’s the scene where Rodan flies over a Mexican town, destroying it from the hurricane-force winds created by his passing. Conceptually, it’s similar to the scene in Godzilla where Godzilla comes ashore in Hawaii and unintentionally creates a tidal wave which wipes out the entire downtown sector, but far less exciting because the film doesn’t bother to make us care about anyone on the ground. Like, they throw O’Shea Jackson and a kid into the scene, but at this point I don’t even know a thing about this soldier and this kid literally just showed up out of nowhere. Not only that, but we don’t even get a proper resolution. One second we see O’Shea Jackson desperately holding onto this kid and then like five minutes later we find out that they’re all fine, not that any of us were wondering anyway. To make matters worse, King of the Monsters does a fantastic job of giving all the monsters distinct personalities. Hell, King Ghidorah’s individual heads have more interesting characterization than anyone in this movie! Worst of all? The human characters actively take up time which should be dedicated to the monsters fighting, especially in the second half of the film. The two most egregious examples are when Rodan and King Ghidorah are fighting and suddenly the film cuts away to dumb drama aboard the Argo and when we get just one shot of Ghidorah wrecking downtown Washington D.C. That’s the kind of moment where some ground-level scenes of destruction could go a long way, but King of the Monsters‘ scope is planted so firmly on its epic, globe-spanning scale that it can’t even take the time to linger on this before zipping the plot ahead to the next big event. Again, I like King of the Monsters and in some ways I think it’s the ideal Hollywood blockbuster interpretation of a kaiju movie, but the human characters are by far its greatest weakness, to the point of being actively detrimental to the whole experience.
Godzilla vs. Kong
I was nervous going into Godzilla vs. Kong, but after seeing the first trailer I was reassured that they had learned one lesson – even if the human characters inevitably sucked, they had pulled off a masterstroke by making Kong the film’s true leading character and emotional core. That said, some studio head out there decided that there still have to be human characters in this movie, and these are a tale of two halves…
For the Kong half of the film, we get Alexander Skarsgård as Nathan Lind, Rebecca Hall as Ilene Andrews and Kaylee Hottle as Jia. They’re all functional at best and serve little more purpose than to drive the plot forward (Lind has researched the hollow earth, and they need Kong to guide them there) or provide a connection to Kong (Andrews is the top researcher on Kong and Jia has bonded with Kong to the point of being able to communicate with him). This half of the film also features Eiza González in an obviously-villainous corporate underling role as she funds their expedition to the hollow earth, but she similarly has little in the way of development or interesting motivation, you just sit there waiting for her sudden but inevitable betrayal. Like most people in the Monsterverse, the humans in this half of the film are purely functional – not actively detrimental or disruptive, but about as uninteresting as you’d expect from a film like this… so better than King of the Monsters, at least.
Speaking of which, that brings us to the Godzilla half of the film, which is centered around Millie Bobby Brown’s returning character, Madison, along with her friend and a bumbling conspiracy theorist who unearth a sinister conspiracy afoot at Apex Cybernetics… and good God, this is by far the worst set of characters we’ve gotten in the entire Monsterverse. Godzilla vs. Kong makes the interesting decision of dialing back on the po-faced seriousness of Godzilla and King of the Monsters and instead goes for a campier tone. This is an sensible idea for a monster movie, since they are intended to be a breezy fun time, but the camp is cranked to the max whenever this trio is on-screen to the point of being grating. It’s to the point of being cartoonish, as these three clowns bumble their way into Apex Cybernetics, somehow avoiding detection the entire way, until they come face-to-face with the moustache-twirling corporate villain. This half of the film also suffers from two egregious sins (actually let’s make that three – Jessica Henwick was cast but cut from the final film, what the fuck movie!?). The first is that poor Kyle Chandler is completely wasted, relegated to little more than a cameo role. A familiar face would have done wonders and I struggle to see how you couldn’t have worked him into the plot in a more substantial manner. The second sin is that the bad guy’s main henchman is freaking Ren Serizawa, the son of Ken Watanabe’s Dr. Serizawa, and the film doesn’t play this fact up at all. Hell, he even dies unceremoniously, making the entire existence of this character pointless. Like, at that point why not just make him a nameless goon? Or just fold his role into that of the main bad guy? I don’t understand this decision and all I can think is that there was significant chunks of story cut out in the final film which may have expanded on his role.
So Godzilla vs. Kong has one set of characters who are functional at best and another set that I actively wish would die. This might have been a crippling flaw for the film but, like I said at the outset, Godzilla vs. Kong downplays this issue by making Kong the true main character. This provides what should be a blueprint for future Monsterverse films where they won’t feel like they have to saddle us with boring or annoying humans and instead focus on the monsters directly. That said, I would like to see a return to what made the first Godzilla film so successful, where the action is shown from ground level with humans scrambling just to survive. King of the Monsters already put the stakes about as high as they can realistically get, so I feel like trying to maintain that kind of scope just isn’t sustainable and instead the right course of action is to lean into the human stakes instead. I really enjoy the Monsterverse and it would be great to see this franchise continue and improve as time goes on
Welcome back to the 2000AD Humble Bundle round-up! I’ve finally gotten a chance to sink my teeth into the rest of this comic book overload and have plenty of thoughts to share. If you missed part one then I would definitely recommend checking it out before reading this. With that said though, let’s dive right back in with a real banger…
Judge Anderson: The Psi Files
Judge Dredd may be the poster-boy for 2000AD but I’d argue that Judge Anderson is the far more compelling judge character. Bizarrely, the Humble Bundle only includes volume two of Judge Anderson: The Psi Files, but luckily it is a compelling snapshot into what makes this character so great. The volume picks up in the wake of the tragic suicide of one of Judge Anderson’s friends and her final words haunt her throughout the entirety of the book: “People with gifts like ours shouldn’t use them for ugly things.” Unlike Dredd, Judge Anderson sees the judges for what they really are, oppressive fascists who make life worse for everyone and questions her role in propping up this system. The social commentary is pointed, including a story which is a blatant Rodney King analogy and which is just as relevant today and another which equates the judges with the Roman legionnaires who persecuted the early Christians. This refusal to just play along makes Anderson a far more radical and personable character, to the point where she abandons her post and goes on a soul-searching journey for the rest of the book. Anderson and the villainous Orlok the Assassin start to have a complicated relationship during this period as well, which is as unlikely as it is intriguing to see play out. The lengthy, serialized nature of the stories makes The Psi Files less focused than, say, Halo Jones (for example, the first third of the book is steeped in Christian imagery before suddenly switching to a story about freaking ancient aliens), but it’s still impressive that this collection is as coherent as it is.
Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files
Of the books included in the Humble Bundle, the Judge Dredd case files were the only ones I had already read and I knew that they, by themselves, were well worth the $20 asking price several times over. The bundle includes the first five volumes and there are several all-time classics in these pages. While there are far two many good stories to list them all, especially notable are the series’ signature “mega-epics”, including such monumental stories as “The Cursed Earth” and “The Day the Law Died” in volume two, “The Judge Child” in volume four and the eye-wateringly epic “Block Mania” and “The Apocalypse War” in volume five (an event so momentous in the history of Judge Dredd that we’re still feeling the effects of it over 40 years later). Honestly, I’m underselling just how amazing these stories are because I just want you to go ahead and get them for yourself – they’re seriously that good!
Kingdom
Oh hey, another story from the mind of Dan Abnett! Kingdom is a far different beast than Abnett’s other story in this bundle, Brink. Set in a world where giant insects have taken over the world, most of humanity has gone into cryo-sleep to allow genetically modified dog soldiers to win the war in their stead. We follow Gene the Hackman, an alpha male dog soldier who loses his pack and begins wandering around the world trying to repel Them. As you can probably tell, Kingdom is full of dog/soldier pop culture references, to the point where the giant insect antagonists are literally called “Them“. The story is also loaded with dramatic irony, largely revolving around the fact that Gene is kind of an idiot – like, he’s cunning but his understanding of the world is incredibly limited and he generally doesn’t bother to expand his horizons. In a particularly funny example, one of his dog soldier companions is put down for being too old to fight and a human tells Gene that he was taken away to a nice farm where he can run around and enjoy himself, a lie which Gene references throughout the series as a place he’d like to visit someday. This wry humour helps to keep Kingdom from getting too grimdark and makes it consistently enjoyable, while Abnett’s writing keeps the story engaging. There are four whole volumes of Kingdom in this bundle and by the time I got to the second one I was hooked. The scope becomes more expansive and complex as it goes, but my one main complaint would be that Abnett has a bad habit of resetting the cast of supporting characters at the start of each volume, which is more annoying and frustrating than anything.
Mazeworld
Mazeworld is an intriguing self-contained story from Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson, the duo responsible for some of the best stories from volume two of Judge Anderson. Mazeworld largely succeeds due to its protagonist Adam Cadman, an unrepentant asshole on death row who learns to work with others and become a hero when he is transported to the titular Mazeworld. Cadman himself doesn’t change that much, merely his perception of himself – in Mazeworld he’s seen as a hero and so he attempts to live up to that reputation. The world itself is interesting, being built up of several mazes which the local populace lack the complete (or true) maps to, which helps the maze-lords keep control over them and Arthur Ranson’s art utilizes Aztec architecture which gives it an exotic and unconventional feel. However, the world itself isn’t particularly well sketched out, especially compared to a similar sort of high-concept fantasy setting like Brass Sun. The finale is also pretty underwhelming, it feels like Alan Grant wanted to make this a limited series and as a result rushed the ending instead of getting there naturally. The ending itself is certainly appropriate, but I feel like it could have been more satisfying if they had given it a bit more room to breathe. Still, Mazeworld‘s a fun, short read that leaves you feeling better about the potential of humankind.
Scarlet Traces
We’re back with another Ian Edginton story, one which I’ve actually read a bit of in 2000AD already – Scarlet Traces, which acts as a companion piece, and eventually sequel, to The War of the Worlds. Featuring art from D’Israeli (for my money, one of the most distinctive artists at 2000AD), the humble bundle collects the first volume of the story along with Edginton and D’Israeli’s graphic novel adaptation of The War of the Worlds. This adaptation is fairly faithful to the source, if somewhat truncated, although it loses a lot of its literary significance in translation. That said, the first part of Scarlet Traces captures the sinister anti-colonial elements of the original novel far better, giving us a nice little pulp mystery which takes on a shockingly bleak and tragic tone as it goes along. Unfortunately, volume one ends just as things are getting truly interesting. There is a second volume available which I’ve purchased and I’ve already followed some of the newer issues in 2000AD, so I know this is a story that I’m really into but just be aware that the single volume in the bundle is but a tease of how good Scarlet Traces really is.
Shakara
Shakara is bonkers. To set the tone, the first page of the book has humanity and the Earth being destroyed unceremoniously, while the last surviving human, a defiant, would-be “hero”, has his head crushed in humiliating fashion just pages later. That’s barely scratching the surface of how insane Shakara gets though. The story follows a bio-mechanical alien who is basically John Wick in space, cranked up to 11. Like… seriously, everything about Shakara is so over the top that it’s brilliant. I’m talking over-the-top aliens (one species is basically a spinal column in a vat, another is a gaunt creature with a giant floating eyeball for a head, while yet another is a sentient dwarf galaxy), impossible planetoids and imaginative spacecraft (one psionic species literally flies around in giant brains). The out-there denizens of the story match just how insane the story itself is. The first act follows the titular Shakara as he interrupts galactic-scale atrocities and takes on entire armies single-handedly in his quest for vengeance. The second act has a team of equally over-the-top assassins being brought together to hunt down and kill Shakara. The third act has every mercenary in the freaking galaxy coming after Shakara… again, it’s basically like John Wick, with the story and world slowly being doled out over time. I love it, it’s such a joy to read and each panel just gets more and more imaginative as it goes along. Like many of these stories there’s a second volume available outside the Humble Bundle and you know I snatched that up before I had even finished the first volume.
Sláine
From what I understand, Sláine is something of a big deal in 2000AD, to the point where he has his own entire tab in the graphic novels section of the webstore. He’s basically an Irish version of Conan the Barbarian and has been with 2000AD since the 80s. I’ve never really read any of his stuff before now and… hoo boy, I have to say that I was really not into it. The Humble Bundle has two Sláine graphic novels included in it. The first is Warrior’s Dawn, a collection of Sláine’s original adventures which sees the titular character and his dwarf companion Ukko trying to make their way back north to reunite with Sláine’s love, Niamh. Warrior’s Dawn is… fine. It’s typical barbarian fantasy fare, with most of the entertainment coming from the constant bickering between the meat-headed Sláine and the unscrupulous Ukko.
If Warrior’s Dawn was the only Sláine story in the Humble Bundle then I would have been unimpressed, but the graphic novel entitled Book of Invasions vol. 1 completely turned me off all things Sláine. Set sometime looong after Warrior’s Dawn, Sláine has gone from a pulpy adventure story to thoroughly-unenjoyable, grimdark seriousness. It’s just so damn cliché, basically coasting off its grimdark tone and art style to try to appeal, but it did not work for me at all. Clint Langley’s art really leaves me mixed – on the one hand it has some of the most detailed and impressive work in the entire bundle. Langley’s style reminds me of Chrisopher Shy’s gorgeous work on the Dead Space graphic novels, not to mention that his work for Warhammer 40,000 is some of my favourite and really captures the horror of that setting well. However, there are times in Sláine where it is just ugly and feels like too much. When Sláine has a “warp-spasm” (translation: he hulks out) his muscles are exaggerated to such a ridiculous degree that I had to laugh at how stupid his tiny torso looked in comparison. To be fair, his warp-spasms have always looked stupid even in Warrior’s Dawn, but here they really clash with the more serious tone. It also does not help that the story itself is just a bunch of boring, grimdark barbarian clichés. Like, oh no, the demon army is only invading because they delight in raping the women and killing the children, how awful! The council of elders are dumb cowards, the only power that matters in this world is the sword and overwhelming violence! And spoiler alert, can you believe that Sláine goes on his quest for vengeance because the demons rape and murder his wife, Niamh? To make matters even worse, Ukko is basically shunted away in this story, so we don’t even get any sort of entertaining banter. Maybe Book of Invasions is just a shitty starting point to get into Sláine, but frankly I’m completely turned off by it. Like… at least I turned around on Bec & Kawl a bit by the end, Sláine was just a slog for me from start to finish. Book of Invasions is easily the worst story in the bundle and Warrior’s Dawn wasn’t much better. Maybe it’s just a matter of taste, but Sláine did not work for me at all.
Zenith
Oh hey it’s another comic from an industry legend, Grant Morrison (who, I was recently informed by some dumbass on Twitter, sucks donkey balls… oh hey, and then another Twitter user informed me Morrison recently came out as non-binary, cool! As a result, I will be using they/them pronouns as they have requested). Zenith is a straight-up superhero comic, which is very unusual in the sci-fi and fantasy-dominated pages of 2000AD, and the Humble Bundle collects all four volumes of the story. It’s obvious that Phase One was written in the wake of industry titans Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, having been published just over a year after both landmark comics came out and shook up superhero narratives forever. It bears some resemblance to Watchmen in its narrative, taking place in an alternate-history timeline where superhumans fought on both sides of World War II, where an atomic bomb was dropped on Berlin and where the superheroes of the 60s have become washed-up shells of their former selves. The only hero still active is the titular Zenith, the only third-generation superhuman who happens to be a selfish, yuppie arsehole more interested in furthering his music career than helping people.
The most interesting thing in Zenith is the world Grant Morrison has created for his story. Finding out about the backstory of the first superhero, Maximan, learning about the second generation of heroes who refused to be tools of the government and instead joined the hippy movement, discovering that the second generation of superheroes have been lying about losing their powers, etc – personally I found this more interesting than the actual A-plot about Zenith dealing with life as a reluctant hero. The side-characters tend to be more interesting than Zenith as well. Washed-up superhero Siadwell Rhys (aka Red Dragon) spends most of Phase One an alcoholic, but Zenith helps to get him off the bottle and into fighting form to deal with a superpowered Nazi… only for him to instantly get one-shotted when they finally do battle. It’s a shocking and tragic moment because by that point Morrison had really gotten me to like Rhys before cruelly snatching him away. Peter St John (aka Mandala) is also fascinating in what he represents. Powers-wise he’s basically Mysterio and he was the ultimate hippy figure during the 60s. However, by the time Zenith takes place, he has fallen so far from his ideals that he has become a key politician in Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government! These generational commentaries are very clear throughout Zenith and are perhaps the most interesting aspect of the stories in my opinion.
All that said, the story starts to go a bit off the rails by the end of the second volume. Suddenly the story involves superheroes from hundreds of alternate dimensions teaming up to defeat the Lovecraftian Old Ones (literally, they name-drop them on a few occasions) and there are several dimension jumps, entire universes being destroyed and a bunch of new characters to keep track of. The art can also make it really hard to understand what’s going on, but Phase Three does give us a couple good twists and a brilliant splash panel of a robot riding a smiley face dinosaur into battle (which is as awesome as it sounds, even if it’s basically pointless in the actual story). Unfortunately, it also ends with an awful trans panic joke, which isn’t unusual for a comic written back in the 80s, but it’s disappointing none-the-less. Meanwhile, Phase Four is a disappointing conclusion. It finally reveals “The Plan” which has been teased for four whole volumes and it’s far more conventional than I had expected. This volume also tease a End of Evangelion-style apocalypse but doesn’t commit to it. Perhaps worst of all, Phase Four continues to just have Zenith as a passive actor within a story that is obstinately his own, making the whole endeavour feel kind of pointless. Zenith is just… strange. If you already know and like Grant Morrison then it might resonate with you, but I find it to be more interesting as a curiosity of a bygone era and a writer stretching himself rather than as a piece of entertainment on its own merits.
Zombo
Zombo wastes no time. Within a couple pages it has already set up its world, story and demonstrated its morbid sense of humour… which is to say that I dig it. The deadpan, dark humour is what really makes Zombo stand out. Sure, like any good piece of zombie media it’s loaded with gore, but how many other zombie stories have a half-human, half-zombie who asks if he can eat you? Zombo scratches the same sort of itch that Metalocalypse does for me, with stories about people getting stranded on a death world getting eviscerated in humourous ways, a suicide cult trying to make their deaths trend on a snuff version of Youtube, a half-zombie, half-bee hybrid called… Zom-bee, and Zombo having to fight his evil twin using the backup brain that’s been built into his ass. For all its dumb thrills though there’s some interesting commentary about putting too much trust in the government and an intriguing concept about the universe consciously pushing back against unchecked human expansion. The Humble Bundle collects the two volumes of graphic novels which have been released so far. I liked the first quite a bit and the second is also good but the second story in the second volume leans way too heavily on the same sort of referential humour that I hated in Bec & Kawl and really soured me on the whole thing. That said, if there was a third Zombo volume I probably would have bought it, so they clearly are doing something right.
And that does it for the stories in this Humble Bundle! There are definitely some great stories here and even at full price I’d recommend several of them wholeheartedly. That said, because I have an obsessive compulsion with ranking the things that I consume, here’s how I’d rank each collection in this bundle. Think of it as a quick-and-dirty recommendation list:
Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files
The Ballad of Halo Jones
Shakara!
Brink
Judge Anderson: The Psi Files
Absalom
Brass Sun
Kingdom
Scarlet Traces (This rank based purely on the limited volumes in the Humble Bundle; if I was counting the continued volumes then this would surely rank higher.)
Defoe 1666
2000 AD‘s Greatest: Celebrating 40 Years of Thrill-Power!
Back in mid-2019 I wrote an article about how I thought that Death Note, popularly considered one of the best anime out there, was kind of trash. It was disappointing – I love the premise but after the first few episodes it drops off a cliff and becomes a slog. Well, back then I wasn’t really expecting this to turn into a new series for the blog but I spent 2020 slogging through another piece of wildly popular media and I’ve got to say… The Witcher 3 is kind of trash. I happen to be writing this while Cyberpunk 2077 backlash is in full swing and I often hear the refrain “Someday Cyberpunk will be as good as The Witcher 3!”… which makes me not want to play it at all. There’s so much stuff that I low-key hate about this game which I really need to get off my chest, because I don’t understand why people are so enamoured with it.
The Open World
First off, the big new feature for The Witcher 3 was its open world and I have to admit that it truly is massive, sporting one enormous map for Novigrad, Oxenfurt and Velen, separate open maps for the Skellige Isles and Kaer Morhen (and Toussaint in the DLC), plus a couple smaller maps for White Orchard and Vizima. It’s an overwhelming amount of ground to cover and while I can understand why someone would be excited by this, it’s where some of my first issues with the came come in. First of all, open world fatigue has well and truly set in in the past few years, but I had already gotten sick of most open worlds by the start of 2011 with Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. That’s the game that made me realize that, in most games, open world traversal sucks. Spending most of your playtime just trying to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible is such a boring gameplay loop and it was bad enough that I dropped Brotherhood (which I was otherwise enjoying) entirely. Since then I’ve often found myself getting tired of open world games with sluggish, restrictive and downright boring traversal options, to the point where I tend to avoid the genre entirely since you’re spending at least half your playtime just putting yourself through tedium in order to get to something interesting. Fallout 4, Far Cry Primal, even Metal Gear Solid V (which I loved at the time, but having to sneak past the same two or three boring outposts to get to any objective was frustrating) have left me tired by the end with me just begging to be able to reach my objectives and end the damn game already without dealing with endless open world bullshit. Compare this to Gravity Rush, a game where the act of moving from place to place is, in itself, a total joy. I hear that Spider-man captures a similar experience with its web-slinging mechanics – I haven’t played it so I can’t confirm, but I just offer these as examples of how getting from place to place can be fun in itself in an open world game rather than a constant, frustrating obstacle.
…which brings me to The Witcher 3. After the first couple hours soaking in the beauty of new location have worn out their welcome, traversal becomes boring at best and infuriating at worst. Need to get to an objective directly on the other side of a mountain range? Better hope you have found a fast-travel point that’s only, like, 600m away from the objective or you’re going to be stuck with two unappealing options – either ride your horse around the mountains or cross your fingers and hope that the game will allow you to climb over the mountain. Of course, if you choose to climb then the game will also force you do to this at walking speed and if you fall off the mountain you’ll die and have to do the whole thing over again after a lengthy loading screen. How fun! Sailing is also painfully slow, but nowhere near as slow as trying to swim from place to place. Better hope your boat doesn’t get sunk in the middle of the seas around Skellige!
To make matters worse, you’re likely to come across some manner of annoying enemy on your way from point A to point B. Random attacks by bandits, wolf packs, sirens, etc can make the world feel a bit more alive, but good God they quickly become a waste of time to encounter. I usually just moan and run away from wolves as fast as possible, but enemies like the sirens basically have to be fought because otherwise they’ll sink your boat and cause you even more wasted time. It can be thrilling if you come across a monster several levels stronger than you are since at least they’ll offer some challenge, but these are rare occurrences (unless you’re going out of your way to punish yourself).
On top of that, the open world in this game is loaded with points of interest marked on the map with a “?”. These things are a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it can be enjoyable and satisfying tracking these all down and filling up your map. Some of them are even super useful, such as the Place of Power spots. Unfortunately, most of these are open world busywork at best, or useless bullshit at worst. The majority of the points of interest are monster dens, bandit camps, hidden treasure and the like, which require you to hunt down a nearby cache or slay some bandits or monsters in order to get some rewards. Unfortunately, these rewards lose any sort of value within a few hours of gameplay. They don’t scale with your level so you’re going to be pocketing hundreds upon hundreds of useless weapons and armour which exist only to be broken down into parts or sold to merchants in order to get yourself a bunch of gold (which is, in itself, pretty useless as well once you’ve stocked up a few thousand crowns). Maybe the intent is that players aren’t supposed to try to complete all these points of interest and I’d even recommend looking up the Places of Power and skipping the rest, but I cannot stop going to them. I just have this obsessive compulsion to uncover every point of interest on my map and I don’t know which are useful and which aren’t so I don’t want to miss any. Skellige was the point where this hit its absolute worst, as there are dozens of identical smugglers’ caches hidden in the water, meaning that you have to sail for literal hours around the islands, killing sirens over and over again just to get a bunch of useless items that you’re just going to sell anyway. CD Projekt RED, sometimes less is more – cut the useless bullshit out, please. I get that this is partly my problem, but I really can’t help it and if CD Projekt RED are going to put such worthless content into their game then they deserve to take shit for it.
Inventory Management
Like I just said, 99.9% of the loot you get in this game is worthless crap. I mean, sure, you can sell it for coin that you have no practical use for after a few hours or break it down into crafting components which you’ll quickly be drowning in. It also doesn’t help that the vast majority of the loot you find in the world is clearly procedurally generated, uninteresting guff that exists just to fill out the world. Beyond this, the overabundance of loot leads to two big issues. First, it makes acquiring loot at the end of a quest or out in the open world feel unrewarding and nothing more than a boring chore. If I complete a quest and get a cool sword, I’d like to be able to use it, not go “oh, this is way weaker than the sword I crafted 10 hours ago”. Secondly, this contributes to this game’s frustrating inventory management. Most of this stems from the restrictive encumbrance mechanic. Like many annoying RPGs, a good chunk of your playtime in The Witcher 3 is going to be spent running back and forth to merchants because the loot you picked up put you one point over your encumbrance threshold and now you suddenly have to walk slowly across the world map. This just makes the traversal issues and unrewarding loot that much more frustrating, and this is compounded even more when you consider that encumbrance is totally arbitrary. Sure, some people may say “it’s more realistic!” or “it’s for immersion!” but both of those arguments are shot right out the window when Geralt can comfortably run around with dozens of swords, armour sets and saddles but then that one last flower pushes him over the edge. That doesn’t even take into account that several items don’t even have an effect on encumbrance, such as the hundreds of pieces of food that Geralt can carry at once.
To make matters worse, The Witcher 3 also features a weapon degradation system, because you weren’t spending enough time in your inventory already. On the one hand, I could see this being somewhat useful if the game was set up in such a way where degradation would force you to use other weapons until your favourites get repaired, but that just isn’t the case at all. After the first hour you’re almost always going to have a dozen weapon and armour repair kits on hand, not to mention that you can just go to a blacksmith and pay to get your gear fixed – it’s one of the few things actually worth paying gold for. Again, you could argue that this is about realism or immersion, but it’s just not fun. It’s not common enough to actually affect gameplay in any significant manner, which means that it’s nothing more than a pointless chore the game makes you go through. Seriously, just drop it, weapon degradation systems always suck.
Combat
Which brings us to the combat in this game. The Witcher 3 drowns you in options right out the gate. Not only do you have your actual sword fighting skills, but you also have access to five signs (aka, minor spells), a crossbow and an ever-growing collection of potions with varying effects. These are all improved as the game goes on, with you being able to put skill points into new techniques and upgrades for whatever abilities you want to focus on. Me? I put all my points into sword damage buffs and upgrading my favourite signs. These upgrades never felt particularly significant to me – like, sure, 25% more damage from sword attacks is probably making a difference, but I can’t say that I actually feel it. It wasn’t really until I got the charged heavy attack that I really felt like an upgrade was actually changing my playstyle any. It also doesn’t help that some options are just broken. The Quen sign in particular is so OP that it not only makes combat boring but makes me play lazily and treat it like a crutch. The very first upgrade gives you a one-hit shield which blasts back enemies and recharges quickly. This means that every fight I get into starts with me casting Quen, dealing damage and then taking a hit, backing off for two seconds til Quen recharges and then casting again. Rinse and repeat. Sure, there are other options available, such as buffing your potions (and spending even more time on inventory management!), getting limited-use out of new melee techniques, or applying damage buff oils to your weapons but… like, why? Unless you’re stupidly under-levelled against a tough enemy, you can coast by on all the crutches this game gives you – and I call them that because when the game suddenly takes them away from you (such as in fist fights or Ciri segments) you realize you now need to remember how to parry effectively or you’re going to get annihilated.
It’s cool seeing Geralt spin around and decapitate foes for the first couple dozen hours, but the combat in this game is just not good enough to sustain itself over the course of a hundred plus hours. As I said before, I dread coming across packs of weak enemies because they’re such a waste of time to deal with and that’s because most fights are stupidly easy. You either get one- or two-shotted by enemies more than five levels above you or you’re massacring everyone with ease. If you play like I do and try to complete as many side-quests as you can, then you’re going to be insanely over-levelled with very little effort, making most of the game’s quests a slog to get through. Like… could they not have implemented a level-scaling system, or anticipated that players would actually play their content, or something? I’ve read elsewhere that I’m not the only one with this issue, it’s like the game’s difficulty was designed for you to be only playing main quests and doing even a couple side quests throws the difficulty curve out of whack. And note that I’m playing the game on Blood & Broken Bones difficulty, so it’s a step up from the standard difficulty. I haven’t played Death March, but considering how mind-numbingly boring B&BB is I can’t help but think that it won’t make the game much harder.
Writing
For what it’s worth, the writing in The Witcher 3 is by far the best part of the game. Long after I grew bored of the combat and open world, I was still hanging on because I wanted to see what would happen next. There are also some fantastic stories and characters within this game, particularly the “Bloody Baron”, who is a textbook example of how to write a charming, sympathetic monster, and many of the side-quests have fully fleshed out stories that make them worthwhile to grind through. However, even the writing begins to wear thin over time and test my patience.
Sometimes I’ll decide “fine, it’s time to start getting the main quest underway again” and you try to get the story moving… only for some stupid, random bullshit to happen in the plot which halts all momentum and you have to deal with before you can move on, even though it’s less important than several of the side quests in the game. One annoying example of this is on Skellige when the plot has finally moved on and you’re ready to leave the island, all that’s left is that a king needs to get crowned. So you’re ready for that to be decided when, uh… bears attack the kingsmoot. What the fuck? I should mention that this kingsmoot is taking place in a guarded castle atop a seaside spire, so when this army of bears attacks it’s truly baffling. Then you’ve got to solve a mystery about who unleashed the bears at the kingsmoot and the person you decide to support in the search ends up being the king. Man, I was done with Skellige when this happened and was just ready to move on, but then this happened out of nowhere and felt like an annoying, uninteresting shark-jump that the game was dropping in my lap just to make the game that much longer.
The worst example of this narrative padding is definitely what happens after you complete Dandelion’s doppler play. You spend hours getting a play put together so you can put out a message to an ally who has gone into hiding and it all goes off without a hitch, hooray! You find the ally, he gives you info about Ciri and now you’re ready to move on with the plot… except immediately afterward someone randomly attacks Dandelion’s girlfriend Priscilla and leaves her near death! Oh no! So once again you have to solve a mystery that comes out of nowhere and halts the actual progression of the plot, except in this case the writing is utter bullshit. Turns out there’s a serial killer who ritually murders prostitutes and makes a big scene of calling them whores. You have three suspects: a doctor with a history of violence, a shady coroner who the doctor doesn’t like and a fanatical priest of the Eternal Fire. You find clues about who the next victim is and, oh, looks like the killer doesn’t like people working against the church, imagine that. He kills an acquaintance of yours who has renounced the church and then you discover the name of his next victim, a prostitute. So you go to the brothel and, oh my God, it’s the priest there torturing her. You get the option to kill him, spare him or let him continue torturing her (!?!?!!), and obviously I’m going to kill him because he has to be our murderer, right? Wrong, turns out that it was the coroner and he was just masking his crimes by pretending to be a fanatic because he’s actually a vampire feeding on people. Umm, what the hell? I mean, I get that misdirection is difficult in a mystery but how do you make a red herring so bad that they end up being an entirely separate serial killer with an identical modus operandi? There’s no reason to assume that the coroner is responsible given the evidence that the game gives you, other than metagaming when the game allows you to spare the priest’s life because why would they let you do that unless he wasn’t the killer? The worst part is that when you think you completed the quest you’ll later find clues that the killer is still at large and Geralt basically just shrugs his shoulders and lets them keep at it. Like… dude, turns out one suspect was a different serial killer and you had only two other suspects, maybe look into that!? The fact that this doesn’t reopen the quest or open an alternate version of it is legitimately infuriating to me, I get that this game is complex and ambitious enough but this quest just shows weakness within the game’s structure and it would seriously be better off without it.
Bugs
The Witcher 3 was apparently a buggy mess at launch and while I would consider the bugs that remain in the game a fairly minor issue at this point, there are still several that will pop up in every playthrough that range from funny to infuriating when they happen. The worst one I encountered was this weird audio glitch that happens when you encounter the Crones of Crookback Bog, where the dialogue completely cuts out for like ten minutes, while you awkwardly read the text on screen and watch the crones pantomime to you about how evil they are. Worst of all, my PS4 crashed at one point and I had to restart my game from the beginning, so in two separate playthroughs this glitch happened… how is this still unpatched to this day? I also had one bug that happened repeatedly during the horse races – I would win the race quite handily, but when I crossed the finish line the game wouldn’t register it, forcing me to restart the game and redo the entire race six or seven times before it would finally register the win legitimately. I have no idea why this one was happening but it was maddening when it did.
Perhaps the most persistent and irritating bug though is that the swimming controls will randomly crap out at times, not allowing you to dive in the water. This is particularly annoying because if I’m in the water then odds are I’m only there because I’m diving for sunken treasure. When this happens, your only options are to climb back onto your ship and hope that that fixes the issue, fast travel to reload the world map, or just restart the game and cross your fingers. This is so goddamn annoying and just makes the already awful Skellige smugglers’ caches that much more of a slog to get through, because this issue happened to me multiple times in just that one section of the game.
Bloat
You may have noticed that there’s a running theme throughout all my issues with The Witcher 3 and that is simply that the game is bloated beyond belief. The open world is massive, but it seems to prioritize size and pretty vistas over actually being fun to explore over a hundred hour journey. The game showers you with loot, but when 99.9% of it is worthless it becomes nothing more than a chore to deal with. Combat gives you tons of options, but overpowered options make the rest redundant, the combat is ridiculously easy and it just can’t sustain itself over the game’s playtime. The writing has some truly great moments, but it just feels padded for nothing more than making the game even longer. I had a similar issue with Alien: Isolation, where the game felt like it had to force itself to be a bloated, twenty hour game when it would have been perfect as a tight, terrifying eight hour experience. All-in-all, The Witcher 3 is a game in serious need of content trimming and a tighter focus. I shouldn’t have to actively force myself to not engage in most of the content you’ve put into your game in order to find any sort of enjoyment with it.
At this point I’ve dropped The Witcher 3 after slogging through it over the course of a year. I’m only at Kaer Morhen now and I just can’t bring myself to play it again. Instead I’ve played the remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 3 and just started Hitman and the difference in enjoyment is palpable. Knowing that I can finish these games casually in a week or two is exciting in itself, not to mention that these are far better curated experiences that deliver greater levels of enjoyment in each play session. If I can give The Witcher 3 one big prop in spite of all this it’s that the game does offer hundreds of hours of playtime for like $20 – that’s a pretty insane value if you need to stretch your money out, but for my own part I’d like to actually get close to finishing a game I started.
But hey, at least Gwent was fun. If I ever do pick The Witcher 3 back up, it will probably be because I want to take part in the Gwent tournament. So that’s something at least.
This shot from a sex scene is one of the featured media screenshots on The Witcher 3‘s website. Seriously.
So How Would You Fix It, Smart Guy?
First off, if even a couple of my big issues with The Witcher 3 got addressed then it would make the experience much better overall, but we’ll go pie-in-the-sky and try to address them all here. Let’s start with the open world. Just due to the mechanics of the game, traversal is never going to be fun, so let’s at least make it less annoying. To that end, make fast travel points a bit more common and make random packs of enemies only really a concern if you’re going deep into the wilds off the main roads. Maybe make them scale in level as well so that they can be an actual obstacle. Similarly, I’d cut down on the useless “?” spots on the map (ESPECIALLY in Skellige), or just straight-up reveal what type of point of interest each is so you know whether to bother with it or not.
For the loot and inventory management, I’d want to make some sweeping changes. First of all, ditch encumbrance and weapon degredation. They suck and can never not suck until you remove them entirely. Secondly, let’s make the loot you get far more valuable. Cut down on the number of random items you can steal or loot from enemies significantly. Let weapons be upgradeable, with each level requiring you to get upgrade materials which you can craft and get the materials around the world map. This would allow reward weapons to actually be useful and could cut down on the number of useless items the game drowns you in. Plus it also means you don’t have to say goodbye to a favourite weapon when you outpace its damage output. Boom, all of a sudden inventory management is no longer a hassle, you actually can get some sort of satisfaction out of new items and it makes looting itself more rewarding because it’s helping you get something that can make your equipment better.
The combat in this game should be Monster Hunter-lite. I get that, conceptually, this is what the game is going for with its decoctions and oils, but they’re pointless compared to spamming signs. Make monster encounters something you have to actually plan for instead of just rushing headlong in like an idiot and suddenly combat would feel far more rewarding. Most importantly, introduce a level-scaling system to make enemy encounters more interesting.
For the writing, basically all that needs to be done is to trim down the padding in the main quest, or at the very least move these into the side-quests. As far as I’m concerned though, that serial killer quest needs to be completely reworked or cut out entirely. In any case, the sum total of these changes would result in the game’s annoyances being reduced or removed entirely, while its strengths are more up-front. It would also mean that the main game would likely be shorter, but if more side-quests were incentivized for the post-game then this would allow players more time to play the game the way they want without feeling like they have to or are missing anything. Given that the lack of urgency in spite of the game’s actual narrative is one of the main criticisms of The Witcher 3, I feel like it would make it a much better game.
This review has been a long time coming. Like, to put it into perspective, I tend to start drafts on my blog so that I remember ideas and am able to come back to them later. Sometimes they even get completed and get published here! Well, it was around seven years ago when I thought “hey, I love DOA: Dead or Alive and would love to write a review explaining why!” For whatever reason, that idea kept getting shoved back in favour of other ideas, but that draft has been sitting in here for literally years in various iterations, including two serious attempts to complete it that got shelved and the whole blog migration to WordPress. This also means that I have had to rewatch the film on several occasions whenever I planned on sitting down to work on this review.
Well, a few months ago I realized that I was rapidly closing in on my 300th blog post. Considering that I celebrated my 200th blog post with a review of DOAX3, what better time to finally get off my ass and review this movie? DOA: Dead or Alive is the best video game movie of all time and I’m going to explain why (yes, better than Detective Pikachu – no one is more shocked by that statement than me).
I remember seeing this film’s DVD cover in the local movie rental place when I was in high school… it looked identical to the covers of the porn DVDs nearby. That was obviously an intentional choice.
Production
After the box office success of the first two Resident Evil films, the producers of the first film, Paul W.S. Anderson, Jeremy Bolt and Bernd Eichinger, were eager to tap into the burgeoning video game adaptation gold rush and searched for the next big hit (funnily enough, of all the video game adaptations listed in production on that link, the only ones that would actually come out were DOA and Resident Evil: Extinction). Perhaps owing to Anderson’s success with the 1995 fighting game adaptation Mortal Kombat, the producers decided to give Dead or Alive a shot – after all, it was all about action sequences and sexy women, so it would surely draw out all the teenage boys, right? Also being brought on to help produce the film was Mark A. Altman, who had previously produced freaking House of the Dead (fighting The Howling 2 for the championship title of most insane film to ever make it into theatres).
Corey Yuen was brought on as the film’s director. Yuen was well-known for his impressive Hong Kong action films and fight choreography, and had just found success with Western audiences with The Transporter. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the lead actresses were all models: Devon Aoki (of Sin City and 2 Fast 2 Furious fame) was cast as Kasumi, Holly Valance (known for the soap opera Neighbours, Prison Break and… what, she was in Taken!? Oh shit, she was the pop singer Liam Neeson has to protect, of course!) was cast as Christie and Jaime Pressly (probably the biggest name in the main cast, best known for My Name is Earl) was cast as Tina Armstrong. The supporting cast are also filled with plenty of interesting actors. By far the most notable is professional wrestler Kevin Nash as Bass Armstrong. This was an absolutely perfect casting, he steals the show whenever he’s on screen. The film also has several notable character actors and B-movie stars, such as Matthew Marsen (who has been in many films, but was last seen on IC2S in Atlas Shrugged) as Max, Eric Roberts (here playing a discount John Carradine) as Donovan, and Natassia Malthe (a kick-ass Uwe Boll regular) as Ayane. Some relative unknowns were also cast in major roles, such as Sarah Carter as Helena Douglas, Steve Howey as Weatherby and Brian J. White as Zack (who plays the role to perfection). Rounding out the cast were a pair of martial artists, Collin Chou as Hayate and Kane Kosugi as Ryu Hayabusa (he’s fine for the role they wrote for him, but good God do not expect this Ryu to be anything like the demon-slaying badass from Ninja Gaiden or you are going to be disappointed).
Filming took place in various locations in China. Most of the cast had never played a Dead or Alive game before, although most checked it out during production (Matthew Marsden specifically acknowledged that he sucked at it). According to the “Making Of” featurette (which really sucks by the way, nearly half of it is uninterrupted footage from the movie), the cast trained for 3 months with US marines and martial arts experts in order to learn their characters’ fighting styles. According to Sarah Carter, the entire cast performed most of their own stunts and some fight sequences could take up to 7 days to film (such as the impressive Helena vs Christie fight at the mid-point). The film also features a volleyball scene which was 100% pure fan service and which went through a staggering forty pairs of bikinis to complete.
Unfortunately for the producers, DOA: Dead or Alive didn’t light up the box anywhere near as much as Resident Evil had. In fact, while those films had wracked up grosses over $100 million worldwide, DOA brought in a paltry $7.7 million on a $30 million budget. Ouch.
Plot Summary
The film opens at a ninja palace in the mountains where princess Kasumi resolves to find her brother, Hayate, who went missing after being invited to the Dead or Alive martial arts tournament and is presumed dead. However, she is warned by Hayate’s friend, Ryu Hayabusa, that if she abandons the castle then she will be condemned to death by the laws of their people. Unperturbed, Kasumi escapes, pursued by her vengeful half-sister, Ayane, and is invited to participate in Dead of Alive. The film then cuts to Tina Armstrong, a professional wrestler who is trying to prove that her talents aren’t all just showmanship (which she quickly proves to us by beating up a group of pirates who board her boat, securing her invite to Dead or Alive). Finally, we’re introduced to Christie, a criminal who uses her femme fatale wiles to fight her way through a group of Interpol agents who have cornered her in her hotel room, earning herself an invitation to Dead or Alive in the process. With our main cast assembled, the group is flown to the island where Dead or Alive is held, alongside fellow competitors including Zack, Hayabusa (who has entered the tournament to watch over and protect Kasumi), Helena Douglas (daughter of the tournament’s recently-deceased co-founder), Bass Armstrong (Tina’s enthusiastic and laid-back father) and Max Marsh (Christie’s partner in crime, who is joining her to try to steal the company’s fortune). After parachuting to the island and traversing the rugged terrain to reach the tournament grounds, the group is introduced to Dead or Alive’s organizer, Victor Donovan, who explains the rules of the tournament – fighters will be tracked with nano-bots, fights can be called at any time and any place with single-round eliminations determining who will move on to the next round of competition.
As the first rounds of the tournament slowly get underway, the characters begin getting to know each other. Zack spends all his time hitting on a very unreceptive Tina, while a computer technician for the tournament named Weatherby tries to work up the courage to ask out Helena (who, surprisingly, decides to give him a chance). Meanwhile, Kasumi continues her search for Hayate, avoiding attacks from Ayane and the other competitors. She is eventually joined by Hayabusa, but he goes missing while infiltrating Donovan’s headquarters, making Kasumi even more suspicious about what’s going on. Finally, Christie and Max discover the location of Dead or Alive’s vault and try to figure out the password to get inside. Max eventually realizes that the code is tattooed on Helena, a fact which adds additional tension when Helena and Christie are paired off against one another in a quarter finals match. After an intense fight, Christie manages to come out on top while also discovering the tattooed code.
Concerned about Hayabusa, Kasumi convinces Tina and Christie to join her in infiltrating Donovan’s headquarters. They discover Hayabusa unconscious, but are incapacitated and captured by Donovan. Meanwhile, saddened by Helena’s defeat to Christie, Weatherby confesses to Helena that Donovan is working on some sort of secret project and that he believes that her father was murdered to cover it up. Helena decides to stop Donovan, but they are attacked by his cronies. They manage to defeat the mob and then head into the complex to get to the bottom of Donovan’s scheme. Donovan monologues to the captured heroes about his plan – he has been using the nanobots in their bloodstream to collect data on the worlds greatest fighters, which will be fed directly into a pair of computer-enhanced glasses he has developed, allowing him to instantly learn their techniques and counter them all. He plans to sell these glasses to several international criminals to rake in millions of dollars. Donovan then reveals that Hayate is still alive and uses him as a demonstration of the glasses’ power, defeating him in one-on-one combat easily and throwing him through a wall. He is left to die but Ayane saves him, which causes her to finally realize that Kasumi was right all along.
Before Donovan can send the data to his buyers, he is interrupted by Weatherby, who cuts off the upload and alerts the CIA of Donovan’s dealings. Donovan and Helena fight while Weatherby frees Hayabusa, Tina, Kasumi and Christie just before Donovan actives a self-destruct sequence. The fighters all converge on Donovan, with Helena, Kasumi, Ayane, Hayate, Tina and Christie all beating on the old man at once while Weatherby and Hayabusa try to find an escape route. They encounter Max, who has been trying to break into the vault, and help him escape (despite his protestations). Overwhelmed by the sheer number of people attacking him, Donovan’s glasses are knocked off and he is left in a paralytic state by Hayate and Kasumi and watches helplessly as the heroes all escape the island before the base explodes, consuming Donovan in the inferno. The group quickly come across the pirates who Tina had fought earlier and steal their boat as they ride off into the sunset… to a final stinger where our heroines all face off against an army of ninjas at Kasumi’s palace.
Review
The opening of DOA is a perfect encapsulation of what makes this movie work. It starts with a terrible CGI tracking shot through a palace in the sky and then assaults us with stilted acting, bad dialogue and melodrama… and then suddenly Kasumi’s escapes by throwing a sword into the wall, leaps the cross the backs of an entire army, uses the sword as a springboard to launch herself over the walls of the palace and then reveals that she has a freaking hang glider hidden under her clothes to sail away as a robot ninja star just comes out of nowhere and invites her to DOA.
Holy shit, what did I just watch?!
The movie just gets better from there and makes it unmistakable that Corey Yuen and his cast know exactly what kind of film they’re making and then wring every ounce of fun out of the premise that they can with tongue planted firmly in cheek. That’s the thing, DOA has several elements that would tank any other film – paper-thin story, bad acting, a stupid and cheap third act, etc. However, Yuen executes this all in such a manner that they either don’t matter or they even enhance the experience. For example, how many times have I criticized Resident Evil for its crappy stories? The difference here is that the story serves DOA‘s actual strengths – fantastic action sequences and fun characters (and for the record, these are the exact elements that made the twoResident Evil movies I actually like work). There’s very little time wasted on pointless exposition or worldbuilding, the film knows what you’re here for and it will give you enough to make that function and create some stakes in an efficient manner. Again, this would usually sound like a bad thing, but how many action movies have we seen where they put in a forced romance, or set up a long-winded relationship in order to give our character motivation when it’s taken away, or just spent time trying to prove that this is not “just some b-movie”? There’s a reason movies like Mad Max: Fury Road, Taken and John Wick are so beloved and that’s because they cut the fat… and it just occurred to me while typing this sentence that I’m unironically going to argue that DOA: Dead or Alive is at least in the same ballpark as those movies.
First off, DOA has some fantastic fight sequences. This should be expected, but you’d be surprised how many video game movies (let alone lower-budget movies in general) that are all about their action sequences fail to even surpass this simple hurdle. Films like The Legend of Chun-Li are supposed to be all about the action but fail to even succeed there. Again, look no further than the most recent Resident Evil, which was basically just an excuse to string together action setpieces but which had the worst directed and edited action sequences in the franchise so far in the process. In this regard, DOA scored a homerun right off the bat by hiring Corey Yuen, whose expertise is clearly reflected in the plethora of fun and exciting fights peppered throughout this film’s runtime.
There are two particular sequences I want to highlight – the showdown between Kasumi and Ayane in the bamboo forest and the rain-soaked, bare-knuckle beatdown between Christie and Helena. The bamboo forest fight is a clear riff on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a sword-wielding Ayane tries to kill an unarmed Kasumi and features all sorts of acrobatics, wire stunts and creative use of the environment to allow Kasumi to survive her half-sister’s furious onslaught. I highlight this particular fight because it’s basically just thrown there for the sake of an action sequence, but it’s so damn cool that it doesn’t matter that it halts the actual story for a couple minutes. On the other hand, the fight between Christie and Helena is not only really cool (shot in slow-motion close-ups during a pouring rain storm), but is also tense because we have no idea who is going to win. We like both characters by this point and don’t want to see either of them lose. Some of the best acting in the film is demonstrated in this sequence, you can really feel that these characters are fighting a desperate battle against one another and doing whatever they can to come out on top. In a movie with tons of great fight sequences, this one really stands out because it makes you realize just how effectively it has gotten you to like these characters.
That’s another big strength of DOA – the characters are all really fun (well, mostly, but we’ll get to that). It helps their personalities and motivations are conveyed perfectly through the action sequences… again, just like Fury Road. I mean, just look at the character introductions for an example. Tina gets introduced complaining that, as a wrestler, she’s not taken seriously before her boat gets boarded by pirates. She takes the opportunity to then beat the crap out of them, proving to the audience that she is indeed a formidable fighter (and even kind-hearted as she allows the last pirate to throw himself off the ship to spare himself a beating). Meanwhile, Christie’s introduction establishes that she’s a charming femme fatale, using her sexuality in order to get the upper hand when she’s ambushed and seemingly cornered by Interpol. Hayate gets one of these introductions in a flashback as well. Need to prove that he’s the best fighter in the world? How about have him chuck a bunch of needles at a group of bandits, snatch these needles out of the air and prick the bandits in their pressure points to paralyze them all? Holy shit, this guy’s amazing! It makes Kasumi’s unrelenting search and Donovan’s later beatdown of Hayate all the more effective.
It’s not just about the fights though, DOA‘s characters are also just fun to watch interacting with each other and have great chemistry. The most obvious example of this is Kevin Nash’s Bass Armstrong and his interactions with Tina. He’s like the ultimate goofy, macho dad and Tina is constantly embarrassed by his inability to take anything seriously. This comes to a head when Tina and Bass get matched against each other and he bursts into her room, only to sheepishly back out when he realizes that he might have just walked in on Tina and Christie in bed together (in reality she was just sharing a bed because Christie’s room got trashed). It’s adorable how supportive he is of his daughter and is obvious that there’s a lot of love between them, even if there appears to be friction most of the time. Weatherby and Helena’s relationship is also quite cute. While Weatherby is a dork and it strains credulity to think that Helena would find him interesting, the fact that she does is adorable and both are kept interesting enough and have enough relevance that it doesn’t feel like either is a dreaded “generic love interest”. Or how about how the film establishes that Kasumi, Christie and Tina are now friends with each other? When the group parachutes onto DOA island together, they have to reach the tournament grounds in time or be disqualified. Initially they’re all looking out for themselves while climbing the temple, but quickly realize that they’re not going to make it unless they work together and are soon a solid team. It’s simple and obvious, but effective visual character building.
Unfortunately, DOA‘s one big stumbling block in terms of its characters is in its lead, Kasumi. Devon Aoki’s performance is extremely flat and I can’t help but feel like this was intentional – Kasumi herself is a bit of a personality-void in the games and I think they were trying to capture the same sort of stoic heroine energy. It’s a shame because Aoki seems very charming and fun in the film’s “Making Of” feature and it would have been nice to see her in a role that didn’t require her to be so serious the whole time. Similarly, Ayane is also very one-note, just pissed off all the time, while Ryu Hayabusa is downgraded from a demon-slaying badass to Kasumi’s generic love interest. Whenever Kasumi’s plot is in control the film loses some of its luster, but thankfully it’s more than made up for with the subplots revolving around Christie and Tina (and eventually Helena).
Another remarkable element of DOA is that the film is one of those weird movies that manages to strike the fine balance between being sexy and empowering at the same time. This is especially surprising given Dead or Alive‘s reputation as a pervy, tit-obsessed series (this certainly wasn’t helped by the fact that Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2 released only a month after DOA hit theaters). DOA does a far better job of balancing this out, if only because the cast are real human beings and not a bunch of 36DD teenagers and so they can’t just take the easy route by going with over-the-top eye-candy. Sure, the girls are in bikinis on several occasions and there are lots of shots of cleavage and butts, but it comes across far better than in the games. The games are usually just voyeuristic but when they fetishize the girls it can get straight-up creepy, not to mention that the games try to maintain this weird sort of “innocence” to them all, like they don’t realize that they’re all stupidly-hot. In DOA, the women all own their sexuality – if they’re in bikinis it generally makes sense (it is a tropical island after all and they’re often in down-time between fights) and they’re not treated like these chaste, untouchable angels with no idea of how beautiful they are. Hell, Christie is straight-up sexually active in this movie, well-aware of her wants and desires and not afraid to use her allures to get the upper-hand on an opponent. It’s kind of like Bayonetta in this regard, where the female characters are framed by the male gaze, but they don’t allow it to trap them. Beyond the characters’ sexuality though, the female cast just kick a ton of ass throughout the film. That’s actually a strength inherent to the games themselves, where several women can go toe-to-toe with the best male fighters in the world and play out their interesting storylines, but the focus on tits always drowns this out and drowns out an otherwise empowering premise. Freed from pervy obsessions, DOA shows us just how awesome these women are as they take down an evil conspiracy with their fists. I’m not sure I’d go so far as to declare the film to be outright feminist, but it’s sure as hell a kickass girl power romp.
I also have to mention the third act, which is a potentially make-or-break part of the film. For my part, I think it’s fucking hilarious and the perfect cherry on top of an enjoyable sundae, but I can understand if someone would think that it’s terrible. Basically, as soon as Donovan’s evil plan is revealed, DOA turns into a G.I. Joe-level cartoon. The sets get really cheap looking and the plot goes off the rails because Donovan’s master plan is stupid beyond comprehension. Okay, cool, you’ve scanned all the fighting techniques from the world’s best fighters and downloaded them to a set of smart glasses which show you how to fight and beat any opponent… There’s just so much about this that’s pants-on-head stupid. First of all, how do you react quick enough to the glasses’ prompts to even fight back? Second, boy it sure would suck if your opponent decided to shoot you instead of engaging in hand-to-hand combat. Third, why make the crux of this evil plan revolve around a fashion accessory which is notoriously easy to knock off, especially when you’re doing quick actions like… oh, I don’t know, fighting people? Fourth, why then antagonize the fighters you stole the data from!? If he had just waited til the tournament was over to sell the data to international terrorists (some of which look like random incels wearing sunglasses!) you wouldn’t have gotten defeated like an idiot! It’s so dumb, but given how intentionally tongue-in-cheek the rest of the film has been I can’t help but think that this plan was made so campy on purpose, so I’m more than willing to go along with it, grinning like a madman all the while.
If we’re being entirely honest, DOA isn’t a top-tier movie by any means. The acting is fine at best, the story is clearly bare-bones and the low budget makes it look cheap at times. Films like House of the Dead or Street Fighter: The Movie may be similarly fun and hilarious, but it’s clear that they were not intended to be enjoyed so ironically. On the flip-side, recent acclaimed video game movies like Detective Pikachu and Sonic aim to be taken more seriously, but they’re just ultimately mediocre popcorn films with boring characters, unimpressive action sequences and questionably-structured stories. However, everyone involved knew exactly what sort of film this was and they did away with pretension to maximize its strengths and make it as enjoyable as possible with tongue planted firmly in cheek throughout. That puts it well above every other video game movie out there.
