Absolutely stacked month. I don’t think we’ll live to see another five-line summary. I guess listening to your recommendations works out sometimes (long titles don’t hurt either).1
Make sure to check out my new Webfic Bingo if you haven’t already.
★: Game Changer, The Power Fantasy, Deltarune
*: The Dark Forest, MissionSword’s Caught in Your Web, It’s Cold Out There Every Day, Two Games, Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love, One of Our Submarines, A Golden Path, The Social Network, Nubby’s Number Factory
Previously, on Record Crash:
The Power Fantasy★
Watchmen was originally meant to be a heavily left-wing work, but Alan Moore accidentally made Rorschach way too cool, the comic becoming a libertarian manifesto in practice. Even if he had succeeded, it’s very hard to avoid eyerolls when you’re going for leftism,2 and, after cultural saturation, the underdog factor is also mostly gone within the scope of fiction. It’s gotten to the point that The Boys makes fun of both ends of the American political spectrum because it’s impossible to make one-sided political satire appeal to the mainstream. Sure, some people will read and enjoy it, but you won’t break even.
The Power Fantasy might be financially doomed, being the closest thing to “Woke Watchmen” I’ve ever read, but that just makes its existence and quality all the more impressive. It’s nearly the best possible execution of the concept.
The name isn’t very good, but before trademark bullshit it used to be “The Superpowers”, which was a play on words based on the core thesis: shit sure would be fucked up if there were multiple Doctors Manhattan, several superheroes with earth-destroying abilities. They would be able to go head-to-head with less literal superpower nations, be subject to the same mutually-assured-destruction logic, and so on.
That premise might make you think that it’s a boring meditation on large-scale war, but nah. The fact that the Superpowers are six human3 beings means almost everything is decided on their personalities and the old drama between them. The protagonists have each been given a different philosophy towards the responsibility of heroism, with one of them pretty much being a sociopath who happens to strongly believe in Utilitarianism, for example. Its approach to portraying the strengths and weaknesses of those philosophies somewhat reminds me of The Good Place, in a good way.4
The art is decent (great colors, backgrounds and paneling in general), but character art sticks out as the weakest element. It’s very Tumblr-influenced,5 for lack of a better word. For example, every superhero needs to look somewhat athletic, while there seems to be a simultaneous demand for diverse body types, so you get some very strange silhouettes.6
But really, I loved reading the whole thing. And I hate traditional comics! I’m pretty sure this is the first I’ve reviewed here.7 The Power Fantasy is just incredibly entertaining, with almost every issue either revealing the very interesting histories of the world and its protagonists, or upsetting the chessboard in dramatic ways. I’ve already mentioned The Boys, and while the tone is not at all similar, the complete disrespect for the status quo that defines its first season is here too.
The comic is ongoing. I’ve read up to Issue 9, and we seem to be getting one a month. I plan to follow it and cross my fingers that it doesn’t shit the bed, and so should you, probably.
MissionSword’s Caught in Your Web*
Thank God for asterisk ratings. This is both great and virtually unrecommendable. Not since that one Waifu Catalog deconstruction fic have I seen something at this level of inside baseball.
It’s a laser-targeted parody of two things: pretentious fanfic writers and AltPower!Worm fanfiction. Taylor and Amy get their powers swapped. That’s the plot, textually, even if nothing actually happens in practice. The real point of the forum thread is the Author Notes, which hide in spoiler tags between the sloparagraphs and all read like this:
Sometimes, in the name of art, I condense everything down as much as possible, and allow the reader to deduce what is happening from the context. Based on the reactions I got to this section, this is not nearly enough for the audience I am cursed with.
I will not explain every last detail of this trigger vision. It is a densely packed, tightly interwoven, highly symbolic metamorphosis. Perhaps I'm still too optimistic, but I want to only hint at some of the properties, explain things in general, and hope that maybe someday someone equipped to appreciate it will read it. I would not like to spoil the experience for that person.
I’m most reminded of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, though don’t get too excited, it’s not quite as funny. You’ll be laughing less often than you’ll be saying “damn, it really be like this in the Worm fandom”. It’s short (and in a bad-on-purpose parting shot way, unfinished), but sweet.
You really, REALLY do need to have read enough bad fanfiction to appreciate it, but you’re still reading this review, so.
Hisho Senki
Tanya in Final Fantasy VII, a few years before the plot starts. She joins the evil ShinRa company as a secretary and starts climbing the corporate ladder. She’s feeling pretty lukewarm about the whole terrorism thing the original protagonists had going.
It was okay. I was able to read every chapter released so far, but, despite the comparatively original concept, I’m not sure it ever reaches the highs the writer or I wanted. It’s also filled with endless Internal Tanyalogues that, while probably accurate to the light novels, incidentally destroy the pacing of what’s already fairly low stakes and chill.
Probably not worth your time.
It’s Cold Out There Every Day*
A very competent character study of two Worm characters, Vista and Imp. They’re trapped in a time loop and have to figure out how to get out.
I found it pretty predictable, but still very well written and fresh, especially for this property. In fact it’s so boringly competent I don’t actually have strong complaints or praise to make. At 40k words, it doesn’t even overstay its welcome.
If you’ve already read Worm virtual cover to virtual cover, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be reading this next.
Bootstrapping
I’ve now read two High School DxD8 fics where the main character fully avoids the lame ecchi plot and munchkins the poorly defined alchemy to become extremely powerful.
That single sentence description is all that’s there to this fic, thanks to one-dimensional characters and a general lack of direction. The author just kept generating “what happens next”, like an LLM.
Follow the protagonist’s lead and ignore this story.
Nubby’s Number Factory*
“It’s Adobe Flash Balatro” is what a particularly ovoid man might say if he had never played Peggle★ before.9
He’s still right, but Peggle is an obvious influence. Outside the item shop, you continue to have a limited degree of control over the game, as RNG decides if you win or not while you watch the screen with arms crossed. The dice might take the form of a ball bouncing between pegs or nubs,10 and you can choose the initial angle of the shot, but it’s still dice. You can’t always roll sixes.
Unlike Peggle, the skill ceiling of the aiming part is fairly low and you can quickly master it. Instead, to get better at and eventually beat the game, you need to use your Balatro joker skills.
There are a million items and perks that do extremely specific things like “trigger all items in odd spots in your inventory” or “each bounce doubles or halves a random peg’s point value” that beg for munchkinny combos. Unlike Balatro and The Binding of Isaac, which is another “get the right items and auto-win” game, I don’t actually think it’s even remotely possible to win the game without going exponential in some way.
I beat the game on my first play session, and again on the second, but that’s understandable, since I’ve already mastered both its parents. The challenges add some extra difficulty, but they’re kind of bullshit. There are some issues with game design in that money rewards swing wildly in quantity. If you get the right items on the first couple shops, you can get 99 dollars from every level,11 which is almost definitely an auto-win. It’s still early in its dev cycle though, so balance problems are easy to forgive.
At the end of the day, Nubby is a game that looks like shit and depends on finding a very very specific roguelite subgenre appealing, so I can’t recommend it to everyone, but I’ve found it a very fun arcade game in the 20 hours I’ve played it.
Now You See Me
This is what I had hoped for when I watched The Fast and the Furious. It’s extremely stupid and terrible, but entertaining regardless. This was largely because we were making fun of every single scene, but still. So-bad-it’s-good is still value.
It’s about (allegedly) magicians who (in practice) cast Harry Potter spells as they fight to evade the cops, with stupid heists tying the movie together. God, I hate heists. The end features what I’m pretty sure is the stupidest twist of all time.12 I seriously can’t think of anything worse.
Again, this is terrible, some 2/10 junk that’s merely “fun with friends”, so no, I don’t recommend it. I simply happened to get some external value from it.
Two Games*
Sprague Grundy is some other /r/rational writer’s alias, but I’ve never figured out whose. I previously read this guy’s OCTO novel—basically a Michael Bay movie from the monster’s point of view—and that was executed in the most boring way possible, so it can’t be Eliezer Yudkowsky behind it as usual.
In contrast, Two Games is a short, thinky story about demon summoning (and probably some AI Safety metaphor, as is also often the case with /r/rational). It’s so short, I can’t say that much about it without spoiling it. It’s clever and reasonably well written, so go for it if the topic interests you.
Curse These Old Bones
A self-insert into Hiruzen Sarutobi, the Dumbledore of the Naruto franchise.
It’s somewhat entertaining in an old-man-themed-Gary-Stu13 way, but it gets boring over time—there’s simply no challenge whatsoever. Much like an actual Dumbledore self-insert,14 the only reason every problem isn’t automatically solved in canon is that they don’t know everything that happens.
There could have been a silver lining in cool anime fights, but the Hokage mainly sits behind a desk and fixfics his village and the people in it. There are so many accumulated problems from all the anime filler and sequels that the ride never ends, which leads to the pacing feeling even slower than it is.
It’s not awful, but with so many other good recommendations this month, you really shouldn’t bother with this one.
One of Our Submarines*
A rare, actually good Homestuck fic.
Even this review will be 100% inscrutable to anyone who hasn’t read at least the first five acts of the webcomic, so feel free to skip ahead.
It’s one of those non-SBURB AUs about the trolls and Alternian society. In this version of events, Sollux is captured and turned into the engine of a spaceship for the baddies, much like his ancestor. Barely sentient after extreme torture-brainwashing straight out of Lena, he discovers a chatroom populated by other troll-turned-ships.
It turns out Sollux was captured for a reason: his troll friends are starting a rebellion mirroring that of the Sufferer’s, and it looks like it might actually work, especially with the chatroom’s help. The ships have only avoided insanity through the centuries thanks to the prophecy concerning Karkat.
The overall concept is very original, and executed nearly flawlessly, especially considering it doesn’t use the most interesting parts of Homestuck. I only have to dock fictional points for introducing wayyyy too many pointless ship OCs.15 Not all of them are bad—I like a lot of the realistic chatroom dynamics combined with the feeling of despair—but about 30% are completely worthless.
I think that, despite being unfinished, this might be the best textual Homestuck fanfic. But don’t get excited, that doesn’t mean much: even those stories the fans call masterpieces are often extremely flawed.16
The Social Network*
This one’s a rewatch, but it holds up.
The trailer does showcase an issue: it’s hilariously talky. Every actor delivers the snappiest lines ever to make up for the (extremely boring on-paper) plot about executive drama.
You’d think that the coolest aspects of a movie about technology would be the technical challenges, but even the two mandatory Hackerman scenes are laughable if you actually listen to what the characters are saying. Zuck and his friends are just scraping websites to get pictures, early on. Beyond that, Facebook was only a clone of Friendster and MySpace with nearly nothing to set it apart beyond prestige.
There really is nothing to the story of Facebook beyond the “Zuck made a website to rate girls against each other first” and “Zuck stabbed everyone in the back” factoids.
Fincher tries his best to make gold from this stupid source material, and mostly succeeds because he’s Fincher. As mentioned, it falls short in that not a single person acts human (I suppose that’s apt for one of the characters), and every line of dialogue reads like one-hour-shower retroactive comebacks.
I’m also left unconvinced by the core message that Zuckerberg and the rest of the villains did all that evil17 shit because they were sad about their exes. Sometimes people cannot be narrativized without taking liberties.
The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
For the second month in a row I review a fic for a young adult franchise I “missed out on” as a child, this time Alex Rider. The way I understand it, from looking at wikis while reading, it’s basically Good-aligned Artemis Fowl. I can imagine that if I had picked this up instead I would have become 90% less annoying.
The canonical plot of the book series concerns the titular teen in a family of (now dead) spies getting hired by MI5 because of some innate and learned talents.
This fic makes him abandon MI5 and join the bad guys, a league of hired killers that do anything for money, even murdering children. The justification is that the agency has been fucking with his life and will eventually get him killed, while at least the bad guys appreciate him and give him a choice.18 He’ll also be mentored by the best of the worst, an assassin that apparently sacrifices himself for him in canon. It’s all still fairly forced, especially when Alex somehow keeps his moral center as he’s headshotting innocent bankers.
I read 14 out of the 98 available chapters before giving up. It wasn’t doing anything overly wrong, the technical writing was fine, but the plot was very angsty and episodic. I’m not sure if I would have enjoyed it more if I knew the source material (and got all the references to the golden timeline that the protagonist is unwittingly ruining) but I’m leaning towards no.
Kind of a bust, and I regret not dropping it earlier.
A Golden Path*
I don’t know, man. This is an ASOIAF fic wherein Paul from Dune gets isekaid north of the Wall right before Robert’s Rebellion. He quickly starts making plans to take over Westeros. Barring the often unexplored time period, it’s 100% a slop premise. We also never see into Paul’s head, it’s often just the Starks hearing about his exploits.
But… I really enjoyed it regardless. I attribute this largely to watching the movies not long ago. In my head, I kept hearing the soundtrack as well as that guy saying LISAN AL GAIB whenever I read Paul doing something clever or audacious, which was often.
The execution is only “competent”,19 and the updates slow, but I think anyone who’s a fan of both franchises will enjoy this.
Not to be confused with the currently popular publicly-AI-assisted Dune fic wherein Paul becomes a cryptobro. I don’t know if I’m ever going to read that one.
Eight Billion Genies
I had no expectations for this comic and it still disappointed me to a Joker 2-tier degree.
I mentioned OCTO earlier, a great idea with stock, Michael Bay-esque characters. This is that, but worse. At least OCTO was made by an intelligent writer who was able to model the societal effects of his premise, if not make it interesting.
Eight Billion Genies takes place in the real world, present time. One day, every living person on Earth gets a genie assigned to them. Each genie can grant one wish and then vanish.
The concept ruins itself. It only takes one guy to wish for everything to stop existing, or for everyone to go to hell no matter what. The fact the premise is self-defeating is apparently the reason why the comic was made, the writer (Charles Soule) having this argument, deciding to say “bet” and go for it, try to redeem the impossible.
What did the writer achieve? Well, every time someone brings up a good point, he goes nuh-uh, it just works a different way because he says so:
You can’t wish anything too reality-warping, because all the big wishes “cancel themselves out”. The example given is government employees of each country wishing for their country to take over and failing. This is applied inconsistently and doesn’t actually make sense when you think about it for longer than five seconds. At some point the writer gives up even harder, and, contradicting what he wrote before, claims the genies have preferences for entertaining wishes and don’t want the game to be over or whatever the fuck. If that was true, why do we still end up with a terrible story?
Wishes generally cancel themselves out even when they’re small. One guy makes a 99 Charisma-granting wish, has a bunch of people donate their genies to him, and essentially uses them as extra lives. You can’t wish him or his people dead because that will just waste your genie and only one of his.
Even when different people wish to be invincible (which leads to a brief superhero arc), the wishes have randomly different effects. The only protagonist in the superhero team (a young child) is arbitrarily more powerful than the rest, so he’s the only one to survive when a supervillain kills his whole team. He still dies of old age.20 Presumably the writer wanted to prevent the “world ends up with 900000 impotent immortals” scenario.
There are too many other “patches” to recount. Much of this would be understandable in any other story other than the one you’re explicitly making to examine a specific idea and its ramifications. The WHOLE POINT of this comic is to show the second and third order effects of everyone having one wish to use. Instead, it almost becomes /r/whowouldwin power level bullshit by the end, due to lateral-thinking wishes simply not being allowed. There are almost never indirect consequences of wishes and, whenever genies grant something vague, they go for whatever execution conveniently looks cool on a comic book page, like giant mechas, kaijus and unicorns.21
I think this writer just isn’t very smart. Cynically, he went for a clickbait premise that would sell the comic, but had no good ideas, let alone a real plan. Most of the potentially interesting early plot stuff fizzles out, and there’s a twee “the perfect wish is about wishing for more love for everyone” ending that makes no goddamn sense, not even thematically. There’s no catharsis, because every character is a generic NPC,22 with one of the villains getting more backstory than all the good guys put together.
The silver lining is that at least the same person who recommended this also told me about The Power Fantasy.23 “Perfectly balanced”, as nothing should be. Send me only kino, thank you very much.
Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love*
Some stories’ titles really make me embarrassed about reviewing them. Mortified, if you will.
This is 100% just a romcom. Even if it was the best romcom ever—which… it potentially is, genrogatorily—it’s still one, so it’s not going to be everyone’s thing. Personally, I’m a fan of comedy, especially dry British humor,24 and this executes that excellently. It’s helped along by really well developed and likable characters, and an intriguing action/mystery plot in the background.
Of course, I’ve said it’s a funny fic with likable characters, yet Draco is the protagonist? This author simply doesn’t give a shit about canon.
This is technically a 10 years in the future sequel to some AU version of The Deathly Hallows in which a lot more people survived, but even then Hermione and especially Malfoy are unrecognizable, I’m pretty sure he actually wears leather pants at one point. Ultimately it’s for the greater good, since his snarky narration is the highlight of the story.25
A gravelly meow interrupted his thoughts. The bandy-legged cat had wandered in. It trotted up to Granger and then, upon noticing Draco, favoured him with a hiss.
Draco did not hiss back, but it was a near thing.
If I had to raise a complaint, is that we didn’t need a 20k word sex scene at the end, and that there’s a lull 75% in where the writer’s just dragging her feet instead of progressing either the background plot or the romance.26 Otherwise, really solid, I love seeing annoying genres redeemed by godlike execution.
But don’t take my word for it, trust whatever the fuck this means:
Love, Death and Robots S4
Ugh.
Much like Black Mirror, this anthology is usually hit-or-miss. This season was ALL misses.
The studio that made Zima Blue (which was so good it inspired Chili and the Chocolate Factory) is back! They made… uh… some story about gangsters fighting giant babies. This is, incidentally, how I find that Zima Blue was based on a short story. I’m sure that’s where the quality came from.
LD&R is supposed to showcase cool animation styles AND good short stories at once. The animation was fine. However, all but one of the 10 episodes (the Devil vs. Cat one, which would just be average in any other season) failed to justify their overly simplistic plots. At best we get some tolerable turn-your-brain-off action.
Also, while I didn’t notice this, the illustrious Mr. Beast voices a character. That really shows where the showrunners’ priorities are.
I’m no longer going to bother with this show unless it gets surprisingly good reviews, which I doubt will ever happen again.
Tech Guy
A real-life historian-author writes a younger software engineer version of himself into the Star Wars prequels. He’s bad at it.
I might not be entirely fair to this fic. For one, I wanted to laugh at how Padmé becomes a mayor and then a president of a planet27 at ages 13 and 14 through poorly explained cultural reasons, but it turns out… that’s… just canon. That’s something that George Lucas designed for his billion dollar universe. It’s what every Star Wars writer will have to deal with for the rest of eternity.
But there are many other fair criticisms I can make. For one, a historian author doesn’t know how computers work, and it shows. Our supposed engineering-major protagonist is confused at how robots have their operating system stored somewhere other than their hard drive. The writer is unaware that’s actually more common than the alternative since he’s not staying in his lane.
Even after he becomes the Steve Jobs of the setting, it stays stupid. Programming is treated like it’s magic, completely impenetrable if the high level code is merely in an unknown language. There are no mentions of machine code or reverse engineering in the entire story, this problem is only resolved when our guy hires an expert in ancient languages.
Much like with Eight Billion Genies, I’d let it slide if the title wasn’t Tech Guy. It should have been Steve Musk Guy,28 as that’s more representative of the content. We read about how he starts his company and deals with logistic issues, especially when he starts clashing with the US Government—I mean Trade Federation.
Does that sound boring? It is. I strongly regret reading this story.
Game Changer★
The timestamp above perfectly embodies the show. There’s a challenge to emulate specific noises, and, after a lot of animal sounds, the prompts become bizarre: someone gets “a North Dakotan”. The tryhard contestant29 goes for the social-justicey angle of “you can’t stereotype people”, and the host collaborates to still make it funny. Then we fade to a different guy perfectly nailing the Netflix Intro, and then to another guy who kind of fucks up his prompt.
Game Changer is like that. An unstable, extremely Californian30 game show where there’s a new gimmick every episode. The quality wobbles a lot—partially based on the specific game but mostly depending on who the contestants are. It’s a lot like Taskmaster, where ingenuity is the skill that’s truly being measured, but it isn’t stuck with a single cast for each season. This also means automatic chemistry: everyone has known each other for a while.
It even somehow dodges all the pitfalls you get from friend-based environments—I’m not aware of any drama, and someone finally called the manlet host a manlet in the most recent season, shattering my suspicion that their friendship would prevent some funny jokes.
My recommended strategy for new watchers is to go to IMDb’s episode list and dismiss anything below a 7.5/10.31 Your threshold may vary, though I guarantee there’s garbage at the bottom. I can also guarantee that sticking to the best episodes will keep you in a constant state of cry-laughter, I watched every episode 9 and above before going back and lowering my standards.
Despite the chaos, I’m marking this as an automatic recommend because both natural entry points work fine for a new viewer: the first season starts with a two really good episodes, and there’s also a free and curated YouTube playlist that you’ll find when you google “watch Game Changer for free”.32
Adventure Awaits! Huzzah!
My first Fire Emblem fic, largely chosen because celebrated author Bavitz is supposedly planning to write one soon. I think this one merges a bunch of games together, and the specific mix is vaguely inspired by the Gacha game the author is playing.
For the purpose of learning some trivia about the franchise, it does the job.
The “adventure” starts with a painstakingly detailed childhood arc, where the main character (who’s a self-insert into what turns out to be the secret son of a powerful noble)33 learns some magic and slowly makes friends.
It takes a good ten chapters—half the fic so far—to get anywhere important, but boy does it get there. They accidentally kill a very powerful person and have to leave the continent entirely. This leads to an equally long (but bafflingly entertaining) soap opera arc on a boat. The author event admits this is his main objective:
I think there are two types of changes people make to canon stories in fanfiction. The natural changes, like how inserting a extra character might naturally change narratives, and the I'm writing this shit change, where the author just changes something because he wants to. I think both are useful tools, especially for authors who want to avoid canon rehash.
The in-universe explanation for it will be given eventually in the story of course, but I want to give my meta explanation on why [character 1] didn't die. It's a pretty simple one: I want to milk family drama, and it's kind of hard to do that with her being a ghost that appears in some beach with [character 2].
Barring the constant “I’m totally grooming my future love interests by befriending them as a ten year old” jokes34—and they really are constant—the story is largely inoffensive, but it also fails to amaze.35
All in all, I find the fic’s overall quality to be roughly equal to the average fantasy anime’s, which means I can’t recommend it in good faith.
The Dark Forest*
I’ve mentioned in a footnote that some source materials just aren’t good for fanfiction. I’d put Outer Wilds up there. It’s so, so impressive that this fic works as well as it does.
The only reason I’m not giving it a full star (it’s the best thing I’ve read this month, potentially the whole year) is that it spoils Outer Wilds to people who haven’t played it.36 That’s it. I think it actually made me enjoy the video game more retroactively, if such a thing is possible.
I can’t talk too much about the plot. Vaguely, the usual win condition in the game doesn’t apply, so the protagonist has to go down a million rabbit holes to figure out a conspiracy within the DLC area (players will understand) in order to make any progress whatsoever. Despite the fact he’s37 kind of a moron, he attempts to solve the problem with the scientific method, rationalist-style.
It fleshes out every character in the original game, and I mean that. For reasons, our MC has to improve his writing skills, and he decides to write a dossier on everyone. Part of his motivation is staying “human” despite his circumstances, and this is a big theme in the story.
The fic is mixed media, inserting screenshots from the game and using different fonts and style depending on whether we’re within an epistolary section.
This adds a lot to the story, especially when the writer figures out ways to recontextualize some half-assed environments and reused models and turns them into plot hooks. Low budget into miracles. I think it helps in some more nebulous way that the story is about archeology just like the video game (if more realistic, with lots of dead ends) .
Does The Dark Forest do anything wrong? Well, it’s not finished, though the author has a very detailed plan he gives frequent updates on:
ACT 2 PROGRESS:
Chapter 4
Outline — 100%
Writing — 100% (~47,100 words)
Editing — 88% (final edit pass 40% complete)38Chapter 5
Outline — 0% (fragmented notes, should be quick to reassemble but right now it may as well not exist)
[…]Chapter 6
Outline — 80% (completed detailed scene-by-scene outline but busting down confidence level to account for changes to Ch5)
Writing — 0%
Editing — 0%[…]
Bear with me — we'll get there eventually.
Also, the writer uses so many emdashes—combined with stream of consciousness narration—that I’m half convinced he’s either the writer of r!Animorphs in disguise or one of his acolytes. This used to be the trait of only one of the viewpoints in the fic, but it’s now spread to two… it’s tolerable right now, I guess.
tl;dr: have you played The Outer Wilds? If so, read this right now.
Mission: Impossible
Oof, the Seinfeld Effect is alive and well.39 I think I would have enjoyed this movie a lot in 1996, but all its best parts have been ruined by now, in large part thanks to the Heist Movie genre (which I despise).
Everything just feels cliché and a parody of itself, even the memorable theme. The relentless march of time has ruined this otherwise decent film.40 The plot is serviceable (a very good spy gets framed by his superiors and has to heist the CIA to expose them, constant backstabbings ensue) and the acting good, but those two aren’t enough to salvage the experience.
There’s also a frankly ridiculous scene at the end that shatters the otherwise grounded41 feel of the movie.
How embarrassing.42
DISCOTALE
A Disco Elysium/Undertale crossover. Look at the screenshot above. I admit it, it *looks* very impressive.
Alas, the fic’s author put all their effort into the visuals. The plot isn’t annoying, but it’s simple, lazy, and unoriginal. Any of us could write this story: simply play the game, write how Harry would react to the situations. And it is every single situation, we have to watch him go through the fucking tutorial.
I think that sometimes a crossover sounds crazy because it IS crazy. Code Geass/Frasier, Kung Fu Panda/Worm, Disco Elysium/Undertale… it’s too bizarre to really work out, and only a bad writer would think to make a serious attempt. It’d be like writing a story about every single person on earth getting a wish—sorry, still mad about that one.
Deltarune★
Chapters 3 and 4 of this game just came out. It’s the presequel to Undertale, and it should be played after it. Not only is Undertale simpler gameplay-wise (so it’ll feel like a step backwards), there are a lot of in-jokes that you’ll miss.
Both Toby Fox games are RPGs with a mix of turn-based and action minigame combat, which is a description that only makes sense when you have that trailer above to visualize it.
Chapters 1 and 2 were a step down after Undertale, and chapters 3 and 4 were a further step down. There are many factors involved in this:
Toby sprained his wrist halfway through development and became unable to compose and arrange as often as he did before. The music was previously the best part of his games. With each new release, he composes fewer and fewer original themes, with significantly inferior arrangements43 that are sometimes even made by guests.
Undertale is a unique experience that has something to say about video games. Deltarune doesn’t add a lot to the conversation, and rehashes a lot, losing the novelty shock.
The combat in Undertale is more stripped down, but this works in its favor, like taking “The” off “The Facebook”. The more traditional RPG party elements in the followup are cruft that don’t make it harder or more fun, just slower.
Undertale gets a pass for its childish story since the protagonist is a young child, and I think it avoids an uncanny valley that the sequel crashes straight into: teenager-targeted stories are extremely cringeworthy for adults, while those aimed at younger children can still be cute and charming.
In this game, there are too many Afterschool Specials-style beats and morals. It starts feeling like Toby Fox himself is a tween and you’re playing his pathetically wish-fulfilling first game about how he beat his bullies and befriended cool monsters and saved the world.
With all that said, you’ll notice I’m still recommending it to everyone. Undertale was just that good, so that the sequel can massively disappoint and still be worth playing. I pray it doesn’t get even worse by the time the full game is released in 2056.
That’s it for the month. Keep the recommendations going, as you see they’re very helpful. I’m currently particularly interested in original serials that have only started this year.
Unrelatedly, I need to whine about my long The Dark Tower journey. Wizard and Glass is such dogshit (Stephen King thought he could make the most predictable and drawn-out love story interesting by throwing “Weird West” on top and reusing The Stand plot beats yet again) that I’ve been stuck with it for like three months, which I think is longer than every other book combined. I have to tell myself I’m not allowed to read anything else unless I progress another 10%, and then I only progress that 10% and drop it until next month. It’s that bad, and I’m only halfway through. This is the reason I’m not reading The Count of Monte Cristo just yet.
I’ve also been watching the new Lord of Mysteries Donghua (Chinese anime), and it’s a pretty good adaptation, with so much budget the two episodes look like an anime movie. We’ll have to see if it stays this good. I’ll probably review it next month.
This is a general problem for multiple reasons unrelated to the actual politics (though not all), and they’re kind of embodied in this image:
One is technically an Angel, but IIRC there’s some bullshit about how Heaven and Hell are Almost Nowhere-like interdimensional concepts and have nothing to do with religion. Could be time travel too, I guess.
Sometimes it reminds me of The Good Place in a bad way, with way too many stupid lines that only a moral philosophy professor could ever say out loud.
Another example is the racial makeup—obviously there should be a worldwide distribution since powers appear randomly, but in this comic you only get America’s definition of diversity: a bunch of English-speaking people with the most common skin colors seen daily by the average American person, with no duplicates. It reminds me of a quote by Community’s Dean Pelton:
And no, the comic’s plot and dialogue weirdly never touch on race at all.
This problem vanishes in the actual cover/promotional art, so it might just be shitty anatomy skills or the artist being rushed? These are supposed to be the same character:
I’d say I got lucky by landing this one, but I read two traditional comics this month, and the second… well, you’ll see.
This story eventually makes it to the Naruto universe, but I dropped the fic long before it got there.
I recently went back and played the original Peggle to double completion (including the honestly unfair challenges), but it’s not really worth a full review when I already did the demo.
Based on the frankly absurd number of bounces you get, I suspect there’s also some bullshit hardcoded “subtly improve shot” mechanics baked in there too. I hope those weren’t responsible for my wins.
Upon which the victory screen will repeat YOU BROKE THE GAME over and over.
Spoilers? The cop that’s been chasing them for 120 minutes is also a master magician and has been sabotaging his own investigation the whole time. This feels like it was added as a last-minute rewrite. It wasn’t foreshadowed, and many of the things he does when alone make no sense unless he knows the audience is watching him.
Unexpectedly (and thankfully), despite being a Gary Stu fic written by a Questionable Questing user, there are no sex scenes. Instead, you get a borderline pornographic description of a female character in an otherwise normal scene every few chapters. It’s very weird, but I guess that’s faithful to anime.
Hilariously, right before pushing out this article, I noticed this author actually has a Dumbledore self-insert too. I clicked on a random chapter and,
"Ah, Bob!" Dumbledore interrupted smoothly, tipping his top hat in greeting. "No need to get all worked up. We're just here on a little business trip, that's all. Just a friendly discussion."
Bob the Goblin's scowl deepened, his eyes narrowing suspiciously. "Business?" he repeated, his tone full of disdain. "You think you can burst into the most secure bank in the wizarding world, drag some poor woman along in her nightclothes, and talk about business? Gringotts is closed ! It's 3AM ! And for the last time, I'm called Ragnok. Ra-Gnok! Not Bob!"
Dumbledore's smile didn't falter. In fact, it grew wider, as if he were savoring some private joke. "Precisely, Business" he said, his voice as smooth as a lubricant for anal play. "And it's quite a lucrative business, I assure you."
What the fuck?
“Too many original characters” is the main failure mode for any Homestuck fanfic.
This margin is too narrow etc etc, but Homestuck is filled with so many self-consistent time loops that it’s pretty hard to change a single detail without ruining everything. This is the fandom of 99999 AUs and 1 for-want-of-a-nail, which isn’t healthy for a fanfic scene.
On a scene-to-scene level the movie isn’t actually taking sides, and the vast majority of it is factual. It feels less like a hit piece and more like Zuckerberg is so terrible even a non-hit-piece makes him look like a caricature.
I’m not really paraphrasing or simplifying here, it just makes no sense. Once he’s working for the bad guys he will get killed if he fails a mission, and I fail to see how that is any better.
Only now do I realize Ideas-Guy, one of my favorite fic writers, is behind this. Even this guy’s B-game is someone else’s A-game.
You could argue that since his wish was being able to find a safe place for his family, it was more of a plot armor wish than the others… but presumably all the other heroes also made generic “I want to protect everyone” wishes that should last even longer. And did he just never have children? That was another “no immortality for you” clause, I guess.
Incidentally, this subplot leads to the only clever moment in the comic, where the kid’s Captain America-like mentor is revealed to also be a child, one even younger than him. The implication is that the only people moral enough to instantly use their wishes like that were also too young to know better.
Further annoying me is the fact that the art and especially the coloring aren’t even good. It feels like someone who only draws greebles on sci-fi ships trying to illustrate their first human story. I usually don’t care about this, but it really got in the way, with every detailed panel being a muddled mess.
The comic ends with all but two of the twenty or so protagonists dead. I didn’t give a shit about the deaths of the eighteen!
Both are Image Comics. Apropos of nothing, do you guys think this blog is popular enough for astroturfing?
There’s also an interesting almost travelogue-y element. By the end of the fic, you’ll have learned everything about many, many eclectic UK landmarks.
The narration never even drops into Marvel Quip/meta territory, which is a blessing in these trying times.
It’s good that there’s not a single Stupid Misunderstanding in the entire thing, but, without dumb tropes interfering, it beggars belief that it takes as long as it does for them to kiss. The fic is 200k words long! It’s the awful “slow burn” that I would drop like it was on slow fire… for any other story. Here, the “filler” is usually pretty funny and entertaining.
Confusingly named “Princess of [Naboo’s capital]” and “Queen of Naboo” in-universe, despite being elected positions.
A bafflingly large share of the word count is dedicated to describing the cars he buys and the ships he modifies.
Brennan Lee Mulligan is consistently the best part of the show. He’s like the dream Taskmaster contestant in that his extreme competitiveness makes the dumbest task seem the most important thing in the world, and he sticks around forever. That said, he can’t carry a bad episode on his own, so be wary of exclusively choosing episodes based on that.
Incidentally, he wrote Strong Female Protagonist, which I found some months ago, hated, and forgot to review. Don’t read that.
The funniest specific demographic tell is that there is not a single prompt in this show that doesn’t assume the contestant owns an iPhone instead of an Android device.
The third season (with everyone in 2020 quarantine mode) is particularly rough, with forced Zoom calls. I genuinely don’t know why they didn’t just delay it until after lockdown was over and just add more space between the contestants’ podia, but the online-call-restricted challenges just make the season unwatchable. Even the allegedly best episode (a riff on Jeopardy) is pretty weak.
Game Changer is part of the Dropout streaming service, which has a bunch of shows by CollegeHumor people. The subscription is probably worth the money if you’re into their neverending D&D show, which I’m not.
And I do mean neverending. It takes 3 days and 16 hours to watch the 121 episodes of LOST. It takes twenty-two days to finish Dimension 20.
I’m pretty sure this is a twist in every single Fire Emblem game.
Given this is a Questionable Questing fic, I really have to stress that they’re just bad jokes. The main character is waiting for adulthood for any kind of romance, and has gone as far as to actively reject teenage overtures (wow!).
Incidentally, this was my problem with the actual Fire Emblem games. It’s not exactly poorly written, just horribly generic, the chivalric romantic fantasy equivalent of zombie movies.
If you haven’t played Outer Wilds, go buy it right this instant, and never look anything up, you only get to play it once.
It’s very hard not to read the main character as a “he”, so forgive the inaccurate pronoun.
It actually came out on the very last day of June. It was over 40k words long. The writer had also continued on to write 50k words of the next chapter, which is in editing. The June chapter was my favorite one so far, to boot.
Ironically, I loved Seinfeld when I watched it for the first time not that long ago, so that might not be the best name for the phenomenon.
I think watching this has had a weird effect on me, in that despite not really enjoying this, I’m far more willing to watch any new M:I movies when they come out, since I assume they get fresher over time?
Comparatively grounded. This ancient documentary proves the “iconic” hacking scene would never work, because Tom Cruise would never make it past the vents in the first place.
I also watched:
Mission: Impossible 3. It was less influential so it’s a bit more tolerable, but still a very generic movie. I think the odd but very successful decision to cast Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the villain is the only memorable thing about it.
Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation. Very weird movie, the first half was a 10/10 with some amazingly imaginative and dense action sequences, then it drove off a cliff into boring for the second.
For example, it’s very annoying that the best composition in the two chapters is terribly arranged, with clashing instruments and an abrasive mix. I can’t just add it to my playlist as-is, so I’ll have to wait for a good cover to come out.
Regarding, composition, the themes of both Chapter 4 bosses are very derivative and none feature any interesting original melodies.
Calling Mythbusters an "ancient documentary" has psychically wounded me, and in two different ways.
>with one of them pretty much being a sociopath who happens to strongly believe in Utilitarianism
I think it's the other way around actually. Lux is a very committed utilitarianist who decided that turning himself into a sociopath was the "most ethical" choice.
Thank you very much for reviewing "Two Games"! I read that story a long time ago, but was never able to find it again.