Reviews for August 2024

Dark, darker, yet darker

Sep 01, 2024

This one’s a repeat of June, sorry: almost everything I read disappointed. I need to stop panning Questionable Questing threads for gold gacha-style. Maybe I’ll aim for (comparatively) higher quality SpaceBattles fics next month. I just hate their WH40K and Battletech spam so much.

I did find a couple gems, and did some housekeeping on the blog itself. You now have categories in the front page if you want to, say, see all the monthly review posts, and I’ve retconned star ratings into all of them.

Speaking of:

★: N/A1

*: git good, Take the Future, Imposter Complex, Tron, Tron: Legacy

Previously, on Record Crash:

Reviews for July 2024

Makin

August 1, 2024

Read full story

Imposter Complex*

I reviewed a Tom Riddle self-insert last month, but this one could not be more different. Yes, it also starts from Book 2, with Voldemort’s diary horcrux escaping after the big snake fight, but that’s about it.

I last reviewed a relatively solid mystery story with very loose characterization, this is instead a solid action fic focused on character development. The divergence is Tom himself, who isn’t actually that much of a bad guy, the horcruxes being at least 90% responsible for his Dark Lord LARPing. While he remembers killing a girl to make himself, and messing with other children at the orphanage, he’s at least got understandable if not forgivable reasons for both in this AU.

What’s important here is our main character knows he and his future self fell down a slippery slope, and he’s vowed to fix his mistakes. He’ll have to ally himself with the good guys this time to defeat Voldemort. He still kind of hates Harry (despite Harry’s hero worship after he’s forced to save his life), he fully hates Dumbledore, and sometimes he can’t help but backslide, but he’s an antihero at worst.

Sirius somehow (but believably) becomes his main contact and ally, after he saves him from Azkaban, and their growing friendship with buddy cop dynamics is one of the best parts of the story. What follows is an attempt to trace his future footsteps from the moment he left Hogwarts, not only to recover the other Horcruxes but also to figure out how Voldemort ended up a overpowered snake guy. Our Tom isn’t nearly as powerful. In fact he’s always slightly too weak to face any of the big threats without help, which is a good decision for the fic.

Tracking down Horcruxes in remote places, investigating them and fighting foreign bad guys is the core of the fic, “action archeology” in the style of Indiana Jones. At one point, our main character travels to that one Chinese mausoleum with the Terracotta Army. You can intuit how that goes.

'Well boys, I'd say we're about plum fucked at present.' I concluded, checking my watch. 'It's about 3am right now, so we have at best two or three hours to get out of here before the muggle archaeologists rock up to work and find a bunch of very angry Terracotta warriors loitering in their dig site. And given that the Chinese ministry can't exactly call in the Obliviators here, that's the Statute of Secrecy caput.'2

In the end I found the story enjoyable, higher than average popcorn. But don’t let that word distract you: it’s not a crack fic, and it tries to present a believable redemption arc for Tom. This works for 80% of the fic’s runtime, but it kind of screws up near the end, with a big jump from “recovering antihero” to “selfless hero who will never do anything wrong again” that is at least as unbelievable to the other characters as it was to me.

It’s not only the redemption arc that gets rushed, the fic struggles with macro-level pacing. You get five or six big set pieces with enjoyable action scenes, but after Tom and Sirius figure out everything about Voldemort, the writer visibly wavers on what to do next. There’s a vague attempt at making Grindelwald a threat, but he seemingly decides against it in like two chapters and the fic swerves again onto the path of making Voldemort the final boss… I mean, we’ll never know what he was going for, since the story has been dead since 2021. Whoops!

Also, Imposter Complex seems to be an undisclosed Brandon Sanderson Cosmere crossover for some reason? I only discovered this through googling some of the seemingly original concepts Tom researches. I think that’s pretty dumb.

I recommend this as a fun action romp, but only to Harry Potter fans. Think Bungle in the Jungle or especially Harry Potter and the Wastelands of Time.

Mario Golf (GBC)

I have no memory of why I decided to play this.

It’s a really complex golf simulator,3 with a high skill ceiling. That half of the title is surprisingly true. The other half, the Mario part… yeah, that’s bullshit. I’m not really a Nintendo person so I don’t care, but this is clearly an unrelated golf game that they pasted some Mario related strings on, and only very rarely. I believe you unlock and fight some characters from the franchise at the very end, but I never made it there…

The game is very addictive, with an initially impossible-to-master aiming minigame (if you’ve played bowling games you get the gist) that gets easier as you improve your stats using the game’s RPG elements. However, you’re still doing the same thing over and over, with limited holes and settings. The story is non-existent, you’re just some guy who joins a local golf club, and anything beyond the minimal gameplay loop of moving from hole to hole and sinking balls is an afterthought. It just got old too fast.

I hesitate to recommend this to anyone. The game is much better than I expected for a Game Boy Color entry, and I learned something about Golf, but that’s all I got from this.

The Celestial Roulette

I mentioned this one during my sysfic essay, but I hadn’t read it—it hadn’t passed the 70k word threshold I tend to use as a filter. I don’t know what I expected, but this wasn’t it. It’s technically a quest, but it’s only published after this guy (Dark Wolf Shiro, who REAL Record Crash readers will remember from that one Guild of X fic I reviewed a while back) already ran votes and decisions by his Patreon users.

Wait, so only the fans who pay this guy money get to decide where the story goes? Well, at least we can hope that happens to be a good demographic… oh, oh no….

The basic concept is: an Original Character that happens to be Amy “Panacea” Dallons’s brother gets a connection to the Celestial Roulette, which is a combination of four major sysfic types. Basically, every 2k words, he gets a new tool (magical creature, item, spell…) in his arsenal. He doesn’t want to join his family’s New Wave team, because he wants to preserve his identity. Okay, that’s kind of a generic plotline, but it could theoretically be good.

That questionable potential is completely dashed by the Patrons, who immediately force the main character to bang his sister. God, I mean, he IS the brother of Worm’s Designated Incest Character, but still.

The Roulette is a bust, too. The Menagerie (which gives random magical creatures) is so much weaker than the other three that our guy tends to automatically reroll whenever it offers anything. The Forge also relies on synergies and prep time more than raw power, so it’s often ignored too.4 Maybe this could have worked (assuming good RNG)5 if the character didn’t have the ability to reroll powers, but I think they’re just inconsistently designed and balanced. It would be hard for them not to be, since they were all made by different people.

Overall, this has a stupid amount of reader-enforced incest porn, boring munchkinry, bad writing… abandon all hope, and read something else.

World of Goo 2

This review has spoilers after the bullet point list. It’s rare that the lategame plot of something matters to the degree I have to include heavy spoilers, but… I will only say I recommend against buying this outside of a Steam sale, maybe not even then.

I was excited when this came out seemingly out of nowhere. I then later found out this was because this was one of those Epic Games Store-funded games, which force (usually temporary) exclusivity on a platform that was previously bereft of it.

The developer is kind of a sellout for this. Mostly because you can tell he wouldn’t have made the game otherwise. The other half of the dev team isn’t even involved, a Super Meat Boy Forever situation if I’ve ever seen one.6

Playing this was a good experience for the first two or three zones. Felt a bit like the beginning areas of Portal 2, mostly the same but with a couple new mechanics, and a promise for continued growth.

But then the dev’s idea inkwell runs out (more on this later), and you keep running into UX issues that make you wonder if the game is unfinished or what the hell is going on.

Can’t zoom out to see the whole level. You can do it to a very small degree, and the game will undo the zoom the moment you scroll the camera.
No “whistling”, the WoG1 feature that calls Goo balls to the screen position where you’re holding the button. This might have been to avoid trivializing some late game puzzles, but the feature could have simply been disabled on those…
No sound or visual settings.
No “save and quit”. If you leave with a level halfway done, all your progress is gone.
Voice acting by dev friends. The actor with the most lines is so bad, someone else and me were convinced they had to be AI generated lines.
No pause feature.
And more…

Someone theorized the game was initially for smartphones and tablets, and was quickly reimagined as PC-only at some point, maybe at Epic’s behest. But even then I’m pretty sure the vast majority of mobile games have sound settings.

I could maybe bear with this and hope the game gets updated, but it gets worse. The story is initially just like World of Goo 1’s. The original focused on a critique of evil corporations, and this one deals with their greenwashing, pretending to do things “for the environment” while really profiting off the suckers that believe it. Maybe a bit derivative, but tolerable and timely.

It’s initially that.

In the second to last chapter, the game starts ripping off Japanese murder mystery visual novel Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony.7 I know, it was hard to believe for me too. But the game reveals you’ve been playing the “archived version” of World of Goo 2, and it’s the far future, after World of Goo is in its 13053th or so pointless iteration. It’s gone through many genres, and you get to play a few mini-sequels, first a mini-golf version of World of Goo, then shifting-gravity VVVVVV-style puzzles, and, finally, a Noir (ugh) pixel-art (ugh) point-and-click adventure (ugh) with meta jokes (reluctant ugh).

First, if you think half assed sequels are bad, why make one and briefly show us three more? Danganronpa had an excuse: fans were begging for it, haranguing the company often. No one was begging for a World of Goo sequel, it was a nice surprise precisely because of that.

Second, Danganronpa V3 is a perfectly normal DR game up to the last 2% of the story when all is revealed. WoG2 wastes at least 35% of the game time on this bullshit, only repeating the three sequel-minigame-types you get to see over and over, which is especially annoying with the dragging point-and-click sections. The twist is revealed at the end of the point-and-click sequences, with an ingame character literally turning to the camera and addressing the player directly.

The game then makes a few statements about how forced sequels are bad, unless it’s fans making them, and ““subtly”” encourages fans to mod the game and make their own spins on the formula instead of relying on the developers.

Then you get a fifth, very short standard World of Goo 2 area that now feels completely pointless after the previous reveal (remember when this was a real game?). And then the game ends.

This is my only theory for what went wrong:

Epic notices World of Goo is one of the top rated games on Steam, and the creators are indie so they don’t need to pay them much.
They approach them with an offer to fund a sequel. Only one of the devs needs money, so he takes on the whole project.
The dev pulls out some unfinished ideas from the first game, struggles to finish three levels with them…
He’s completely burned out. He doesn’t have any good ideas left, for the story or for the gameplay. There never was any impetus, only money. The development languishes, explaining why this was released so long after Epic’s big exclusive burst.
Epic finally forces him to complete it unless he wants to break the contract.
He half-asses the end of the story, and makes chapter 4 a critique of the very thing Epic is forcing on him in protest.
Epic isn’t happy, but pushes the project to the finish line with the bare minimum features to not count as “broken” and calls it a day. No marketing, as usual.

So is this worth playing?

The first three chapters feel like a small World of Goo DLC. Worth 10 dollars, maybe, not 30. So any big fans of the original could still be happy if they do that. I want to say the fifth is worth playing too,8 but there’s no way to get there without sitting through like three hours of terrible point and click gameplay, so I don’t want to count it.

So yes, buy this if you want three more chapters with some interesting mechanics, if it ever goes down to that price range. It’s not going to blow your mind. If you play past chapter 3, it might also make you angry.

Take the Future*

I still haven’t finished the Talos Principle 2 expansion because it makes my PC around 900 degrees hotter, and I can’t take that on top of the existing heat wave. This fic was a good replacement, though.

I’d been checking Sufficient Velocity out of desperation. This is usually one of the worst places to find fiction on—pretty much the only way to end up there as an author is if you get banned from SpaceBattles but then avoid breaking the very similar SV rules. Both mod teams wear the same brand of trilby, so to speak.

Sometimes it pays off, though, this wasn’t mirrored anywhere else. Take the Future caught my eye because it was the first fanfic of this franchise I’ve seen. The originals are puzzle games, and they have a story, but so much of it seemed untranslatable to fanfic.

Well, this author did the impossible. I didn’t like the plot of The Talos Principle 2, and this fic’s stated objective is making something better. The game splits off from a point early in the game, Byron’s apparent death, and deals with the political upheaval that causes back in New Jerusalem, the robot city. This sounds boring as shit, but our point of view is Alcatraz, the guy who was put in charge of defending the “conservative” point of view in the original game, and 1K, the playable character, is rewritten to have some agency and take over Byron’s accelerationist ideals. Their clashes and general dynamic are very fun, especially when the former is actually making some decent points unlike in the original game.

Talos Principle 2 was written by people who weren’t even trying to be neutral, honestly. I’m on the same wavelength as them, and I like progress despite minor/purely theoretical risks, but I still know that sometimes the people advocating for safety have a point, and I wouldn’t write stupid strawmen just to win an imaginary argument. Take the Future makes that argument the centerpiece of the story and puts a lot of effort and time into actually exploring the practical implications. There’s character development, people changing their mind believably, realistic conflict…

It’s not a perfect story. For one, it requires having played the game start to finish and remembering the plot, which I’m not sure applies to a lot of people in August 2024. The beginning seems like a slow paced rehash and almost made me drop it, and the ending feels just a bit too easy. It’s very talky, though it’s not only talky. But I can’t think of anything else.

I know saying “developers, hire this man” is a meme, but…

Magic is Programming

Well, that was a fucking lie.

This story starts off as a generic isekai. Our guy Carlos (who doesn’t even make shitty puns) gets a wish from a dungeon core, and since he’s just been transported to a new world he doesn’t understand, that’s what he asks for, capital U Understanding.

This proves to be a good move, because mages in this world only have access to an extremely complicated magic system that only Carlos, with the help of his new epic skill, can see as programming code:

spell begin; use mana = 0.1; loop begin; parameter color = white; parameter shape = sphere; parameter direction = all; parameter intensity = 0.01; parameter location = target; effect glow; loop while = (any mana unspent); spell end; spell cast;

I like the concept. But as I say, this author is a liar, and basically none of it has anything to do with programming. You’d think from the relatively unique syntax in that quote that there would actually be a fully designed programming system he’d use all the time, but nah. Our guy mostly sits and meditates at blue boxes and then becomes stronger. All the programming-related problem solving happens offscreen.

All other problem solving is so poorly handled. For example: they’re held at swordpoint by a merchant, and the protagonist (who still has zero useful spells) hamfistedly talks his way out of the situation by claiming he’s a secret noble (he has one trait that nobles do, but no other proof). He doesn’t even reveal his name, says he’s on a secret mission (?). They get an appraiser (because people who appraise nobles are apparently a thing here) to come, he talks the appraiser into examining him privately, then convinces him to lie to the merchant… everyone always falls for the first lie the protagonist tells them, without acknowledging the context: Carlos is essentially a thief and they’re trying to recover their lost Dungeon Core. They should lock him up first and ask questions later.

All in all, poor characters, unbelievable dialogue, lazy execution of the premise… just avoid this, it’s bad.

The King in the Long Night

Gently putting the lens down, Varys inspected the item as a whole: it was splayed out on the silver tray, alongside the finest instruments and medical tools money could buy. On the outside, the item appeared to be nothing more or less than a simple run-of-the-mill raven or crow, with black plumage and brown eyes, unremarkable in any way. Yet, once cut open, rather than blood and stomach and viscera, there were only these fine gold wires, these strange coils of curious fabric in place of muscle, and pieces of what had to be crystal. The previous owner had called it a "clockwork raven" yet there were no gears to be found, making for a poor clock indeed.

"The arched bill and short wings indicate it is not a bird of Citadel stock, but a wild and common raven," Maester Ondrew scoffed. "Superficially, I mean. It was modeled off of a wild raven. At first, given the remarkable realism of it… the impossible realism of it…" the Maester took another drink of wine before staring down into the cup. "I had thought it a live bird, captured and… somehow changed. Given the structures inside… there is no chance such a thing could develop in nature. No chance. It is undoubtedly man-made. Or… 'made' in some fashion, if not by men."

The first chapter of this is a banger, with strong technical writing and perfect delivery of the premise: an advanced race of humans has come to Westeros, and all they want is uplift it.

Alas, good scene-to-scene execution goes only so far. This story actually fails on what the author chooses to write about. Virtually every chapter consists of the following: a canon ASOIAF character meets one of the “aliens” (they’re Stellaris humans, technically), they’re terrified or confused, the aliens smugly cubstomp them in a fight or scare them with advanced technology. End chapter, move on to the next.

I’m sure we get to see Planetos slowly changing in the background as the plot progresses, but the person who recommended this confirms that the repetitive structure remains. Not for me, and I don’t understand what anyone could see in it.

The Wild Tale of Cyril Leon

This is a RWBY self-insert. There’s an AU element wherein Faunus are more common and integrated into society, to the point they’re sometimes racist against our human main character.

It’s inoffensively forgettable slice-of-life (which was good as a palate cleanser), to the point I could not begin to describe the plot. The author himself, who at points makes me think might be a 13 year old, has admitted his self-insert is a very passive main character. He’s actually pretty weak even with a Sharingan and Dragonborn powers… yeah, it’s that kind of fic. Don’t bother.

Unwinder’s Tall Comics: Mildred’s dog has gone missing

This one doesn’t need a long description. It’s a 10-minute choose-your-own-adventure guest comic for a webcomic I have no intention of reading. Why did I read this strip? It’s written by Øyvind Thorsby, creator of the amazing Transdimensional Brain Chip. His art tends to look like this:

If you can get past that, it’s an okay if extremely short experience that makes fun of CYOA structures in general. I don’t strictly recommend it, but hey, you pay me to review everything I consume (you don’t?).

Tinkering with Life

A guy gets transported to ASOIAF a few years before the story proper begins. He conveniently saves Jon Snow with his incredibly broken healing power (Panacea’s from Worm (again)) and that gets him an official job at Winterfell and the trust of Ned Stark. Soon he gets a job offer to fix a pandemic at King’s Landing too…

It’s a very boring story with no stakes, and it only gets worse when he starts really Panacea-ing it up and brainwashing people to follow his orders. The writer worries me a little, not because he’s writing a villain main character, but because he seems to be completely unaware that he’s writing one? There isn’t even the usual apologism, the story revels in it. You’re better off ignoring this one. And I’m better off ignoring all the “healer in ASOIAF” fics, what’s this, the third one that sucks?

SuperSoldier

This one is so trashy I’m still wondering what made me keep reading it for longer than two chapters.

It’s essentially a Captain America self-insert, but the main character ALSO gets Soldier Boy (from The Boys (no relation))’s upgrades.

These upgrades plus foreknowledge means he can do things like going straight for Italy’s liberation from the Nazis, instead of delaying everything until he has to fight Red Skull like in the movie. Unfortunately, this leads to endless war scenes that aren’t even smart, the SI just overpowers every threat against him, with no stakes. We do hear a lot about how great and powerful he is from other people.9

It’s just bad, and not even in an interesting way. I think I just expected The Boys to actually cross over at some point. God, I think this is legit the most boring MCU movie you could choose to self-insert into, too.

Almost Invincible

An entertaining self-insert into the Invincible comics (critically not the cartoon, which is what our guy watched).

It’s okay writing wise, and it has decent pacing. It looked like the main character kept driving the plot off the rails, and I kept thinking “wow, he’s got some good characterization ideas”, but after it was over I googled some stuff, and almost everything I thought was interesting (like a Nolan redemption arc) is ripped off from canon, which I know nothing about.

Ultimately, I don’t think any fans of the original will find anything worth reading in this one. People like me who know almost nothing about the franchise might still only consider it “alright, I guess”.10

git good*

Izuku Midoriya from My Hero Academia is not quirkless in this story. He instead unlocks a special quirk at age four, and fails to figure out how the fuck it works for over a decade. Makes sense, since it’s based on the forgotten computer program “git”.

This premise might be completely opaque to anyone who hasn’t used version control or developed software in general, now that I think about it.

Anyway, the power is the highlight, like in Back and Forth, that Worm fic I reviewed a while back. This author is a master of both git and thinking of interesting applications and gimmicks for it. The story itself is decently written (with some AU elements and minor characters brought to the forefront), but many of the stations of canon apply, and it’s mostly a vehicle for showing off the power.

Izuku can have his power track multiple versions of reality (or objects in them, anyway), and collapse them in cool ways. The most basic application is just collapsing objects that were on his person in a branch he created hours ago, so that they merge to his current timeline and show up in his hands, preserving momentum too for additional action uses. The least basic applications… let me paste the synopsis/hook.11

Reality shattered like broken glass. The firmament that separated the real world from the eldritch beyond had broken. Two timelines had collided in the center of the street—an incongruous synthesis of two different chains of events. A building collapsed, and it did not. An explosion devastated the surroundings, and it did not. Screaming faces and laughs of joy overlapped each other as if viewed through a kaleidoscopic prism.

The crowd looked on in horror and awe. Who was responsible for tearing apart the fabric of reality?

Izuku groaned. Great, another merge conflict, he thought. What a pain.

I’ve already mentioned the actual plotline isn’t anything to write home about. Most of it is somewhat enjoyable slice-of-life, with little action to speak of. One of the minor characters, a girl with an invisibility power, is kind of annoying and (ironically) gets a disproportionate amount focus with a worryingly Mary Sueish tone. Those issues aren’t enough for me to stop recommending it to everyone, but this is:

I have no writing time anymore. I mean, I could try to force it, squeeze some time in here and there… but looking at it seriously, not lying to myself, the inevitable destined future of this story is for chapter updates to go from being weekly… to being monthly… to being released every few months… then an update is posted a year later with the note "I'm not dead!"… and then it withers away and dies, never updating again.

I'm not going to finish this. I hate to say it, but it's not going to happen. Upon that realization, I instantly lost all motivation to continue.

So, here's what's going to happen instead: I'm bum-rushing my way to something that vaguely resembles a satisfying (or, well, functional) conclusion. Next chapter will be the last. ☹️

It’s better than the all too common scenario he presents at the beginning for sure, but it still sucks. The final chapter ignores the rest of characters and focuses on Izuku accepting responsibility and making a promise to himself, which is a way to handle it, I guess, but “nothing happens” would be an alternate description, and the writer’s ideas for the remaining arcs weren’t even good.

I think this is still worth the read, even if it’s only technically finished, but curb your expectations.

Tron* + Tron: Legacy*

I’d never watched these movies before, but decided it was the best time to do it: there’s a third installment coming soonish, scored by Nine Inch Nails, and that’s such an interesting choice I’ll probably have to watch it on that basis alone.

These movies are excuses for having action scenes in a virtual world, so the plot is extremely loose in both.

In the first, the bad guy made an AI to lock away the evidence of his crimes, and our main character Flynn, together with Alan (whose “program” is the titular Tron) has to defeat the AI to expose them. Flynn is accidentally isekai’d to the virtual world while doing so.

In the sequel, Flynn’s program Clu betrays and traps him into the virtual reality, so his son has to bail him out, or at least prevent Clu from escaping into the real world.12

The first film is pretty much an average 1982 film with dated if charming effects, and FUCKING GODAWFUL music. I had heard Wendy Carlos was good, but this composition of hers was completely terrible. I watched this film with twenty people and not a single person could stand it. The second is scored by Daft Punk doing a pretty good job, and has a great aesthetic going for it (barring unforgivable deaging CGI for one of the characters that will bother the hell out of you). Thanks to the music, the action scenes definitely reach higher highs.

However, I think, in the end, the first one was better as a complete experience. The plot is simple, but it respects your time and intelligence. The second movie is filled with Disney slop glazing all the dialogue, making appeals to emotion that don’t quite make sense when you think for longer than two seconds about them, characters sacrificing themselves when they don’t actually need to, etc. The original Tron world’s aesthetic and atmosphere was also far more alien and interesting—one of its most interesting elements is that Programs (the people in the virtual world) have a quasireligious relationship with their Users, for good or bad—and the sequel generally disappoints on that front. I heard the sequel world gets fleshed out in the intermediate cartoon Tron: Uprising, but I’ve had enough Tron for a while.

Should you watch either? Sure, why not. Just don’t go into them with the expectation that they’re anything but action movies, or you’ll be disappointed.

And that’s it for August. I did also spend a ton of time reading a terrible, terrible 800k words fic, but I might spin that off into its own full review if it doesn’t come across too mean-spirited. I’ll try to find a balance. Let me know if you find anything else for me to read!