Maybe it’s just me, but the only way a post ever makes it on this site is if I sit down and write a post the moment I have an idea. Otherwise, I end up with a paragraph or two and it’s left to rot in my drafts forever. Stuff that I’ve had sitting in my drafts folder for up to a year that you may or may not see sometime in the future:
Oh well.
This is a story post so spoilers bla bla bla.
So I’m about halfway through the campaign of Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty. For the most part, the story was pretty okay. I mean, the characters on the Hyperion are your typical sci-fi motley crew of guys and you’re going around freedom fighting against the Dominion. The missions themselves are pretty neat. But then Zeratul shows up and I’m all awesome, I can play as Zeratul and the Protoss, wooooo.
As I’m going through the Zeratul missions, I’m constantly reminded of that Idle Thumbs episode where they talk about Mass Effect. Basically, the complaint was that all video game plots eventually ended up being about saving the universe and it turns out there’s a prophecy and a chosen one. It’s never about being a space cop or something, it always has to be something overwrought and grandiose. And that’s exactly where Starcraft 2’s story is going.
The first Starcraft was about three races. The Terran campaign was about overthrowing the oppressive rule of the Confederacy and trying to stave off the Zerg invasion. The Zerg campaign was about the Zerg trying to assimilate the Terrans so they could eventually take on and assimilate the Protoss to become the perfect beings. The Protoss campaign was about fighting the Zerg off. After that, the Protoss had to find a new homeworld, Terrans from earth wanted to pacify the Koprulu Sector, and Kerrigan wanted to ruin everyone’s plans. There was nothing about saving the world in any of Starcraft; each player in the story had their own motivations.
Now I play Starcraft 2 and what am I getting? The Zerg aren’t so bad, you guys, the Overmind was forced to try and assimilate the Protoss! You thought Kerrigan was the villain, but she’s actually the chosen one and she’s going to save the universe!
I can already see where this is going. Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm is undoubtedly going to be about the Zerg’s fight for freedom as they seek to overcome their bloodthirsty nature and tap in to their former noble animal spirits. Finally, in Starcraft 2: Protoss Boogaloo, all three races come together to face down the Xel’Naga who are going to burn the universe down.
What the hell happened to Blizzard that the only storyline they can write now is Warcraft III’s?
I like how I went through the trouble of changing my theme to a format that displayed more than two posts at a time back then, in hopes that I’d write shorter posts more frequently but didn’t.
Oh wait, I guess I don’t like that.
Waterloo Magnitude 5.0 is a thirty second anime about a 5.0 earthquake that hits Waterloo originating from somewhere north of Ottawa. For the first fifteen seconds, everyone stops, wondering what the slight shaking is. Then everyone goes on Twitter to find out whether or not it was an earthquake. Life goes on.
So a bunch of anime I was watching finished their run.
The problem with DtB was that it ended with a bunch of questions and answering very few of them. The problem with DtB2 is that it didn’t answer any of the questions from the last season and added new ones and didn’t answer those either. It also removed most of the likeable characters or the parts of characters that were likeable. So yeah, the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t need a sidestory OVA to explain things that we were waiting for you to explain.
A.K.A. that show that looked like K-ON! but was superficially similar. At worst, it was some slice of life in a small European town. It had quite a few moments though, from moonshining to PTSD to the revelation of a post-apocalyptic wasteland right outside the borders. Not spectacular, but definitely not bad.
More Hidamari, more awesome. I was dreading what might happen if we threw in two more characters, but Nazuna and Nori filled out the cast pretty well. They weren’t exactly the Yuno and Miya clones I was expecting them to be. We’ve also got new relationship dynamics now that we have all the years filled out. Another highly enjoyable wideface season.
Not my kind of show, but I still watched it. It was alright, I guess, and it had its moments. I did not enjoy the random LOL CLAMP moments near the end of the show though. I probably wouldn’t have missed it if I dropped it. Oh well.
Surprisingly not bad and pretty well paced, considering this is Chiaki Kon we’re talking about. Unfortunately, she also chose to stick to the manga pretty closely and that means we still got the terrible manga ending. That said, the ending’s probably the worst part of the season, which places it well ahead of Paris Chapter.
This was a very fun little show and it looks like Gainax put way more effort into the show than they usually do. I liked pretty much all the characters in the show except for Anzu, which is kind of unfortunate because she’s around a lot. Hiiragi is the best character on the show, with Hinagiku and her Yakuza family coming up in second.
Ryukishi07, I am disappoint.
I was expecting this to be something terrible like Seitokai no Ichizon, but it actually managed to be pretty entertaining. I guess the way the jokes are written are much more appealing to me than that show I mentioned before. It also gets points for actually using the convoluted battle system premise in an interesting fashion.
This went down pretty much like I expected. It’s a really faithful adaptation of the manga and paced just right to reach exactly the right spot to end on. And it was great; easily the best show from Fall 2009. I’m looking forward to a second season in between checking if the next chapter is out yet.
This was kind of disappointing. Even though things definitely happened, it felt like nothing was happening at all. I’m aware that it’s really setup for the next movie, but as a movie, it was really, really weak. Just about the only good thing to come out of it is school food punishment’s light prayer single.