Ladies and gentlemen, David Bowie.
Hello again everyone. I'm back with another installment of my new monthly update series. As for the reason why I opened this post with a David Bowie video, I ended up watching Labyrinth again a couple of weeks ago.
Well, it's been a fairly okay month for me. During the first week though, it was looking like my dad might need to have an operation. He has an aneurism in one of his heart valves, and while that sounds terrible it's actually not very serious. I mean it's not nothing, but it's normally not a condition that needs urgent attention. They only need to operate on such an aneurism if it reached a certain size. Well when this month started, my dad told me they might finally need to perform surgery. So he and my aunt went to speak with the surgeon who would perform this operation to see what his options were, but then the surgeon took another look at the latest scan of my dad's aneurism and said it wasn't as big as my dad's other doctor thought it was and nothing needed to be done. So I got worried over nothing, and the thing is I was in this very same situation two years ago.
I've also been having some issues with Crunchyroll's online store over the course of this month. I preordered a few manga titles from them, and they have been shipping out way late. With one of these orders I contacted Crunchyroll's customer service devision, and the response I got was that the order in question, which was supposed to ship out on October 8th, would actually be shipping out around October 29th. In fact this order finally just shipped out today. As for the reason for the delay, the only explanation I got was stuff about vendors and other such things. This sort of stuff didn't happen with RightStuf. They would ship out product on time or in some cases even before the release date. In any case, the moral of my story is don't preorder anything from Crunchyroll unless you absolutely have to.
Game Review Section
So for most of this past month I’ve been playing the new Sword Art Online video game, Fractured Daydream. The general gameplay for this game is pretty fun and easy to figure out. The story for it is kind of out there for an SAO story, but it serves the intended purpose of throwing together all of these characters into a situation where they would have to work as a team. Without giving away any spoilers though, I will say that the choice for the identity of the story’s final villain was rather uninspired. Flawed story aside though, it was pretty fun and interesting to see the way all of these different characters interacted with each other.
Of course the real draw of Fractured Daydream is it’s multiplayer aspect. The game has two types of quests where groups of twenty players all work together to achieve a certain objective, the Co-Op Quests and the Boss Raid Quests. The Co-Op Quests has players work together to clear a dungeon or field map and defeat a boss monster, while the Boss Raids are just battles against a particularly powerful boss monster and any minions it summons. While I do enjoy the boss fights in this, I must admit I like the Co-Op Quests a little better because there’s a little more open world exploration to them.
Most of the dungeons/field maps for the Co-Op Quests are pretty unique, with some being better than others. My favorite of these dungeons is one based on the World Tree that Kirito had to infiltrate to rescue Asuna during the Fairy Dance arc of the light novels/anime series. The first level is basically a labyrinth under the base of a tree that’s often patrolled by the type of robot fairies Kirito initially had to fight through, and the second level is yet another labyrinth that looks more technological and laboratory-like. There are even certain sections where you can see holographic brains representing the victims Sugou/Oberon had captured and was doing experiments on. My one complaint about this dungeon is that the boss chamber was back underneath the tree, and the boss itself was some sort of squid woman. It would’ve been way more appropriate to have the boss chamber on top of the tree, and final boss should’ve been some sort of super powerful robot fairly or something else more thematically appropriate. Also, the second level of the dungeon should’ve been patrolled by slug monsters like the ones that had recaptured Asuna in the series.
My biggest criticism about the game as a whole though is just the simply lack of variety with the multiplayer quests. Right now there are only six different Co-Op Quests and five different boss raids, and of the five boss raids, three of them are only accessible after doing some serious level grinding. This makes the game feel a little repetitive after a while. There is the Free Roam Quest option, which is played solo, and while Free Roam does have more of an open world aspect, it too can feel a little repetitive after a while. There are only two different maps for the Free Roam mode, and nether of them have any dungeons to explore.
So my hope for the game is that they’ll eventually add more quest options in the form of DLC or other kinds of updates. Different types of quests besides Co-Op and Boss Raid quests would be ideal, but at the very least I’d be okay with other Co-Op Quests besides the six we already have. I wouldn’t mind seeing something based on the Calibur Arc of the original series. Still, Fractured Daydream is a pretty good game. I feel like it’s a game one could easily get burned out on, but for me it’s something to play until the next big Pokemon game comes out.
Anime Review Section
I also used this month to finally watch a couple of anime titles that I've been meaning to watch for a couple of years now, Birdie Wing: Golf Girls' Story and Moible Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury.
I'll start this review by talking about Birdie Wing, which ended up being a pretty absurd series. If real world golf was anything like the version of golf given to us in this series, I might actually watch it. They had transforming golf courses and golf swings that were essentially martial arts moves. if they had a Brazilian soccer announcer doing the commentating, they would've had golf in its perfect form. The only issue I had with Birdie Wing was with the romance/rivalry that existed between the show's main protagonist, Eve and her arch-rival, Aoi. It becomes clear that their rivalry is really just misplaced feelings of romantic attraction, but they don't develop it any further than that, or even acknowledge that the romance exists. Other than that, it's a pretty bonkers show.
Now I'll talk about Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, or G-Witch as it was often called in reviews of the series on the Anime News Network. Before I get started though, I want to mention as a disclaimer that I am not a hardcore Gundam fan. I've only seen a handful of shows in the franchise, and of the few I've seen I've only actually liked a handful of them. I did try watching the original Gundam once, but I just couldn't get into it. None of the characters grabbed me, I found I couldn't care less about whatever war they had going on, and as an anime the whole thing just looked way too dated.
Getting back to G-Witch, I had been meaning to watch it for quite a while mainly because it had a female main protagonist, which for a franchise like Gundam is pretty revolutionary. I went into G-Witch not really knowing what to expect beyond what little I had read about the series on ANN. The last thing I ever expected though was for the series to start out as a Gundam version of Revolutionary Girl Utena. After I finished watching G-Witch myself, I went back and read every episode review of the series to get another perspective on it, and from those reviews I found out that G-Witch also borrowed quite a bit from Shakespeare's The Tempest. I immediately downloaded that play onto my Kindle for about a buck so I could read it and get the references.
Anyway, all of the references and parallels to Utena really sold G-Witch for me. It was still a Gundam series in the end, but one that was unlike any series in the franchise that had come before. Of course the series fumbled a bit towards the end, particularly with the climax. For instance, I was expecting the main villain's big super weapon to be something a little more grandiose than a big device that essentially just screwed up everyone's wi-fi. I kind of feel like many of these flaws could simply be due to the fact that they only had twelve episodes to work with for both seasons. Plus even though the show's climax had flaws, it stuck the landing with a nice little epilogue. In closing, I'd have to say that G-Witch is now my favorite Gundam series (sorry, Gundam SEED).
Closing Remarks
So I think that about does it for this monthly update. For anyone who's interested, I've also since started posting chapters of my biggest Sailor Moon fanfic, yet, Revenge of the Old Ones. It's been getting some pretty good response on both FFN and AO3. Beyond that, I don't think there's really too much worth mentioning.
So until next time, I wish everyone a good month and hope that everyone has a happy and safe Halloween tomorrow.
