Gormongous

I don't know how far I am, maybe twenty levels into the game, but I'm getting a lot of feelings, not all of them good. The story is way too big, with way too many characters, really to be supported by the mechanics of Hotline Miami. There's much less confidence in letting the weirdness and confusion lie, like it did in the first game. The levels are also too big, too open, and often too puzzly, the lattermost not being helped by certain playable characters with extremely specific strengths and weaknesses being typically forced upon you without choice. In Hotline Miami, if I was eating shit with Jake, it was time to change things up with Tony or Louie. In Hotline Miami 2, save for a few exceptions among the levels, if I'm eating shit, it's probably just because I haven't found the best path through a given level yet. There's just not that much strategy to mix up without the masks and a denser level design. I honestly don't see how you're supposed to be able to get an A+ on most levels without cheese like hopping around corners or firing off guns to attract attention and get high combos. Flexibility is a meaningless category because a level has a dozen weapons at most and the time it takes to switch between them is going to lose you more on your Time Bonus than you'll gain for Flexibility, anyway. The later levels have an extremely high threshold just for awarding a passing grade, with one (level 17, I think) giving me a C despite three double-digit combos and not a second lost on time. I know, I'm bitching about the scoring system, but it's indicative of the slight bloating that sometimes crowd out the good stuff in this game. I mean, don't get me wrong. It's not bad. It's still the same basic mechanics as Hotline Miami, although I could swear that some small stuff has been changed, like thrown knives now only having maybe a one-in-three chance of instantly killing. It's just a much larger and yet much more linear game, with fewer options and fewer surprises.

Also, I should have remembered that Cara said she was a history buff as a kid when she was talking about Tomb Raider. I braced to groan when she brought up the Romans' obsession with straight roads, but then she explained it very clearly before moving onto the political character of maps and urban planning. I keep forgetting what I've known in my heart since her review of the 1996 Electronic Dream Phone, Cara Ellison is truly great.

Jeez, I hadn't even thought about Peake. That's sobering, but good to bring up. Thanks, Nachimir, and rest in peace, Mr. Pratchett.

I don't know. If you look at the Anno or Settlers games, they're much more sharply restricted by the landscape. The problem is almost never how to build an efficient city on its own, but how to build one that plugs best into a preexisting system. If remote or off-map powers exist, they're as likely to be hostile as friendly. There's a lot of assumptions about the tabula rasa nature of urban planning in Sim City that don't exist in many European city-builders and might not have existed in any if Sim City didn't turn out to be a huge success, creating new assumptions about what it means to be a city-building game.

Well, it's not a zero-sum game. Wonder Woman can be better-written and wear pants. Or rather, Wonder Woman wearing pants can only make better writing more likely, not less.

It might help to introduce the concept of the Overton Window to this conversation. Because the vast majority of mainstream media depicts torture as effective, the window in people's minds shifts from "Is it justifiable to use a morally objectionable technique that will probably yield no results" to "Is it justifiable to use a morally objectionable technique that will yield definite results." Those are vastly different questions, as is the window of permissible behavior under their different assumptions.

I think Oh! Edo Rocket is secretly one of the greatest anime of all time, but that's probably because I like comedies with very little respect for the fourth wall and the only ones that beat out Oh! Edo Rocket there are anime based on manga by Koji Kumeta. Okay, fair enough. I confess, I don't know much about Mononoke except that one Mushishi fan I knew denigrated it as a poor man's Mushishi. I feel as though I can't trust his opinion wholly...

Wow, an anime of which I genuinely have no awareness whatsoever. What do you mean by "if nothing else"? Is it not very good as a horror anime? That reminds me, I should also put Hell Girl on that list, even though it's more ghost stories than straight-out horror.

We're talking about Reign: The Conqueror, but for Jesus of Nazareth instead of Alexander the Great, right?

Well, I think you're at a disadvantage for disliking the "chosen one" stuff, because that's how most non-Japanese people get into anime, whence they can discover works of greater depth. It's like something I wrote a few weeks back about Excel Saga being this really intensive multi-level deconstruction of dozens of subgenre works, but when it was licensed for American audiences, it was sold as "random and wacky anime bullshit" instead, probably because it's easier to market that, and so most non-Japanese people hold it to be a really shallow dead-end of a show, because it was superficially appealing but required a lot of media literacy to really get it. Having an awareness of the medium is hard, even for someone who's watched hundreds of shows like me, and knowing whether something is representative of anything else is just as hard. It's been crushing in the past for me to enjoy Revolutionary Girl Utena or Oh! Edo Rocket, then discover that they're totally unique works that didn't directly influence anything else. Anyway. There are not many good horror anime. Shiki eventually picks up, but it's solidly at a B-movie register. I'm a huge fan of Another, which is a short twelve-episode series that moves fairly quickly, but I know it has many detractors for a supposedly unsatisfying mystery and peremptory ending. The only other big one is the massive Higurashi franchise, which I haven't seen and can't comment upon. If Patrick has a tolerance for the goofy antics that characterize the early parts of Trigun, then I'm much less trepidatious about recommending Planetes. Usually, I have to worry about people getting through the first six or seven episodes to discover that it's actually an anime about the enormous human cost of spaceflight and about the reasons that we pay it anyway. It's got well-formed characters too, with no messiahs, just regular people.

You have only yourself to blame.

Yeah, nothing horrifyingly problematic there. Just cops and robbers!

Yeah, I especially love Evangelion for being "You are the chosen one because your mom and dad were scientists working for an apocalyptic death-cult, and trying to both live up to the role they built for you and save the Earth in the process will drive you to multiple nervous breakdowns." Eva becomes much less interesting if there isn't a "chosen one" framework in place to represent the emotional and psychological burden of social expectations, but if I talk too much more about it Twig will complain like he's complaining about Kids on the Slope. I agree wholeheartedly. Disliking the "chosen one" trope that is a staple of shounen and seinen anime is mostly the same as disliking the "rugged individualist" trope that is a staple of American dramatic television. It takes a bit of effort to look past all the Walter Whites and Rick Grimeses out there, but it's definitely not the end-all and be-all of the medium. Echoing Twig, yet again, what sort of stories do you like in your media? Also, I'm working off the assumption that the presence of the "chosen one" trope invariably ruins an anime for you, but man... Akira and most of Miyazaki's works have it in spades, so I don't know. Actually, it's bummed me out in recent years how I've started to feel some discomfort at the in-universe fetishization of the character Nausicaa from the eponymous movie. I still love it, to the point that it's probably my favorite of Miyazaki's works, but it's begun to grate a little.

My college roommate and longtime friend recently got hired at Harmonix, so I'm having fun flooding this form with all of our favorite songs in the hopes that he's also advocating them from the inside.

There are generally two tacks I take when introducing someone to anime. If they seem interested in it or have relatively few preconceptions, I usually go for anime that shows how unique it can be as a medium, among which FLCL could be counted but is probably better appreciated after watching a few other shows to establish basic literacy. If they show suspicion or hostility, I usually go for anime that shows how it can improve upon more familiar genres in Western television and animation. That's why my go-to show for the latter is always going to be Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Everyone's aware of police procedurals, thanks to fucking Law & Order, but what about a police procedural that has a well-rounded female character as the lead and focuses not only on the ethics of emerging technologies but also of police jurisdiction, political corruption, domestic terrorism, and immigration? Oh yeah, it takes place in a cool cyberpunk future, too. Actually, I'm watching the Patlabor TV series right now and it also has a not-terrible main character who's female, as well as a hyper-competent coworker of hers and a well-respected division commander. Depending on how you count them, one third of the show's main characters are female, and this is in 1989. Were anime writers and directors really that forward-looking, or is the demographic makeup of Japanese law enforcement just very different from that in America?

I mean, I understand some spoiler aversion, but it's literally the very first thing that happens in the game, before any of the actual gameplay.

I guess I mean more the show's aimlessness than the characters. Cowboy Bebop's characters were certainly aimless, but the show itself had a sense of direction. Whatever the characters did or didn't do, they all had pasts waiting for them (or coming for them) and that gave the show something that Michiko to Hatchin lacks, despite it explicitly being about its characters running from something. I distinctly remember a dry spell in the teens that made me seriously question if the show had the gas to make it twenty-two episodes.

I mean, it might be good to wait for Patrick to clarify there. If he's saying that any show featuring any kind of exceptionally powerful being is right out, then my list is going to look very different. Also, I find Michiko to Hatchin so uneven and aimless that I can't really recommend it to anyone, but it's cool that other people had a more positive reaction to it.

Blue Gender was terrible, I thought. They were trying to go for a bleak, post-apocalyptic sci-fi world destroyed by massive bug monsters, but they conveyed it mostly through the protagonist being constantly and relentlessly horrified at everything he saw, to the point of ineffectuality. Two dozen episodes in, they still hadn't really turned the corner on that. I don't know how I made it through. Among most people I know who are into anime, Cowboy Bebop's held to be pretty darn good. I don't know anyone who's watched a lot of other shows and still thinks of Cowboy Bebop as the greatest anime of all time, though. Its general aesthetic style, especially the soundtrack, hold up marvelously, but the incredibly light touch on its characters and story keep it from being an anime to which I return again and again out of fondness rather than just forgetfulness. It's part of a crop of turn-of-the-millennium anime, like Trigun and Outlaw Star, that traded on a newer kind of seinen cool and only really found their audience on home media and overseas, so its influence is strong but slow to diffuse and a little played out by now. I don't know, it's fine work. I bought the collector's edition of the Blu-ray, but would honestly give away the artbook after one read. I'm not entirely sure what you're asking. If you conceive of the "Cowboy Bebop feeling" as extremely episodic and aesthetically Western, you're probably headed for some disappointment. The Western aesthetic is not unique to Cowboy Bebop, but where it's used in other anime, it's often used for much different purposes, and I don't think that it's a particularly good bellwether of whether someone unfamiliar with anime will enjoy a given show. The episodic structure is also tricky, since it's generally the structure for gag anime and Cowboy Bebop used it in part just because it ran half of its episodes on cable TV and released the rest straight to home media. There are serious shows that focus on one- or two-episode plots, but generally as part of a larger story with a definite end, because that's really why most people watch anime, to get away from the episodic format of most Western television (although Western television is also headed away from that, too, thanks to the rise of Netflix and the HBO/AMC-style serial drama). If I were to recommend mostly episodic (but serious) anime that aren't slaves to their own mythology, I'd recommend Mushishi (of course), Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (cyberpunk police procedural, rather than the philosophical noodling of the movies), Samurai Champloo and Space Dandy (subsequent shows directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, although not as good as Bebop in my opinion), and... I'll have to think of some others. I want to recommend something like Planetes, a hard sci-fi anime about near-future spaceflight, but it definitely qualifies more as "serial" despite having a highly episodic beginning. I'll get back to you, really. Also, to echo Twig a bit, what anime are you thinking of when you say "mythology magic chosen one power gemstone chosen one magic BS" and "mythic fantasy chosen one power gemstone magic dumb humor magic"? Do you mean you don't like the Hero's Journey, "chosen one" plotlines, or fantasy elements in general? Knowing what you've tried and not liked would be another good data point in all of this.

Yeah, I had a fairly strong dislike of Bakemonogatari when I watched it for those exact reasons, Twig. It felt like it was just a show about some dude building a harem of girls who are damsels to forces both supernatural and sexual. I found no reason to like it except the Shinbou/Shaft direction, so I just considered the other anime in the series a regrettable waste. But really, I think the show turns it around in Nisemonogatari with the introduction of Kaiki Deishu. He's not exactly Araragi's opposite, but he is a malevolent force that keeps the show from being Araragi just saving girls from themselves and their need to be fucked. From a few episodes into Nisemonogatari, and all throughout the second season, it's about the relationships that Araragi has built with the girls that he's saved and the consequences stemming from them. Even Sengoku, who gets two Bill 156 jokes (the ordinance forbidding sexual depiction of minors in media) in her penultimate arc, actually has a story-based and character-building payoff in how pornographically devoted she is to Araragi. As far as I'm concerned, it's an anime that's quite good, but takes a while to get going, and because of that, it leaves you in the dark too long as to whether there's any point to the panty shots and innuendo. And actually, Coods (Deleric?), I thought that maybe the anime would be improved by the removal of Araragi, but he functions really well as a hub through which more interesting characters can interact. Sure, if it's just him one-on-one with a girl, like in most of the Bakemonogatari and all of Nekomonogatari, it's not great, but when he's not there, like in most of Hanamonogatari, the show drags even worse. The rest of the characters are relatively sane women who like each other, so there's no frisson. Obviously, the actual answer is to replace Araragi with a different protagonist who has less boring motives, like Kaiki Deishu in certain arcs of the second season, but that version of the anime wouldn't sell as well, of course. Keep at it, is what I'm saying, Twig. The first season is the worst (season).

Yeah, it's been present in every one that I've played. It's interesting, though, because there was a lot of press, especially on this game's release, about Bungie solving or evolving the MMO, and yet within such an altered design are still some of the huge flaws that have dogged MMOs for decades.

I don't know if that's the same as being a sex worker or even working at McDonalds, though. In the realm of non-transactional sex, you can consent to do something that your partner wants to do, even though it's not something you'd want on your own, and that's still consent, by most definitions. If it were something truly objectionable to you, I hope that you wouldn't consent, whatever your partner wanted, and if circumstances made you feel as if you had to consent whether or not it was objectionable to you, then that's not consent, it's coercion. I guess that the dynamic is the same with wearing clothes that your partner or friends like, but there are multiple instances, just off the top of my head, where people are forced by the necessities of life in a capitalist system to work jobs that are truly repugnant to them, either physically or morally, and if it were possible for them to survive by any other means, they would, but they are not offered an opportunity for that by said system. For some people under some circumstances, sex work would be considered among those repugnant jobs. I have extreme difficulty framing that as "consent" in any useful sense of the word.

Hah, introducing the coercive structures of capitalism into this conversation says more about our society's many flaws than about the concept of consent. That's not putting you on blast, just the world in which we live.

They've said in multiple interviews that they're aware of the criticism about their game's thematic assumptions, but that they really just want to make a game that captures the feeling of how prisons operate in television and film. At this point, they appear to be making a deliberate choice not to deal with the moral gray areas surrounding prisons, like rehabilitation vs. incarceration (or retribution) and the effects of prison sentences on personality and criminal behavior. They've even said that they were hesitant to introduce more details to the prisoners, even for the sake of a better simulation, because they don't really want the player to feel obligated to keep those details in their head while playing. They have a right to make whatever game they want, and a lot of Prison Architect looks and works really well, but I feel like they might be better off in the long run building a building/management sim that's not predicated on such a complex and unresolved issue. As it stands, the intro mission implies that the developers are interesting in doing a deep dive on it via the mechanics of their game, and as you and SBM say, that is emphatically not the case in the game itself.

Eh, I doubt they'd see it, even if you walked them through it. In the Abrahamic religions, it's not blasphemy to denigrate the Devil or overstate his wickedness.