Skyward Sword Review

Zelda has been a widely acclaimed series over the generations (that's console generations). Pioneering not only 2D but 3D adventure games for over 20 years. And now Skyward Sword has launched and is set out to show us that the Wii isn't some out-dated piece of hardware and can stand toe-to-toe with any game from this console generation by showcasing beautiful art direction, and superb one-to-one controls with the Wii motion plus... And I'm the Queen of Spain.

While playing this game, I found myself making observations regarding the design. I started to notice that almost every aspect of the game had been taken from somewhere else and stuffed into the final product whether it fit or not. It's not unheard of that a game play mechanic will come from another Zelda game, or another Nintendo game like Mario; but I couldn't help but picture Skyward Sword being this Frankenstein's monster that was stitched together from pieces of other games, struggling to make it all look natural and likeable. The air blower thingy resembles the water cannon from Mario Sunshine, the water bubbles for underwater breathing are from the Galaxy series, gratitude crystals are pretty much star bits from Mario Galaxy, the upgrade system pulled from any modern RPG, bowling bombs from Wii Sports, sky-diving from Wii Sports Resort, whip mechanics from Metroid Prime 3, music controls from Wii music, music lessons from either Wind Waker or Ocarina of Time (take your pick), the main theme is actually just Zelda's lullaby played backwards and other little patches of ideas. It adds to a suspicion that someone didn't know what this game was supposed to be other than a Wii mote waggle fest and decided to ripped other games off and tie it all together with very little effort.

One new addition to the franchise, and borrowed from modern gaming, is the stamina meter... just because they felt like having one. It'll limit all the running, climbing and heavy-combat moments of the game all the while making Link seem like a very obese teenager rather than the Hero of the Goddess. He can't run for more than 10 seconds without having to catch his breath. The only thing it adds is a few tense moments when you have an enemy chasing you, but other than that, it's just a restriction on the amount of fun you can have.

There are new items in this game like the blower, even though it was taken from Mario Sunshine, a whip and the beetle that you can launch like a projectile and maneuver in mid-air. The beetle is a nice addition to the series since it does multiple things and handles nicely. You can pick up bombs, drop them on enemies air-raid style, scout ahead, run into things, it's just fun to mess with. The whip is for whipping, swinging and latching on to levers that are otherwise out of reach. The rest of the items are things we've seen before, but Zelda Skyward Sword did mess up on the execution of presentation. Usually one of the perks of beating a dungeon is getting a shiny, new toy to play with. While we're given introductory stuff in the beginning, like the hook-shot and the sling-shot, you know, stuff we're used to seeing, the new stuff is usually towards the end and is meant to surprise us. You know what item they saved for last? The bow and arrow. The item that's been in the game since the very beginning. Bow and flipping arrow. Surprise! It's not that it's a bad item, it's just expected. We know at some point we're getting one, so why wait until the very last moment to give it to us?

The actual upgrading of the items is nice; you collect bits of stuff from around the world, none of which are terribly hard to find, and bring them back to Skyloft (hub town) to upgrade. Upgrading the shield is worth it, kinda, but I didn't really notice much benefit from maxing out my bow and arrow. The other collecting is done with bugs, which I found surprisingly enjoyable. Going around catching bugs in your net makes me recall my youth. It's that emotion of remembrance which inspired Miyamoto to create the Zelda series in the first place. It's like the perfect moment in a Zelda that completely translates the creator's intentions to my own feelings and memories; making that sought-after connection between game and gamer. But don't worry, there were plenty of moments to completely ruin that feeling ten times over.

Now lets talk about the controls. Oh yes, the very thing we've been waiting for. Ever since we first took up the master sword and Hylian shield, we've all dreamed of swinging our controllers around to feel like the hero that's on the screen. Now let's talk about why they suck. First of all, Link doesn't always do what you tell him. I found that about 75% of the swinging motions will register correctly, leaving the other fourth to the game's imagination. Swinging in one direction sometimes had Link swinging in the opposite direction or just the wrong angle all together. Stabbing had Link either swinging wildly or performing a spin move some of the time; all of which leaves you open to attacks when facing challenging enemies.

There's also something wrong with the controls when Link get's knocked down and has to get back up with sword still in hand. At first, the controls don't even act like the sword is drawn, and an obligatory swing has to be given in order to knock them back in place. A charged attack can be performed by raising the sword, or Wii mote if you're in reality, and absorbing the light and powering your weapon. But often times the controls don't want to act like you're holding up the Wii mote so it ends up looking like you're trying to get reception for your sword in game, and makes you look like a moron.

By the way, that one-to-one sword control thing: it's only half true. While running with your sword out is controlled one-to-one, your attacks are limited to about 4 different angles: diagonal, diagonal the other way, horizontal and vertical. Stabbing is also there but I've already complained about that. Using the shield is almost unnecessary throughout the entire game and works about 80% of the time. The rest of the time you'll accidentally trigger a charge attack or Link will just stand there looking dumb.

Link also refuses to run and swing at the same time, which is odd since you could do that in Twilight Princess. You can be dashing up to an enemy and swipe your sword, but Link will first stop dead and then swing unless you're targeting it, meaning you'll miscalculate the distance and your swing, and get hit. Even when facing off against an enemy locked onto, Link does little more than shuffle around. Pressing A to jump around is all very nice, but nothing propels you forward that isn't an attack.

Z-targeting is starting to show it's age since there's no other means of controlling the camera other than resetting it. And the more mobile battles will often leave you with a poor point of view and get you blind-siding by something off screen. Really wish Nintendo would adopt that whole 2nd analog stick thing that's been around for over a decade now, and no, a d-pad does not count.

The combat itself doesn't do much to foster the strategies the game wants you to employ. Often enemies will only allow you to swing at them from one direction while blocking all other attacks. But it's actually faster to just keep slashing mindlessly until one of your hits connects and stuns the enemy so you can finish it off.

The musical sections are needlessly tacked on and carry their own issues. Instead of memorizing songs or having a complex instrument to play, the harp is just a simple motion. You hold A and move the Wii mote back and forth. The challenge is to complete the motions in time with a pulsing circle which is to say there's no challenge at all. The real difficulty is getting Link's motions to match up with yours. Sometimes no matter how broad a strum I would perform, Link wouldn't do anything. Also, the songs you 'learn' are forgettable and overly synthesized.

Aiming has been made an utter chore for perplexing reasons. The process completely relies on the Wii motion plus behaving itself which is like asking a bull to not trash a china store. Nintendo realized that this was a bad idea but instead of fixing it, they decided to give us the option of resetting the marker by pointing at the screen and hitting down on the d-pad. Nothing is more immersion-breaking than having to re-calibrate the controls in mid-battle, and I found myself doing it quite a bit. The game assumes that you play with the Wii mote constantly pointing at the center of the screen instead of having the Wii mote at your side as you lazily flick your wrist to attack. Even if you did play the way the game wanted you to, Link would run around with his sword pointed in front of him, which looks more comical than threatening. If only there were some sensor bar that came with the Wii so it could accurately track any movements being performed in front of the screen so everything stays relative. Something like that should really just be shipped with the Wii, perhaps with a little stand. But I guess one can only dream of such a mythical device.

And then there's your companion Fi; the most obnoxious, useless character in video game history thus far, whose every line is pure malice towards your intelligence. Her purpose is to point out events that happened only 10 seconds ago; like everyone who plays this game is suffering from the worst case of hyper attention deficit disorder known to man. I don't need to be reminded of the fact that such-and-such happen, I was there, I was the one who caused all that crap. I question what Nintendo must think of it's audience when creating a character like this whom can make even Navi seem tolerable. It's like they think we just get progressively dumber and have to have basic game mechanics explained to us like we've never heard of video gaming before. What about the first Zelda for the NES? There were no tutorials, it just dropped you in the middle of nowhere and wished you the best of luck. Why not go back to that? What's with this constant hand-holding to a series we're supposed to be celebrating the 25th anniversary of. What's worse is the plot makes an effort to get an emotional response from us towards Fi. I have only one emotion reserved for her and it's rage. Her characterization is also on bar with a loaf of bread. She exhibits no emotion and sounds like Glados if you ran her through an auto-tune filter sans the dark humor.

As if all the constant reminders of how the controls work weren't enough, the game actually has four, that's FOUR, videos on how to set up Wii motion plus and work the controller. I really wish I was making this up, but I'm not. I sat there and I watched those videos just to see if they could be justified in any way and no, they can't. There's no person dumb enough on this planet who needs to watch these videos. First of all, the person playing the game obviously knows how to operate the Wii mote considering they turned on the system, put the game in and selected it from the dash board. Did Nintendo think they just guessed their way through that process? Also, the Wii is over 5 years old, what new information for the system could there possibly be? Is there a magic button to convert all Wii games to support standard controllers? If there is, someone please let me know. I'd watch a video for that.

The graphics are a mixed bag but ultimately show their age. The world is colorful and nice to look at times, but everything gets blurry when looked at up close or is off in the distance. I understand that they wanted to go for a water-color effect, but I think they could've sharpened things up a little. See Okami. The characters animate well enough, but sometimes their expressions don't match what their limited vocals are doing. There are moments where Fi will be singing a gentle tune, but her on-screen character looks like she's belting out opera.

Bosses are a treat in this game, and no, that's not sarcasm (not this time at least). They do get progressively more challenging and more fun with each new encounter. It's a shame that the controls get in the way of most of the enjoyment. But while fighting new bosses is great, Nintendo also decided to make us fight them again and again. It starts to feel like Capcom had a hand in this Zelda when I'm facing the exact same boss again for a third time. One repeat encounter happened a mere 20 minutes after the last one. That's not even enough time to finish an episode of Futurama, how about we pace ourselves a little bit Nintendo?

And that brings me to a fatal error with this game. It's padded out, heavily. There's little content here of any substance. When you're not traveling through the small world, you're stuck doing quests that have little meaning other than stopping any progression in the game for a few hours.

One of the worst moments is when you have an escort mission with a robot who is carrying a jug of water through a bunch of baddies. First off, the robot can fly. So why does it have to be so low to the ground where all the danger is, why can't it just hover out of harm's way? Second, to get to the start of the escort mission, I used a drop zone. Guess where else there's a drop zone. At the destination of the freaking escort mission. Why couldn't I just drop down there? I had already been there, unlocked the save point and dropped there before. What was different about this time? Why did I need to do this? Also, the robot doesn't move out of the way from enemy fire. He just hovers there stubbornly, complaining to you that he's getting hit. God forbid he MOVES OUT OF THE FREAKING WAY.

Another moment is your second encounter with the water dragon. She tells you while searching to pieces of the song of the hero that you need to prove your worth with a trial. First off, I already proved my worth to her at the beginning of the game to get part of a sacred flame. Was I not worthy enough then? I already established myself as the Hero of the Goddess, the very same Hero from which legends were spoken of. Who was she to suddenly question everything I've done not only for her, but for the entire world. No, instead you have to swim around and collect magic notes. What arbitrary non-sense. And secondly, she pulls the mission straight out of her watery ass. She takes the part of the song and splits it up into 20 some odd pieces and scatters it around the level. She does realize I'm trying to save the freaking world and don't have time to put up with this crap.

Don't even get me started on the forced stealth section near the end game which requires you to sneak around and re-discover all your gear again. The development team was too interested in finding ways to waste the player's time than actually worrying about if any of this stuff actually made sense. If you were to cut out all the blatant padding that's done in this game, you'd be left with a product about one third it's original size and a game that would only be about 10 hours long.

There are some nice moments where the pacing of the game is slowed down so you can get some contrast to all the action, like the moments in the silent realms. I enjoyed these sections because even though they were exactly the same areas I've been before, they were treated differently. Their tone was completely changed into a more peaceful area, until you ran out of time and had to frantically find more spirit seeds to pacify the demons that inhabited the area. It was nice to get away from the swordplay to more strategic collecting.

Temples have been a staple of the series, and Twilight Princess had some of the best yet. It's a shame that this is the game that follows it because the dungeons here are mostly shallow. There are a few exceptions like the final one, but most really don't leave a lasting impression or challenge the player.

The soundtrack isn't overly awful, but it's not that great either. Most of the time I couldn't hear it over the sound of the gears in my head grinding together every time Link did something I didn't command him to do, or Fi needing to tell me that I just picked up an item after I just picked up the item. But one track that stands out is the orchestrated piece you hear while you're flying around. Not because it's a particularly well-arranged piece of music, but because flying around is overly dull.

Most of the time you don't even feel like you're traveling that fast while soaring around the skies, and even when you are, there's really no indication of it. The best comparison I can make is to Wind Waker, how you sailed across a vast ocean while the water flew past your as your boat parted surface of the sea. In that game you could feel the speed you were going because of all the contextual hints around you; in Skyward Sword there's just air. Have fun looking at that. The size of the sky over world itself is criminally small. There are very few points of interest to entice your sense of exploration while the rest is just empty.

The ground level is no better; there are 3 main areas and they're all uncovered after completing the first three temples, making the world seem very small and uninteresting. Other Zelda games had a nice, expansive world that begged to be discovered. In Skyward Sword, there's not a whole lot of exploration to be had. It actually baffles me that most of the quests have you back-tracking over the same land. If Nintendo really needed to do this, why not have present versions and past versions. There is a time mechanic built into the plot where you can travel back in time, but it's never really taken advantage of. If they're going to pad out the game, at least they could look like they're trying to be creative.

Oh, and there's no fishing mini-game to speak of. Something that would've been perfect for the Wii mote was completely ignored. Why couldn't they rip off that idea from Twilight Princess or Ocarina of Time? Pretty sure you could've found space for it on the disc by deleting those pointless instructional videos.

The plot has a girl named Zelda and a male lead named whatever you want but you're going to name him Link anyways so really it doesn't matter. And eventually, Zelda gets captured and you have to save her, except this time she really wasn't captured and doesn't need saving, so the basic premise of the plot is chasing after her because she's fulfilling her destiny or some crap like that. The game doesn't do a whole lot to motivate you to push forward. Zelda's not in any danger from anything, and there's no feeling of a dark god trying to engulf the world so you pretty much just run around and do what everyone tells you to do. Some moments require you to make a choice during a conversation, but freedom is an illusion. All conversation paths lead to the same place so I wonder why they even bother letting you choose; especially when all 3 choices basically can be interpreted the same way.

The bad guy you'll be most acquainted with, Ghirahim, barely has any screen time and you never really see him doing anything overly evil or anything to make you hate him. He ALMOST gets Zelda, he ALMOST stops Link, he ALMOST seems like a developed character, but he's not. I actually completely forgot he was in the game at one point until the plot forced him back into the action. I'm not even sure what he spent most of the game doing. The only other character worth mentioning is Groose because he's the only one that showed real development. He starts out as the typical bully but then redeems himself through his own actions. Maybe the game should've been about him.

The plot also creates excuses for you to venture from one point, complete a task and then journey back to that point multiple times, like we saw in the DS games. A design choice that should've died with Phantom Hourglass but was kept alive in later incarnations. Instead of having to travel through the same puzzles and unstoppable enemies like Phantom Hourglass, they just put it on the other side of the world which doesn't really make it any better.

If all these in-game issues weren't enough, Skyward Sword shipped with a notorious glitch that prevents you from completing the game. And unlike most game-ending glitches, this one is fairly easy to pull off. Just simply complete the desert level first when trying to assemble the song of the hero and talk to the goron twice during that time and you've successfully locked your game. There have been various other reports like completing another level then going to the desert stage, talking to the goron and then trying to go to another stage which will lock the game up as well. But that one may be explained if you consider the fact that the developers wanted you to complete each area one at a time or in a certain order, but that just makes it a terribly designed part of the game. So we're ultimately left with two possibilities for the Zelda team: are they ignorant or are they just stupid? Either way, they're going to have a fun time trying to patch this game since the Wii doesn't support any sort of modern WiFi connection and the adapters have long been decommissioned.

But is Skyward Sword a bad game? I say no. Not really. There are worse games out there, and I did see it through to the end. I might even go so far as saying I enjoyed bits and pieces before being interrupted by nonsense and all the not-fishing I did. But is it a good Zelda game? And that answer is no, it isn't. Why? Because of one solitary fact that holds it back. And if there's one thing to take away from this review it's this: the game never let's you embark on your own adventure.

During the entirety of the game, you're told what to do, when to do it, and rarely have a chance to deviate from the path set before you. The world is small, the objectives are made PAINFULLY obvious and there's very little critical thinking the player has to do on their own. The game holds your hand all the time with Fi chiming in unnecessarily and there are constant reminders of basic mechanics you grasped long ago. The game just never lets you go to do your own thing. There are no solitary moments where you can just take in the environment and have a quiet moment to reflect on what you've done and where you're going. Part of the journey of the hero is feeling like you're on a really epic quest built upon your own successes.

Why not let me figure out where to go on my own? In Link to the Past, all you had was a world map and some flashing icons that were either pendants or crystals and that's it. We all managed to beat that game without losing our minds or getting a degree of archeology from Harvard. No one had to force exposition in and hold our hand to the point of madness to make utterly sure that we were playing the game properly at all times. AND WHY NO FISHING MINI GAME. When you take away that sense of exploration, you take away what makes the adventure genre great. And that's what keeps Skyward Sword from being a good Zelda game.

Iwata himself actually stated that he went this very contained-sense-of-playing route because he didn't want players getting lost. Well news flash, that's kinda what makes an adventure, an adventure. If there's no danger of getting lost, then there's no sense of risk or curiosity of exploration. And getting lost isn't a bad thing, it means we're off the beaten path and figuring stuff on our own. It makes the world seem like a bigger place. If everything is just straight forward, it becomes too linear and boring.

Zelda Skyward Sword definitely showcases what can be done on the Wii: baffling controls, sub-par graphics and shallow content. It perfectly represents everything the Wii is to the gaming world right now. Just an outdated piece of junk that was fun at one point, but now is embarrassing to talk about. And now we can say the same thing about the Zelda franchise. This is the first Zelda I've played where the mechanics just felt old. Like nothing new was being tried with this game, just stamping out the same formula with ambitions to re-create the Ocarina of Time magic. It feels more like Iwata's project than Miyamoto's; everything is just too safe and tested already. It's like the fear of failure held this game back from being bold and adventurous. Like they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained. And I gained nothing from playing this game, other than high blood pressure.

Dark Souls Review

It's been a few years since Demon's Souls came in as the unanticipated hit of the season with its imposing difficulty, which brought gaming back to the philosophy of 'what you don't know will kill you' found in NES games. Dark Souls looks to continue that tradition of pain and suffering, dying and learning by keeping the same basic formula from Demon's Souls.

The biggest change from Demon's Souls is the world. Demon's Souls had a hub based world with the Nexus connecting all the different levels together, and each level segmented out into stretches ending with a boss fight. Dark Souls uses a much larger over world and ditches the hub for an open-exploration game progression, which means all levels are interconnected in an impressive fashion. It's not uncommon to reach the edge of a level and see parts or terrain from another level off in the distance; this makes the world more believable and the game more easy to get immersed into by the player.

The programmers were smart enough to create several vantage points through out the game to aid the player in overlooking the land below or showcasing the sky filtering through the architecture. Some of the best moments of the game are standing high atop a ledge and glancing peacefully out to distant lands. These scenes are further enhanced by the contrast of all the mayhem that occurs when you're closer to lands which you're gazing over, amiss all the enemies. FromSoftware definitely knew they had built some fantastic levels to showcase, no two areas look the same and the game pace them out nicely. You start out with the pretty standard dungeon and dilapidated city and graduate to lava pits, crystalline caves and surreal wastelands.

The best part about this open world, there are no load times; everything is perfectly seamless much like Wind Waker. Unless you're dying, warping or starting up the game, the action never stops. With all the good the new world brings, there is some bad which infects the game on a fundamental level. Because you can essentially go anywhere right from the beginning, so there's a severe lack of direction in the game. Difficulty progression is still linear just like Demon's Souls, but if you don't know where you're going, you run the risk of fighting bosses either before or after you're supposed to according to their level of challenge. There were a few bosses I had to muscle my way through and then there were some I just over-powered. It doesn't help that some key moments of progression that open up a new area or lead to the next boss are obscured. Many times I overlooked the next part of the game because it was tucked away in some corner or was connected by a well-hidden ladder. The feeling of accomplishment is diminished because it's often unclear why certain bosses need to be defeated in Dark Souls. In Demon's Souls, it was easy: beat the boss, complete the level. In Dark Souls, bosses are spread out and don't necessary unlock new areas, which feels like nothing was gained.

Bosses are just as challenging as ever. Dark Souls throws just about every wicked boss type at you imaginable: relentless powerhouses, 4 on 1 matches, towering knights, you'll feel like you've slain everything possible by the end of the game; all of which require different strategies. There are a few bosses that are just overly simple, most of which was Gravelord Nito. Nito's level, the Tomb of the Giants, is one of the most challenging levels, but his boss fight is a walk in the park. Nito is also apart of the last gauntlet of bosses to get to the final area, so having him be a push over is disappointing for as menacing as he looks. Speaking of the final stretch of bosses, 3 of the 5 are much easier than all the bosses that lead up to them. At the very least, the final boss is one of the most challenging bosses in the game, which is a great way to finish the game. The ending is a little anti-climactic, but I don't see how it really could've been embellished.

Widely praised, Dark Soul's is completely built around the tight battle system much like Demon's Souls, but there are some blemishes on the combat. Every now and then during a fight, button commands will be delayed by 5 - 7 seconds. Meaning, you'll push a button to attack but the attack won't register with the game until much later when you don't want it to, and can lead to devastating openings during a fight. Most notable, I was fighting the final boss and my attacks were delayed 3 times in a row. In a game like Dark Souls, that is unacceptable. Your character will still take their sweet time using a recovery item, making sure they savor every last bit.

*** Update: the control delays have supposedly been fixed in a recent patch.

Targeting hasn't improved at all from Demon's Souls. You'll still be trying to target enemies that are directly in front of you in vain. The worst situations come when you're trying to dodge an enemy but have to lock onto them first, but the targeting system goes blind and you just end up resetting your camera position which leaves you open for attacks. Or you'll be fighting and enemy and they're particularly well-placed behind a single blade of grass which throws the targeting system off as if they're not there. Unless the enemy is in your face and not obstructed by anything, I wouldn't count on locking onto them. More problems arise when you're already locked onto an enemy but get thrown around or move away from them enough to disengage the target. Why can't it be that: if I see the enemy, I should be able to target the enemy. Not: if I see the enemy, and the stars are aligned, and there's nothing between us, and they're 5 inches from my face, and I'm wearing green, and it's the first Sunday of the month, then I now target them.

*** Update: the targeting has supposedly been fixed in a recent patch.

Forget about being able to switch between targets when you have multiple enemies coming at you, which is almost all the time. You'd have an easier time telling a dog to go fetch something blue. The best method I came up with is disengaging one enemy and lock onto the nearest one, and continue that.

There are a bit more weapon and armor types in Dark Souls versus Demon's Souls, but don't really add too much to the game. You'll generally find one weapon you like and build that up throughout the game. Arrows will still curve to hit you, which I find confusing. How in the world do arrows shot only by my enemies manage to follow me to some extent. Yet I have to use a poorly designed mark each time I shoot in first-person mode because my all arrows will shoot from my left side and move across the mark and eventually end up somewhere off to the right. Apparently the enemies in this game are using a technology of wooden arrow yet unseen in the real world: one with homing capabilities that trace paths straight to my face.

Furthering the advancement of wooden arrows, they also have the ability to get stuck in mid-air much like they did in Demon's Souls. You'll shoot an arrow at a barely visible enemy but see that the arrow stops short as it floats motionless next to a pillar or corner.


Crafting is back and is what I consider to be the model of excellent design. Each item can be upgraded via items either purchased or found to 10 levels. From there, depending on your smithy and items, you can branch off into other upgrade paths like: more magic damage, elemental damage, raw power, etc. The great thing about this upgrade system is: 1) the materials aren't that scarce until you get higher up and 2) at any point, you can downgrade your weapon/armor back to its +10 status before the enhancements. None of this, re-find the item and start over bull crap. Upgrading is easily one of the best things about the game and should be imitated.

A new addition to the game is the Humanity system. In Demon's Souls, you had two different states to play the game in: dead and alive. Dead characters would have their HP chopped off but would receive other benefits, while alive would give you your full HP bar but take away some things. You could only restore you life by beating a boss, meaning you'll probably play through much of the game with your HP bar limited. Now in Dark Souls, you're either in Hallow or Human form. Hallowed players are essentially those who've died, but receive no stat penalty and cannot Kindle bonfires. Players that restore their humanity can kindle bonfires and have an item drop increase or lose their humanity by dying. The way to restore your humanity is use an item called Humanity, genius. These items can be farmed or obtained almost randomly throughout the game. Most boss battles didn't give me a humanity back, but running around sometimes would. I think it has to do with other online players and what they're doing, but I can't be sure. I've never found a noticeable pattern. You'll be playing much of this game as a hallow and aren't missing much of anything outside kindling.

Kindling bonfires is a way to increase you flask amount. Instead of having multiple types of healing items to sift through, FromSoftware just condensed it all into one item that's refilled every time you rest at a bonfire. You start off with 5 but can kindle a bonfire up to 20. Bonfires themselves allow you to restore your health, warp around the world, repair items, augments weapons and armor, and level up. All these functions are unlocked during the course of the game. You can think of bonfires as check points in the game, safe zones that can only be activated once there are no enemies around. Resting at a bonfire also resets the enemies layout, returning all non-boss and non-unique enemies to life. It's an interesting trade off that keeps things balanced.

What isn't so balanced is where these bonfires are placed. More than a few of them are behind invisible walls or placed in some hidden spot in the level that most people would just skip over. It'd be nice if they were all easily found, but I guess this game didn't want anything to be easy about it, so often times you'll go over an area a lot, only to come back later and find a bonfire that you missed which could've saved you a lot of trouble and frustration.

Players can unlock a warp option later in the game which allows characters to warp around the giant world, but only to specific bonfires that have a keeper or were at the end of certain bosses. The problem is, these bonfires aren't exactly evenly placed throughout the world, so there's still some backtracking that has to be done despite a fast-travel system which kinda defeats the point.

If you are humane and are roaming around, odds are you'll be invaded by another player. These little moments are met either as nice breaks from the game, or are just out-right annoying depending on what you're doing. There's still no option to play the game in offline mode without just ripping out your internet connect or turning it off in the PS3 / 360. Because, believe it or not, there are some moments I want to use humanity's boost in drop rates to farm stuff without being blown off an edge but some jackass's combustion spell or skewered on their lightning-augmented katana. Maybe that's just the old fashion part of me talking.

Again from Demon's Souls, dying means losing all your souls but keeping all your items, but in Dark Souls you'll lose your humanity status and any humanity you've accumulated as a number which appears in the upper left corner of the screen, you'll still have the items though.

The narration of the game is very minimal, you're given the premise of the game and nothing more afterwards. You're a hallow or undead or whatever terminology the game uses and you're charged with the duty to ring two bells on opposite ends of the earth and bring the light back to the land. The rest of the story is either told by the various characters spread around the land or the lore. The world is an interesting place, and the characters feel authentic so you won't feel short-changed on the story.

The score compliments the feeling of oppression very well. The serene moments are met with a very soothing yet dire melody to express both the comfort of non-combat but the despair of the world, the battles have a chorus joined with dramatic themes which gives each fight some added weight to them; every instance of the game has a score to match. Even when there's no music playing, the various ambiance adds to the environment, whether is the sounds of distance waterfalls or the faint sounds of approaching enemies. The feeling of foreboding despair is constantly imposing upon you as you traverse the land.

Dark Souls, with all the good, commits plenty of deadly sins of gaming. The first of which is the classic infinitely re-spawning enemy sin. Small, flying bugs in the depths of the poison swamp of Blightown will infinitely spawn upon you. They'll come at you 2 at a time and are obnoxious to hit.

Gaming sin number two is a big one for completionists. There is at least 1 item in the entire game that is 100% missable. Before the actual game starts, during the character creation process, you are allowed to pick a job class and a gift to get at the beginning. Most of the gifts can be found in the normal game, except one. The Master Keys can either be obtained by picking the thief job class or picking them as a gift. Deciding to do neither will not allow you to obtain them forever with that character. This may not seen like a big deal, but me as a completionist and this game with a new game+ function, this is inexcusable. You do not have missable items in a game that allows you to start over after you've beaten it. I know the game likes to punish lack of knowledge, but this goes too far.

All the same online functions that were in Demon's Souls are still present in Dark Souls: you can write messages in hopes of aiding other players, or just be a douche bag and write "shortcut drop" next to a bottomless edge. You can also join other players game and assist them directly, but only if you aren't a hallow.

All in all, the game play is still addictive and the online component is two-of-a-kind now. As the credits scrolled up on my screen after battling my way through hordes of enemies, ruthless fiends and towering bosses, I couldn't help but look passed all the names and reflect upon my journey that lead there and the broken controllers that had been sacrificed along the way.

Game Review: Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky

Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky is the 6th role-playing game in the unknown, Japanese gaming series, and was first released back in 2004 and is the first game in a trilogy of games. With the limited release of Japanese role-playing games this year, I decided to see what this series had to offer.

It doesn't seem you need to have played any of the older Legend of Heroes games to understand the plot of this one, but what plot is developed in this entry is shaky at best. The plot suffers from the same problem Lunar: Silver Story had in which, the plot doesn't really kick it into high gear until halfway through the game.

What's present for the first 20 hours is merely one weak, over-arching plot, in this case: your dad, Cassius Bright, going missing, and a series of meaningless subplots. Writing a plot like this can either give characters time to develop, or bore the player to tears. Unfortunately, Trails in the Sky falls into the latter category. It isn't like there aren't a lot of characters to develop, it's just none of them really evolve during that time. The weak over-arching plot of your father going missing is lightly touched on now and again, but since they build up your father as this great hero, him being missing doesn't really draw out much concern. At the beginning, your concern that something had happened to your father through some accident, but instead of building up the suspense, they shut it down by making it seem that no matter what situation your father is put in, he'll be able to handle it.

By the halfway point, the real plot finally makes it appearance, but even that gets mishandled. The villains are never properly developed, it seems half of the events happen off-screen, and only a few of the plot elements get a thorough explanation. The big issue is that the plot doesn't make the crisis seem all that urgent or that caustic. The slow pacing of the game hampers any momentum or excitement potential. So with the beginning and middle mishandled, surely this game can at least close everything out in a nice resolution. Wrong. The game has villains making uncharacteristic U-turns, convenient plot devices are deployed and everything ends on one huge cliff-hanger. Yes, the game ends on one giant cliff-hanger that involved an underlying plot involving certain main characters and villains in operation behind the scenes. All of which seemed a lot more interesting than what we were fed for 40+ hours. So what the plot did was stall out for 20 hours, didn't take the time to set anything up in a coherent manner, throws together a resolution, then has the audacity to tell us in the final minutes of the game that the real plot has yet to begin. There's an industry word we use for plots that do that, its called 'Bullshit'.

Trails in the Sky, or TitS for short, sets everything up for us to purchase a sequel to this gaming trilogy that may or may not come to the United States in a bigger douche-bag move than Golden Sun 3. A law must be written that game writers can't do this, use an entire game just to build up another game's plot. They had over 40 hours to get something done in this game, and they chose to squander it. I can understand the concept of a sequel, but at least provide something meaningful the first time, and take it somewhere else the next time. Don't just make a first game to set up the other games, otherwise you're just the dot Hack series all over again.

The characters don't do much to save this game. The two main characters Joshua and Estelle don't create a lot of memorable moments. Joshua's personality is as dry as the desert, but Estelle is decently portrayed as someone who doesn't quite think before she acts, but not in a cliche way that gets predictable or annoying. The game likes to play on the fact that Joshua isn't Estelle's real brother, so there's still room for a romance story to take place, as awkward as that may be. But that never really takes off either, as that development is cut short near the end of the game, we just get those almost-moments for most of the game. I guess it'll be another one of those things that will be featured in the next game. The rest of the cast really doesn't leave an impression, none of them really develop beyond what we're given when we first see them. Overall, the plot and characters were poorly executed and none of which created any sort of dramatic or memorable moments.

Battles are fought in a turn-based, free-roaming field similar to turn-based strategy games. Think something of a hybrid between Star Ocean and Final Fantasy X. Players can move around the battlefield, avoiding enemy spells or moving in for the kill, and turns are kept track of by a vertical list along the left-hand side. Though it's handy to see what turns are coming up, it's not as reliable as Final Fantasy X's turn count. Often times, extra turns will crop up in the list either from enemies casting spells, different special moves pushing down other participants down the list, or getting a preemptive strike.

Every now and then bonuses will appear next to spots on the turn list that offer some advantage, so having tactics to reshuffle the turn order around can play into some element of strategy. The bonuses aren't varied or that frequent, but that just means battles won't necessarily be decided by them either; which is good since it removes that fickle element of luck.

Getting into battles takes a page from Persona or similar games in that, enemies appear on screen while you're roaming around, and its up to you to either avoid them or tactically get behind them for a preemptive strike. An issue arises when it's you that's trying to avoid an enemy's advance. Your party members will follow you Chrono Trigger-style, and if you're in the middle of running away, the enemy can catch the tail end of your party and create a battle to your disadvantage.

Another issue that plagues the game is, it's too easy to accidentally run into enemies. They start off almost completely transparent until you get close to them. Until you get an orb that let's you see them in full from a distance, you're stuck either blindly running through areas, or walking for most of the game. I understand designers like to take their customizable parts and apply them to many areas of the game, but having the enemies be nearly invisible makes no sense. Is everyone in this world just near-sighted? Are enemies semi-transparent? No, they're not. It's just a clumsy way to get more involvement from orbs.

While actual combat is handled competently, the battle mechanics never really change throughout the game. The most change you'll see is from unlocking new spells through higher tier orbs or a new, character-specific special abilities. Aside from that, most battles will play out with the same basic strategy each time, which can really put a strain on the game play when the same grouping of enemies crop up repeatedly. On that note, Trails in the Sky has a few moments where they throw the exact same grouping of enemies at you constantly, mostly towards the end of the game.

The customizable part of combat comes from allocating orbs to each player. Each orb has an elemental affiliation and an effect. Effects range from a boost in statistics or added effects in battle like adding poison to your attacks or lowering spell-casting time. But there aren't enough orbs in the game to really diversify characters, so everyone's set up comes down to similar combinations of orbs. Orb elemental affiliation determines which spells you're able to cast. More fire orbs will open up more powerful fire spells. But again, since most setups will be the same, there isn't a lot of spell diversity. There's also a criminally low amount of equipment choices, and none of the accessories really provide much in battle. Gear setup follows the old tradition of 'just put on the weapons and armor with the better stats'. Experience points are handled by the modern concept of, the higher your level, the fewer and fewer experience points your character will get, which keeps people from over-leveling.

The graphics are typical, well-executed PSP-level graphics. There are a few spots where corners may have been cut, like airship propellers sticking out of octagonal engines. The character sprites actually remind me of a mesh between Super Mario RPG and Golden Sun, which is a good thing. They're animated, it's clear what they're doing, overall, the traits of each character's personality are conveyed through their sprites. The game has a habit of re-using a lot of the hallways and rooms for dungeons, the final dungeon being a big offender. I'm not kidding that the final dungeon is thrown at you with similar looking decor throughout all 4 floors and you have no map to navigate it with. You'll be traversing through this labyrinth with the feeling of constant deja vu.

Soundtrack doesn't quite match the on-screen action a lot of the times. Though it is worth noting that when a battle turns dire, the music shifts accordingly. Outside that one clever touch, the soundtrack isn't winning any awards.

And just to kick TitS while it's down, the title doesn't make much sense. Legend of Heroes, I'll take that part since it loosely fits the theme of the game, but Trails in the Sky? The sky has nothing to do with the plot, airships aren't even heavily involved like Skies of Arcadia. I'm not sure what trails in the sky has to do with this game, but I wouldn't be against launching it into orbit just so some more sky was involved.

The game does get a few key things right: one being failing a battle just means having the option to restart from the beginning of that battle, and the other is the Bracer notebook. The notebook keeps your progress in the game by jotting down what has happened and where you need to go. This minimizes any confusion from taking an extended break with the game and jumping back in.

Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky fails... in the Sky. It's just one missed opportunity after another. All it needed was a little more care and attention. Orbs could've been used and combined to create new skills or spells, more gear choices could've opened up the battle mechanics, the turn-based game play could've taken a page from Radiant History, characters could've been put through a lot more interesting scenarios instead of playing it safe, and a host of other minor tweaks could've made this game a winner. Instead, its a dud. Trails in the Sky may have a hard time getting continued support like this and will be overlooked in favor of better games in the genre, at least by me. TitS or not.

Anime Review: Steins;gate

Steins;gate is an anime that aired in Japan during the summer season, but one that really surprised me. And given that there have already been surprises with this year in anime, that's saying something. What surprises me the most is Steins;gate shows just how good an anime can be. Nine times out of ten, anime is complete garbage, but every now and then one comes along that makes anime worth defending. I give you my review of Steins;gate.

Steins;gate centers largely around a story about time travel. But instead of focusing on two split timelines, the main character travels through many different variations of a timeline. While it doesn't explore the full possibility of seeing the same world in drastically different ways, it does give each timeline more meaning by having the main character tasked with changing only one thing about the timeline at a time, causing a new timeline to occur. This wouldn't be so compelling if it didn't personally involve the entire cast of characters. The anime makes very good use of everything they present to us.

The main character, Okabe, is drastically different from most anime protagonists by first having an actual personality. Instead of the cardboard cutout characters we've see that are either heroes that either stomp around, declaring shamelessly the values of good or just being indifferent to everything while flocks of girls assemble around him, Okabe actually leaves a strong impression. He's a scientist, or at least he says he is, but instead of acting in a calculated manner, he acts like he's caught in his own fantasy from time to time. He'll often pretends to be talking on a phone while rambling about some anonymous organization, when there really isn't any organization at that point, or attempt to be clever in some way that's completely transparent. But all the while he does these goofy things, he always remains completely self-aware of it all which gives him a lot more validity than most anime characters I'm used to seeing. Even later in the series, he goes through subtle changes while still maintaining the characteristics that make him likeable, but ads an undertone based on what he's going through. Wait, did I just say an anime was subtle about something? By God, that can't be right. Anime is about as subtle as a buffalo running through a daycare. It's actually true. This anime has subtly and it uses it well.

Okabe being goofy as he is while wearing a lab coat does create some authentically humorous moments. Picture if you will him sitting next to an otaku and Okabe is the one socially embarrassing himself so the otaku is ashamed of being seen with him. That's just funny.

When he's not goofing off in public, he's at his lab, which is really an apartment above a shop, messing with future devices or talking to his team which comprises of Daru and Mayuri.

But an anime can't survive on one cast member alone, luckily Okabe is surrounded by a great collection of other characters, all of which serve some purpose to the plot. Starring opposite him is Kurisu. She's an actual scientist and a genius to boot. Somehow she gets caught up in the antics of Okabe and his club and usually expresses the desire to have nothing to do with them, and yet she always comes back for more. She's the more serious character but has her goofy moments, so she compliments Okabe's personality very well.

Daru, the previously mentioned otaku, is just that. He's also a computer geek and master hacker. He adds more to the humor than anything else but does take part in some of the more shocking and dramatic moments in the series.

Mayuri is the least compelling of all the characters. She doesn't change much throughout and is only used as a plot device later in the story. But that doesn't mean she doesn't contribute nothing to the cast. She has her quirk of saying 'tutturu' which replaces 'hello' or 'goodbye'. I think she's mostly there to give us a baseline for everyone else, so everything isn't just serious or slightly off all the time.

Moeka is the silent type who communicates to everyone through her cellphone. She plays a heavy roll in the middle of the plot which at one point is despised but then later pitied. The writing has to be good for that to happen and the plot pulls it off well.

Ruka for all purposes is a trap. A boy that looks very much like a girl but isn't thrown in for some misplaced fan service or popularity. Ruka's situation lends itself to one of the more dramatic moments in the story, which shows good use of character beyond artificial reasoning.

The rest of the cast are equally strong and involve themselves in interesting ways in the plot, which is really nice to see in an anime. The plot makes use of every single person, nothing is just thrown in for no reason which seems to be the trend with most every anime. Since this is an eclectic cast of characters, the dialog is very entertaining. With Okabe at the helm of most conversations, it gives the rest of the cast something to work with. Even though this series does have its dramatic moments, there's still a lot of well-placed humor to be found.

The only criticism I have for the show is a minor spoiler about where the plot takes everyone so feel free to skip passed this next paragraph.

<-- SPOILER PARAGRAPH -->

About halfway through the series, in order to change the timeline to a more desired future, each character has to undo something about the timeline they changed revealed to them by Okabe. This involves all the minor characters sacrificing something important to them for something bigger than themselves and really evokes a sense of sympathy for them, especially Rika. It's heart-breaking to watch Okabe encourage them to do this while he's so determined. But when it comes time for Okabe to sacrifice something, the anime dodges the issue so that he doesn't really have to give up anything. I think it would've been more meaningful if he had to personally go through what he was making all the minor characters go through since he was more than willing to let them give up their timeline.





<-- YOU CAN START READING AGAIN -->





So other than that one flaw in the later theme of the story, this anime is gold. I had a lot of fun watching it. It does things better than most any other current anime out there today. The animation is above average and the soundtrack gets the job done. I don't exaggerate when I say this is one of my personal favorites.

It may take a while to get to the United State, if it's brought here at all, but it's worth buying the DVDs / Blurays. And it shows that anime isn't always terrible-flavored terrible covered in weird, it's just like that most of the time.

Video Game Review: Catherine

In this review, I beat Catherine. Now if only there was a way that I could say that without someone filing for domestic abuse charges.

Atlus continues its fascination with making us climb up ridiculous towers that lead to some existential place during the middle of the night with their latest game from the Persona development team, Catherine. If anyone played Persona 3 or its various incarnations, the main goal of the game (other than dating imaginary characters) was to climb Tartarus during the dark hour. Good to know that 5 years later, Altus now has us climbing a tower again in the middle of the night, but this time its comprised of blocks and sheep.

First off, the anime, cell-shaded graphics are awesome. It disappoints me that more games with this same graphic styling haven't made their way over to the States, and I will be further disappointed if Persona 5 doesn't have the same styling as well. All the character emote properly and move convincingly; the voice acting is solid. The only hiccup I experienced with the sound was with the dialog running into each other. Sometimes characters wouldn't properly finish their sentences before starting the next one, so it seemed like they were talking over themselves which has to be the greatest ventriloquist feat ever executed.

The story isn't that deep and the characters aren't the most developed, but an impression is left. You're Vincent Brooks (and I'm Ryan Brooks) and you're put through guilt-trip-induced trials because you have cheated on your girlfriend, Katherine, with another girl named Catherine. Everything the game is based around the concept of atonement and relationships. It's nice to see a game define a concept and stick with it through every facet. The one thing that doesn't work so well is the moral choice system. What you're supposed to do whenever a game throws this mechanic at you is choose the route you'd personally take while playing the game. What you're probably going to do, like I did, was just go to one extreme to see one ending, and then replay and go the other to see the other ending. Thus, defeating the real point of the moral choice system. Let's face it, no one acts out in games the way they do in real life. In a real zombie apocalypse, I'd probably piss my pants and hide somewhere until someone rescued me and my drenched pants. In a game, I'll find the nearest firepower and unload round after round of prejudice towards anything remotely undead.

One could make the argument that this is a simple mechanic employed to make the player go through the game to get different endings, but I counter with the point that games have done multiple endings in the past without needed a meter to tell me how good or bad I am. It is interesting to see scenes diverge depending on how you've previously answered questions and acted, but I'd rather not see the meter or have the moral points be so obvious. After every block puzzle, the game literally stops you to ask a question about what you would do in a situation. The 'good' and 'bad' answers are obvious and don't really enhance the game play or story. I'd rather have my actions decide what course the game takes, and with a dating simulation game, there should've been no problem setting up situations to question how I would handle different relationship-based moments.

Game play consists of two different scenarios: there are the moment where you are in your bar, chatting it up with friends, looking at naughty pictures or playing Rapunzel, which is a block game within a block game... within a dream and there are the moments you spend climbing blocks in your sleep. The bar interactions are very reminiscent of the simulation moments in Persona 3 and 4. It's interesting to interact with different characters or just sit down at the table and get drunk, and most of the actions do have an effect on the outcome of the game and it's 8 different endings.

The block-climbing faces you off with different varieties of blocks, usually a new one introduced with each new level, and you have to climb your way to the top while sections start falling off periodically. The puzzles can be solved many different ways, and the game lets you reset up to 9 moves in case you completely botched a climb like I did on soooo many occasions. Nothing like pushing a support block out of the way just to see the level above you come tumbling down. In case you really mess things up, which I did, you can choose to reset the entire level and start over, or start over from a checkpoint. Both options expend one retry, which can be accumulated by collecting pillows that are found on each level. And trust me, you will fail a puzzle many times before you figure out the magical combination of block moving needed to move on. Though each level, especially the later ones, are difficult, I always found myself having an excess of retries. Pillows will give you two retries, and if you fail, the item will re-spawn for you to collect it again. Thus, you can amass continues quickly by simply retrying a level over and over again.

The different variations of blocks in the game are interesting and creative, but not all are well executed. There are blocks in the later levels that have a face attached to them, that are supposed to knock you down or move randomly and can easily be defeating by stand on top of them or resetting back one move. There are cheap ones that will only reveal what type of block they are until you stand on top of them. Usually letting you get comfortable standing on them while you look around for somewhere to climb, only to have them turn into a spike block and demolish you; you have to constantly keep an eye on your footing as well as where you want to go.

Nothing beats the utter frustration when you mix in a camera that does not turn around the entire block and mind-bogglingly bad controls. If you're unfortunate enough to try to navigate behind the puzzle, I hope you didn't need to navigate anywhere you intended to in a hurry. And if you're playing this game, that's the case all the freaking time. Some brain child at Atlus decided that controls needed to be reversed for left and right while hanging off the back of blocks, but only when you move across them. When moving from block to block, they're not reversed. So moving across the back of a set of blocks turns into a guessing game of if you need to adjust for reverse controls or not reversed controls. Or you'll give up and never try it again. I had a handful of moments where I was just pressing left and I kept going left, then right, then left again, amounting to getting nowhere. It's utter insanity.

There's a small selection of items in the game, all of which have a purpose and serve to make the puzzles a little easier if you need some assistance. Two ways to get items are buy them in the store at the end of each level, or find them on the levels themselves. Trick is, you can only carry one item at a time. I had to rely on items twice to complete a stage, and if the item you want isn't on the level, you have to reset the game, go buy it, and then start the climb again.

Throughout some levels, enemies are scattered around. Most of them are just other sheep trying to climb up to freedom as well. The issue is, they always get in the way. Atlus takes this competition seriously, so you cannot move to a higher block when another sheep is occupying it. This leads to many moments where the floor is collapsing underneath you, and you can't move anywhere because the freaking sheep are blocking your way. The opposite of that is, if you're moving to a block on the same level or a level below, you can knock them off. Eventually, you'll encounter enemies that wield axes and will kill you if you're close enough. So on top of everything else going on in a level, you now have sheep murderers to look out for.

Bosses usually aren't apart of puzzle games, but they're here. Usually they all involve the same idea, just keep climbing higher and higher as fast as you can. Some use attacks that will knock out a section of the puzzle, all of which can be undone by your magic undo move. I actually managed to lock one of the end bosses in a constant state of readying an attack for a while by doing this, thus allowing me to progress further than I had before without them blasting away a precious section of the puzzle.

Of course no game is complete without some dumb escort mission, and there is just one in this game. And it is every bit of annoying as you'd think it'd be. Your AI partner has no sense of self preservation and has to be constantly attended to or they'll stand around as their death comes flying at them. There were a few moments where I had to shout at the TV "MOVE DAMN YOU" because there's no way to directly get them to move.

In true Atlus fashion, the game doesn't end when you think it will. It took about 7-8 more puzzles to actually beat the game than advertised. It wouldn't be an issue if the game didn't keep telling you, 'oh, don't worry, this is the last puzzle'. It was about the 3rd time the game told me that, that I just stopped listening to what it had to say on the matter.

At the end of it all Catherine is a unique game, but it could've executed the whole moral dilemma situation better. I wouldn't say it's team Persona's best game, but it's not their worst. The game will run you about 10-12 hours, not counting deadly plunges into the abyss. All I can really say is, I could live without it.

Dissidia 012 [Duodecim] Final Fantasy

I'm just going to cut to the big joke of the game: the title. Just in case anyone is confused on how to say it, or just what it is: it works like this: Dissidia 012 [Duodecim] Final Fantasy. Dissidia (latin for conflict) 012 (pronounced duodecim) [duodecim] (the designers telling you how to pronounce previous numeral arrangement in brackets) and Final Fantasy (the game series this game is based on). So yeah, we have latin, a number, how to pronounce that number and a name of a series this game is roughly based around. For some reason, the 21st century have struck Square Enix with the inability to name games. Previously they've provided us with gems like: Birth By Sleep, 386/2 Days and the confusingly-titled Infinite Undiscovery. Maybe the next Dissidia game will have the year thrown in so we all remember when it came out.

Dissidia Duodecim's story is one of pretentious dialog, cliched topics about friendship and all that is  good and right that modern anime is bursting full of and mock-moments taken from the characters' respective games; none of which amount to anything close to decent. The premise for the plot from the get-go is really flawed. Each Final Fantasy may have had a decently penned script and plot (except 8), but when you try to cut and splice them all together, there's very little chance to get anything good, much less coherent. It's like ripping out pages from Dorian Gray, Lord of the Rings, Old Man and the Sea and The Great Gatsby, and rearranging them together to make a new book; all you really have is a mess of pages and glue that no one wants to read, and some of the creators ate some of the paste. And that's exactly what Dissidia Duodecim's story is, an incoherent mess created by a bunch of glue-eaters. The overall story doesn't really make much sense, and when it 'twists' you can almost hear spine of the story snap in half.

You have a Tolkien-esque end-of-everything scenario with the god of Discord and the goddess of Harmony fighting it out, except neither of them really fight. They've summoned the souls of the antagonists and protagonists from the different Final Fantasy universes and make them fight. Though when someone is defeated, they come back anyways, so really there's not a whole lot of progression. The game's new story line actually points this out at some point which must mean the script writers gave up on thinking of a good reason for everyone to keep fighting. Along the way the protagonists meet up and work together to defeat evil, and boy do they not shut up about it. It came to the point where I was rooting for evil just so I wouldn't have to listen to it anymore. Eventually though, Chaos does take up his position as lead bad guy to fight, and he is a badass. But then on the opposite side of the spectrum has the Goddess who is flat out useless as far as goddesses go or just anything in general. She doesn't do anything the entire time except suck and die.

Voice acting is pretty solid overall, Chaos being voiced by Goliath from the TV series Gargoyles is just one big treat and easily my favorite voice actor in the game. Most of the male protagonists sound bland and run together, the only other stand out performance is by Kefka. Kefka is one of the few characters I enjoyed watching in the cut scenes as his demented personality has that Heath Leger joker-quality to it where you hate him, but you can't stop watching him. Sometimes he's evil, sometimes he's just goofy, but in the end, he at least has a personality which is more than I can say for the rest of the cast.

The soundtrack is a mixed bag. Some of the remixed tracks from the older games sound great, but others sound a little butchered like Terra's theme from Final Fantasy VI. I also liked the soundtrack a lot better before I knew Kidneythieves was involved in some of it. It's not that I don't like the band, I just don't want to hear them ever again... ever.

Thankfully, DynamicDuodecim took the grid-style map and replaced it with a real world map (more like a state map given the size) and a better grid-style map. The over world is essentially linear with multiple starting points for each character and one teleport crystal to go from one end to the other. There's no exploration or secrets, the only NPCs are your allies, enemies and Moogle shops, and there are treasures spread around on the slightly off-beaten path. It doesn't serve much of a purpose beyond being a freer area to roam around, but story battles still take place on a grid. But the major differences between the first game and the second are good ones, no longer does movement take KP, you can move from square to square freely. There are bonuses and actual strategy this time around. KP gambles, chain assists, bravery multipliers, level reducers and more all aid you in combat.

Combat is relatively unchanged except for the addition of an assist character bar which charges during actions like counter-attacking or blocking and countering which allows another character to jump into the battle temporarily to help dish out the damage. It's not that big of a game-changer, but it is something to mess around with. Players will still fight between exchanging bravery to beef up their attack power and then go for the throat with HP attacks, and this leads to some epic and intense battles just like the first game. The camera goes a little nutty when fighters are locked in tight spaces like a corner or during the close encounter moments where you have to dodge at the right moment but there's something in the foreground obstructing your view of the other person. There are some cheap moments to the game play, especially if you're good at figuring out the AI. Sometimes the computer can be predictable and exploited in funny ways which de-fangs the difficulty.

For the most part, Duodecaheron is the same game as the first with minor improvements and with a more bolstered roster, adding in 9 more characters: Kain from Final Fantasy IV, Tifa from Final Fantasy VII (jiggle-physics included), Laguna from Final Fantasy VIII, Yuna from Final Fantasy X, Vaan from Final Fantasy XII, Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII, Prishe from Final Fantasy XI, Gilgamesh from Final Fantasy V, and Desperado Chaos from Dissidia / Final Fantasy. Just in case you're trying to pick between this game and the first, go with this one. Not only do you get the story mode for 6 of the new characters, you get the entire game from the first with the enhanced grid system and world map. But just in case you already own the first one, there is a feature which you can load data from Dissidia 1 into this game.

Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon Review

I think we all know why we keep seeing this movie series in theaters. It's because we either liked Transformers as children and thus the franchise will always be apart of us when we were experiencing the bliss of youth. It might also have to do with the fact that movies like this make for better trailers than actual movies. Suffice to say, most all of the best scenes for Dark of the Moon are in the trailer and what's left for the movie is utter garbage.

Michael Bay once again proves he is about as good of a director as I am a walrus. There were a lot of problems establishing locations and time frames for which the events took place. I found myself confused for a while about what actually was going on or what the movie was trying to show to me simply because I didn't know where anything was taking place. Pretty much the whole middle part of the film is like that, characters just jump from one location to the next without any sense of continuity and it makes the "story" harder to follow, what little there is.

Most of the scenes in this movie were also shot with a sweeping camera, which makes it look like there's more happening than there really is. For a while it disguises the fact that this movie has no substance, but after an hour, it becomes noticeable that the camera just never sits still. This isn't a problem specifically with Transformers 3 because it extends to most every other film he has ever directed. Bay needs to slow down the camera and focus on something or someone at some point, establish a setting or scene before he goes tearing through it.

Continuity is also a major problem this movie has with the other two movies established in the same canon as this. My biggest problem was, they showed us new characters without introducing them to us. New Autobots appear in this movie without any explanation of how or why. Most of them aren't even given names so I can't even tell you which ones I liked, and about the same number never even spoke. So how or why should I care about what happens in this movie when half the protagonist robots weren't even cared enough for by the director or writer. There was a really cool red Autobot that used a God of War-like weapon, referring to the Blades of Chaos, where the Autobot would throw two hooks at the enemy which had tethers at the ends of their handles, so he could latch on and pull back on his weapons to disable the Decepticons. I liked that, I could relate that to my crippling video game addiction and enjoy it, but beyond that one time he used it, the Autobot left no impression on me. Even when I tried to enjoy this movie, it didn't allow me to.

And that's the biggest flaw this movie has that separates it out from the other two movies. It's hard to enjoy. Every scene and twist is either ripped directly from the first two movies, or something else. There are no surprises in this movie at all. There's nothing to get excited about. None of the action was built up, so there was no drama or suspense. There was nothing to look forward to. It's just more of the same. How many more times could they use the scene where people are falling and one of the Autobots catches them? All the action, all the characters, all the effects, it's all exactly the same. It's so copy and pasted that it's actually really boring to watch. They blatantly ripped off other movies like District 9 and actually got the composer from Inception to do the soundtrack. And guess what, the soundtrack sounds just like Inception. How about something more original?

What that all amounts to is shallow action scenes. When two robots fight, the weight of the outcome should make the viewer care about the fight itself. But almost none of the fight scenes had any weight to them. When you don't build up the anticipation of the fight, the fight doesn't leave an impact, the characters fighting come off as shallow and you lose your audience's interest. When Optimus and Megatron finally had their 15 second bout, I didn't even care. All the bad guys before this point in the movie had mostly been off-camera accept Soundwave's bird. So the villains never really did anything to make us hate them or provide the proper context for the battle. You never actually SEE them do anything evil. It was almost like everyone just came together in the climax because it was expected at that point: like Megatron and Optimus were just looking at scripts off-camera and going through the motions before breaking off and reminiscing about the 80's around the buffet table on set.

Three of the new Autobots were pure product placement from Chevy and NASCAR. They were replicas of the Sprint cars driven by Juan Pablo Montoya, Jimmie Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. It was a little treat to see them since I am a NASCAR fan but it raises more questions than hopes. Why choose those car models to impersonate? It seems so random and quite frankly, very improbable. I know why the writers did it; it's because all of the cars in the movie were Chevrolets. And the three drivers I mentioned before drive Chevy Impalas. But it made no sense to the setting or story, it was just random. And again, they were never given any names or introduced to us, and only Juan Pablo's car spoke. This is another thing that confuses me: Juan Pablo is Columbian, but the car in the movie spoke with a Scottish accent. How does that work? If it had a Columbian accent, it would've made a lot more sense, but they went in a completely terrible direction which only adds to the confusion of the character. It made it hard to enjoy seeing those three Sprint cars decked out in heavy artillery and jet engines.

It wasn't just the Autobot characters that were mishandled, but the humans too. Once again 80% of the movie is about what those lame humans are doing which is far too long to spend on what people didn't pay to see. The movie is called Transformers, not Dawson's Creek or Saving Private Ryan. I also found most of the characters too cartoon-ish for the movie, which is an odd feeling to have since Transformers was originally a cartoon. But here, they don't match the tone of the movie. Everything else is pure action, but now we have these awkward comic relief moments where characters just act goofy for no reason. I understand humor is something that can be worked in, but it was as gently placed in this movie as a space shuttle would be in an elephants rectum. There's also an obscene amount of models in this movie, female models, model rockets, model cars, everything so polished and perfect that it's distracting. Every female in the background under the age of 25 looks like they're shooting their own private commercial, posing at opportune times to sell something. The biggest distraction would be the female lead. I know she's a model by trade, but god, could she stop posing in this movie and start acting? Almost every scene she's in, she has to pose for the camera. We get it, she's hot, let's have more robot action now.

It wasn't only new Autobots that seemingly sprung up between films, a whole slew of new nameless Decepticons showed up who were apparently hiding on the moon the entire time. I'm not even sure how that makes any sense. We run into another continuity problem; where were they in the other movies? Why weren't they summoned to fight in those films? Once again, nothing is ever explained.

The coolest new Decepticon was the giant worm that apparently was a part of Shockwave or controlled by Shockwave, once again, nothing is ever clarified to what or how this transformer works which is a shame. It is unique and interesting but it's given no explanation and doesn't even receive a proper exit from the movie. It was never destroyed or stopped, it was forgotten after it's final scene and that was the end of it.

Soundwave does make another appearance and once again he's cool to see. But he's only in one meaningless scene, it's his bird that gets most of the screen time. The bird itself is cool to watch since it can mimic the appearance of technology like TV's and such, so it's practical and fun. It was nice seeing something that was treated right, but again, Soundwave has about 1 line in the entire movie, he sounded great by the way, but he never shows up again.

Some inconsistencies that I noticed on-camera are that: no matter what desperate or life-threatening situation the lead female was thrown in, she always looked her best, which was a little jarring. Perfect makeup, perfect hair every time is distracting to see when you were supposed to have gone through a battlefield. Even the cars maintained an absolute perfect shine even if they transformed and were suddenly battle-worn. This just contributes to the on-going continuity problem this movie had. Also, Chicago gets wrecked beyond belief, but then some shots have the buildings looking pristine and undamaged, which makes me focus on that instead of the action.

The plot is dumb as a pile of bolts. This one gives the second movie a run for it's money, and that's really bad. The big twist in the movie didn't even make sense. There's also a scene where the female lead (you've probably noticed by now I can't remember the name of any of the characters) talks to Megatron and chews him out. First off, why is Megatron taking crap from a human and not bashing her face in? It would have been so satisfying for them to kill her off right then and there, but no. Megatron takes it like the mega-bitch he is.

Even Optimus Prime seems rather weak in this movie. Three scenes stood out to me: one where Optimus doesn't talk to people because he's having a sissy fit, one where the Intelligence Department lady chews him out, and one where he gets tangled in a bunch of ropes. I was honestly embarrassed for him. Optimus is a prime, certified bad ass and someone had the gull to write a scene where he's stuck in some wires, and the other Autobots have to cut him free in the middle of a battle.

The Intelligence Department lady also had the biggest stick up her ass and acts like the stereotypical, no-nonsense, everything by the books lady, and comes off as obnoxious and predictable. Never having seen a Transformer up close before, she has the balls to argue with all of the robots like they'll listen to anything she has to say.

For a third time, Michael Bay had absolutely no respect for the source material that he was working with and ignored what was already established to give us utter garbage. There's so much substance to work with when trying to put together a Transformer's movie, but instead, Bay went after the clueless retard demographic. The people who see these movies for the thrills and action, and that's what brings in the most money.

Overall, the acting is hokey, the action is redundant, the story is abysmal, characters are shallow and forgettable, the jokes are lame, the soundtrack is pretty much Inception by the end of the movie, there are no surprises, nothing to leave an impression and is a waste of time. This is a done-by-template movie that just copies the other two movies without adding anything of substance. If you want to see this movie, just watch the second movie, because that's basically what Dark of the Moon is. Or better yet, just watch the 1986 animated Transformers film.

Worst JRPG Cliches

I love JRPGs, and I don't know why. I can definitely see the flaws in the concept of a story-driven game. But sometimes the stories are really good or the game play is interesting enough to escape the scorn of my heart. But then there are just some things that I can't forgive, some cliches that appear in JRPGs over and over again that remain unchallenged. They are thus:

Oh, I Was Supposed to Die

Boss battles are always put in games as the challenge moments, to take all your experience and put it to good use. But sometimes, what seems like a particularly difficult challenge, ends up being a trick. It's the boss fight you were SUPPOSED to lose. Oh, well thank you game. Thank you for telling me that I was supposed to lose this fight. I only spent all of my items keeping my pathetic team alive, and it was all for nothing. Now I have to reset and die properly. Why do JRPGs even let us control these fights if we can't determine the outcome? What's worse is sometimes the fights almost look winnable until the big boss person unleashing move of ultimate destruction #27 on us and wipes everyone out in one hit. To be fair, there are some fights that are just overly difficult, but not impossible, and people use those as 'oh, I beat the game at its own... game' moments (Xenogears). But there aren't enough to warrant what should've been a cut-scene. Biggest offender: Eternal Sonata.

They Left and They Took My Stuff!

I don't know how this keeps happening in Japanese RPGs but it's annoying each and every single time it happens. You spend all this time and money to buff up the gear of a non-main character and due to the plot's own discretion, that character leaves. Oh, and they took all your stuff with them. There's nothing like seeing a character go and then checking your inventory to see all that gear mysteriously absent. I don't know if it's just stupidity on the development side or maybe there's some concept that I'm not getting, but it has to stop. I'd like to think it was only old JRPGs that did this, but no, even modern JRPGs continue this trend of torment. Latest examples I can think of are the Final Fantasy IV DS edition which has characters moving in and out of the party like there's a revolving door and often at unpredictable times, and Eternal Sonata which makes you think you're keeping all the characters till the end of the game, just to lose a few near the end. How hard is it to really just take off the gear before they leave? I've seen games do it, it's not hard to figure out.

To add insult to injury, sometimes the characters never come back; or when they do, they have completely new gear. And while I'm on the subject, stop giving us awesome characters which we can't remove their awesome gear from. There's never really a good reason, the game only gives you the 'this gear can only be worn by this person' excuse. Yeah, like no one else in the fricken group can figure out how to put on a hat. Biggest offender: Final Fantasy IV.

There's Nothing Stopping Me...

There's nothing like exploring the vast fantasy world of a game, with its surreal environments and strange inhabitants, only to find the end of it all and its an invisible wall. Or how about when you want to move from one vertical plane to the next, only to just get stuck walkign in place. Since most JRPGs don't have a jump button, and no, contextual jumping 'spots' do NOT count (FFXIII, FFX-2), they just throw up invisible walls to stop people from moving vertically across anything. Or when there's a little opening between two walls which no developer put anything there to stop you, you run into an invisible wall. It's not like JRPGs are complicated enough to need all buttons on a standard controller, so programming a jump button shouldn't be a problem. The westerners seemed to have figured it out, so what's going on in Japan? Have they not figured out that bending the knees and propelling one's self upwards is possible? That for a brief moment, humans can accelerate upwards fast enough to overcome gravity?

Even worse is when there's an open field and suddenly you just stop because there literally is no more world past that view point. It's like you just ran into some Truman Show moment where you found the edge of your little world. How hard is it to program a wall? It's not just JRPGs that do this, its most RPGs in general. Biggest offender: Final Fantasy XI.

Death and Deja Vu

So you're at the boss that's been building up the entire dungeon. Because its a JRPG, there of course has to be a dialog to reassert who is good and who is bad for some arbitrary reason. In doing so, there's a long, unskippable cut-scene. Fine, I can deal with that. But now I'm in the fight and I've just lost. Perfect, time to watch the whole thing again. I also have found that the harder the boss, the longer the cut-scene is. I guess the designers thought we'd need to be reinvigorated by the on-screen antics of the characters to get excited for the battle again, but at least give us the option to skip it. Or worse when it's just dialog and no cinematics. Now I have to mash the 'X' button to get through the conversation so I can mash the 'X' button some more to win the fight. Biggest offender: Tales of games and Eternal Sonata.

And now while I'm on THIS subject. Why can't I skip every scene in the game? Radiant Historia got it right. You can just blow past all the dialog, scenes and crap to get back to the game play, but rarely does a game even tease the notion that people might want to go through it again and not have to deal with whiny character #420 talking about how they're not good enough. Chrono Cross had an interesting solution to this problem by having a fast forward button for the entire game. Literally holding down a button will cause everything to speed up twice its normal speed which was made for the sole purpose of having people who have beaten the game more than once to go through it faster. Biggest Offender: Final Fantasy X.

Feel Like I'm Missing Something

There are many reasons to replay a game. Different endings, branching paths or maybe you just really like it. But one reason shouldn't be because you missed some item along the way and the game closes the door on that location forever. It doesn't necessarily have to be an item, it can be an ability or enemy type or some collectable that is just never available again. It wouldn't be as bad, but then JRPGs start to track this stuff with bestiaries and item collections. They're just taunting us at this point. So now that I've missed their stupid item that they placed in some unnoticeable part of the world that for some reason I can't return to, and now I have to begrudgingly play through the entire game again while I look at a guide just so this crap doesn't happen again. Biggest offender: any Tales of game.

Been There, Done That

A well-paced game keeps the action going. Getting to new dungeons, finding out more bits of the plot, becoming stronger; it's really the only thing that keeps us playing. But then, for some reason, the plot summons us back to a dungeon or level we've already been to to collect something we couldn't pick up before or talk to some idiot that wasn't there the first time. Not only do we have to back track through old territory, but we have the same random encounters we had the first time we were there. What went from a decent challenge is now a nuisance. It's like swatting away gnats that continuously pester you until you leave. Biggest offender: Star Ocean: First Departure.

I'm Just Really Emotional Right Now

Tragedy isn't uncommon in JRPGs. It's often that these moments that bring the characters to the brink of despair just to build them up again makes the game that much more memorable. And then there are times where those characters just keep whining about it for half the game. This isn't strictly a JRPG problem as it is a character problem in general. I'm talking about that youthful, whiny character that complains about every little thing along the way. I'm essentially referring to Hope from Final Fantasy XIII. Yes, your mother somehow died in a fall where as other main character just walked away from, that's sad. Now you blame Snow for everything, fine. Deal with it or murder Snow. Don't talk about it for 10 hours. It's one of the few times I'd rather hear Vanille speak. Okay, I don't really mean that. But still, maybe let the anger or despair build up internally, and let us observe for ourselves how the character is being overcome and eaten away but his own feelings of rage and sorrow instead of OH HEY LOOK I'M SAD BECAUSE SAD THINGS HAPPENED TO ME. WATCH ME KEEP BEING SAD AS I TELL OTHER CHARACTERS HOW SAD I AM ALL THE TIME. Biggest offender: Hope from Final Fantasy XIII.

HEAL ME

Bad AI is one thing. It's quite another when you are dependent on it to live. I'm talking about when the computer takes over healing duties, only to botch it up worse than the Hindenburg and everyone dies. There have been ways developed to overcome non-player controlled allies through gambits or pre-defined behavior mechanics like Dragon Age: Origin, but then there are games that are either pretentious enough or stupid enough to think that an AI is better than direct, player input. Unfortunately, the worst AI seems to come from the healer all the time. They're either busy looking at flowers while enemies trample the rest of the party to death, or they're too stupid to realize that reviving another healer will effectively double the healing potential of the group, and thus the better chance of surviving. Biggest offender: Final Fantasy XIII.

Often times, its actually the offensive AI that's dumb as box of rocks. It's rare, but I've seen it happen: the AI instead heals the party or cures a status effect instead of dealing the final blow to a boss, and then that boss wipes out the entire group in the next turn. I wish I could reach in and grab people from within my TV just for this purpose. Biggest offender: Persona 3.

You Want Me to do What?

Nothing like playing an RPG just to have completely obscure game play mechanics thrown at you from no where. I'm talking about those weird moments where the game designers forgot they were working on a role-playing game, and decided to make something else for a while. Whether it's a weird mini-game section, or a piece of another game shoe-horned in, there's almost nothing quite as jarring. Like in Crisis Core where you're forced to pursue a stealth approach to an entrance and all the game gives you is a mini map with enemy dots. Thanks game. You do realize that entire games have been developed around the concept of stealth: offering various camera control methods, ways to track the enemies, tools to help sneak from one side of the room to another, and you've replaced all that with a single mini-map. Wow. If only Hideo Kojima knew it was just that easy. It's practically insulting to the entire stealth genre. Or the moment in Final Fantasy X-2 where you have to sync up camera angles to a dance number on the Celsius or some crap like that. Just a dumb mini-game that kills you inside to do, but if you made it to that point in Final Fantasy X-2, you were probably dead inside anyways. Also, you can just mash buttons during that mini-game and get a perfect score. Nice programming. Biggest offender: Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII.

You're Sick

It's bad enough that enemies can dish out the damage and heal themselves, but there are also those that specialize in indirect methods of dealing death. It wouldn't be an RPG without status effects. I could pretty much list every single one of them here since they're all annoying to deal with, but I'll talk about the one's that have caused me a lot of personal pain.

Confusion: when an enemy makes your character confused so they attack wildly in any direction, often, at themselves. Of course, there's a small chance they'll still attack the enemy, but they never do. It get's particularly annoying in Pokemon when you have a 50/50 shot and you hit yourself 3 times in a row. Biggest offender: Pokemon (all of them).

Stone: this one is extra annoying because you need to have other members to heal you. And when all your members are stoned, it's game over. What's worse is when petrification is an added effect to an enemy's normal attack or they just spam the move / spell / ability over and over. Biggest offender: tie between Final Fantasy II and Tales of Phantasia.

Death: difficulty and strategy go out the window with this. Death is just what it sounds like, death. You're characters are dead, deceased, they are no more, they've ceased to be, kicked the bucket, pushing up daisies, etc. Death has shown its face in various forms, some times as spells, sometimes as an enemy or sometimes as a surprise in a treasure chest but it is never welcome. Worst is when an enemy can keep using it over and over again, or when the game inflicts it upon you because you're taking too long to beat a boss (Final Fantasy XIII). Biggest offender: Final Fantasy XI for having an enemy that has death as an added effect to their normal attack.

The SEO Universe

SEO - Search Engine Optimization. The goal is to get noticed on the web. And from a very limited view, that is what SEO is. But the further you dive into the inner workings of what it takes to get noticed on the web, you begin to realize that there's more to it than that. I see SEO not as a optimizing for search engines, but taking control of your (the client's) part of the universe.

Think of web presence as a universal model. The universe is the web; the bigger celestial bodies (websites / web presence) will attract the most planets (people / visitors). The bigger something is, the more gravity it has, ergo the more planets revolve around it. The same goes for the web. The more presence you have on the web and the better quality content you have, the more people will gravitate towards it. What the result is, is several clusters of giant celestial bodies that control their area of the universe (the web) while smaller stars revolve around them, and those smaller stars eventually find their own group of planets that gather around it and thrive on it. I refer to stars as web presence because just saying website is too narrow-minded and the point I want to make is your presence is everything on the web, not just one thing.

What most all search engines allow you to do is gather as many visitors as you can, and make yourself bigger; basically compounding your size to give you more gravity. But in order to gain more visitors, you have to strive to be as big as your competition. All things being equal, the bigger your star, the more likely you'll grow. Size requirements are controlled by what your star is for. If you're a local business, your star has to compete with the other business stars that are also local, which means you can get away with being a red dwarf, because they're not that big either. You might not be as big as Amazon (Betelgeuse, a star bigger than our sun), but you don't need to be because you have your own local market. But if you want to go up against VY Canis Majoris (largest star in the known universe), you'd better be just as big. So do you just need a big star for the sake of having one? No, there's more to it than that. Web presence is like the various elements that make up a star; a good mixture and balance will having you shining bright, a bad one means boom! and a few planets disappear. So what's the right mixture? Let's talk about our elements first.

Little pieces of you exist all over the web. Every social media website, every blog post, every picture, everything is just one more piece of you that exists out there somewhere. These little pieces are the various elements that determine whether your star shines as bright as the next one. And to help that, you first must take control of them because one wrong element can hurt you. Wrong meaning, if wrong information exists about you like an address for a business or a phone number, the more caustic your mixture will be. But if you control all these different pieces and bring them together, the easier it is to glow. Wrong also means the quality of your elements. You don't want to combine trash to make a star. By trash I mean bad content that has nothing to do with your star, and nothing to do with the planets you want to revolve around it. Give planets what they need to survive and prosper; the reason they revolve around your star. Give your star enough trash, it'll turn supernova and result in a black hole of which nothing can escape (search engines will slam you) and your part of space becomes empty.

This is what SEO is now. It's the mixture of your star. The mixture used to involve the technical details trying to present itself to the universe in such a way to gain approval, but now its the planets that have the power. That's not to say the universe doesn't play a part, because it does, but the universe cares about the planets and what they need to survive.

So how do I create my star? How do I figure out just the right mixture? Like combining elements in a laboratory, you need to know what you're doing, or you need to consult a scientist (SEO engineer). But unlike the perfection that is combining elements together to form atoms and molecules, there's no perfect formula to creating a star. But a scientist can't do it alone, we only know how to combine the elements once we have them, we can't create them for you (we can but we're not experts at what you do). The elements are your content; what your web presence will be about. If you're a business, you know your business and your industry the best. Thus, working with a scientist in creating the elements is the best way to create a shining star. Do you have 3rd party listings in various directory sites? Those are elements. Do you have a Facebook page or Twitter account? Those are elements. And your scientist needs to know about them all, and more importantly, you need to know about them and take control of them.

Scientists may not have perfected the formula, but we can measure the quality of your elements and get a good idea. Here's what we figured out so far: content of your web presence, amount of content of your web presence, consistency of the presence, people who link to your presence and how often your presence changes. These are the elements you can control and influence, the rest is up to the scientist.

It's the scientist's job to take all those elements and combine them into a star. The star can be just one website or a website plus advertisements, or it can just be a Facebook page. Whatever it is, your path to shining means being proactive about controlling your part of the universe.