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.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
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.
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.
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