Missed Classic: Trinity - Is This The 50S? Or 1999?

Written by Joe Pranevich

Welcome back! Last time out, I explored the strange mushroom forest that I was dropped into after the end of the world. This "wabe", as I think it is called, is a strange place set in the shadow of a gigantic sundial and includes giant bees, an impossible flower garden, a cottage with game design notes, and a half-dozen mushrooms with little doors. But this isn't The Smurfs: each mushroom appears to have been created by a nuclear detonation. As I closed out last time, I finally worked out how to control the movement of the "sun" overhead to drop shadows on each of the doors. I opened the first door and was dropped back into reality, somewhere and somewhen.

This game remains difficult to write about. My usual style is a bit flippant and just not appropriate for the subject matter, but I also cannot help to be quippy. I'll try to keep the tone light as much as I can, but this is a difficult game with difficult themes and some of the scenes in this session are disturbing. I had to step away from the game at one point for a few days. Fair warning, but on with the show.

Ray Palmer seems like such a nice guy.

When I walked through the mushroom door in my previous post, I arrived in a rickety room filled with equipment that I do not understand. The white door remains open and I can use it to return to the mesa in the wabe, but then it closes immediately after. No amount of resetting the sundial opens the door again so I assume there is no way back. Will I only get one shot at each doorway? Is there a way to know what order I have to take the doors? I hope Mr. Moriarty won't be too evil about this, but I am prepared for a lot of saving and reloading.

The equipment that I stand next to is radioactive and obviously a nuclear bomb, but I'm not positive which bomb it is. Climbing down the scaffolding, I find myself in a large room with aircraft hangar-style doors. They are too heavy to open, but there's a button nearby so it's not much of a puzzle. A second button activates an intercom speaker and a voice informs anyone listening that it is six minutes to detonation. I'd better hurry! I open the doors and head out onto a tropical island. Thanks to the manual's history lesson, I guess that this is the H-Bomb explosion in 1952. The documentation just says a "remote island in the South Pacific" and I was fairly certain that was Bikini Atoll, but a quick Wikipedia search informs me that the first test was actually on nearby Enewetak Atoll.

Focusing on the present, I notice that the tide is coming in. That voice in my ear sniggers that "Gnomon can tether tide or time." Whoever he is, he's less clever than he thinks he is. We start exploring from our vantage point on the south of the island. To the west is a second island with a single coconut tree. Thanks to a mob of attacking crabs, there is no way to get to that island or its lone tree. To the north is an "extension" of wood leading off the island, described as being like a six-foot in diameter drinking straw connecting the facility to someplace offshore. It's too high up to climb and I do not see a way to access it from the hangar shed. While exploring, a shark follows me around the island, but when I reach the eastern shore he reveals himself to actually be a friendly dolphin! That's cute, but… er… he's going to die pretty soon.

R.I.P Flipper. None under sea were smarter than he.

Beyond that, there doesn't seem to be much to do here. After a time, I notice that the western island has sunk under the tide and only a single coconut remains floating in the water. There is no obvious way to fetch it but it screams "puzzle" and must be important for something. I eventually work out that the dolphin is actually incredibly intelligent and fetches the coconut for me when I ask. I break it open with my axe but find only coconut milk inside. What did I expect? A priceless gem? The "milk" leaks out quickly and I restore so as not to lose it. Could that be "good enough" for the potion at the cottage? The magpie said that we needed milk, honey, garlic, and a lizard. Surely, this vegan substitute for milk isn't "good enough" for a magic potion, is it? With nothing else to do and the timer ticking down, I leave my paradise to its fate and return through the white door.

I do some fast Googling to learn that the island was called Elugelab; the blast destroyed it utterly, leaving only a 15-story deep crater in the ocean bed where an island once had been. The wooden "straw" led to the nearby Teiter Island which survived the blast. There doesn't seem to be any real-world counterpart to the tiny island with the coconuts; as a tidal island it's not likely to have appeared on any maps and Moriarty may have just made it up.

When I return to the "wabe", I immediately try the coconut milk in the potion and it seems to work! I'm not sure how that counts, but I have three ingredients now. I need to find a lizard.

Princess Peach has seen better.

The Mushroom Kingdom

With my first trip out of the way and the knowledge of how to open the doors, I take stock of the rest of the portal toadstools:

• The first is in the meadow where I started. It doesn't open again now but presumably led to Kensington Gardens.
• The second is the toadstool at the waterfall.
• I cannot find the third. I suspect that it is near the boy blowing bubbles and possibly somewhere I need to fly to if I can work out how to gain altitude. Or perhaps the boy is sitting on it?
• The fourth is the one that I just explored on the mesa.
• The fifth is in the garden behind the magpie's cottage.
• The sixth door is on the moor far to the east of the map.
• I cannot find the seventh, but I expect that it is probably wherever the ferryman takes you.

My guess is that Mr. Moriarty is clever and has made each of the toadstools independent so that you can take them in any order. I therefore try the second one next and am immediately proven wrong: it leads out into Earth orbit with no spacesuit and nearly instant death. Nukes in space? There must be a way to survive there to do whatever I need to do, but I'm pretty sure I don't have the means yet.

The death scene at least offers some hints as we arrive, dead, at the ferryman's river. This time, we have a coin and use it to board the boat to the great beyond. Other than that, I don't glean any further hints how to cross without dying so I restore and try the next mushroom.

As a kid, I visited the Psygnosis offices in Cambridge. It was amazing. By coincidence, I later worked in the exact same office long after they had moved out.

Mother Russia

I take the fifth door next and arrive in what appears to be an elevated shack on the Siberian steppe. It's cold and gray and someone is speaking in Russian on the loudspeaker. Google fails me and has no idea what "dyevianatsat minut" means, but Infocom was likely using either a nonstandard (or simply outdated now) romanization. My guess is that they meant "devyatnadtsat' minut" (девятнадцать минут) or nineteen minutes. Plenty of time, right?

I climb down from the shack and immediately step on a rodent underfoot. In fact, the ground is mobbed by hundreds or thousands of creatures all racing to the northeast. They "look something like hamsters, with long brown fur and beady eyes". Should I follow them? Or see where they came from? I try heading "upstream" against the tide of creatures, but Russian guards kill me so that's not the way. I follow them instead to discover a cliff edge where the rodents are jumping off in apparent mass-suicide. Only then does the game tell me what you already figured out: they are lemmings! Of course, lemmings don't actually jump off of cliffs, right? That's just an urban legend spread by an old (faked) Disney documentary?

At the cliff, I discover a single trapped lemming in a fissure. I rescue it but it quickly bites my hand and disappears into the mass. If I release the magpie, I can grab it and then stick it in the cage. Is that a good trade? Do I need the magpie for anything? Remembering back last week, I did not get any points for it (only for the cage) so maybe not? Also, lemmings are not lizards even if they have the same starting letter, and even if the potion took coconut milk instead of cow's milk, that would be too much of a stretch. I find nothing else of interest on the tundra. I even jump off the cliff once but just drown in the frigid Arctic water. Once there is nothing left to do and the countdown is presumably getting close, I head back through the door.

Doing some real-world research, I learn that I wasn't on the Russian steppe after all: the Soviets did their nuclear testing at a site in Kazakhstan. I was close enough though since that was part of the Soviet Union until 1991 and Moriarty would likely not have seen it as a separate country. The test site was 100 miles west of Semipalatinsk (now called Semey) and the region sees many health problems thanks to all of the tests performed there. There doesn't seem to be any real-world analogue to the cliffs as the nearest bodies of water I can find to the test site are frozen lakes around 25 miles to the northeast according to Google Earth. Am I looking too deeply at this? Absolutely. I'm procrastinating writing the next section.

A spoonful of sugar helps the deep existential dread go down?

Hiroshima

The sixth door is my only remaining choice, located on the moor just north of the ferryman's river. Stepping through, we find ourselves in midair and falling fast. Unlike in the space section, we have a few turns to experiment before we land with a splat and I have an idea what to do: open the umbrella! Doing so slows our descent enough that we land safely in a children's sandbox. Writing this section is choking me up, so I'm going to pause by just giving you the room description:

Playground, in a sandpile

A set of children's swings move back and forth in the humid breeze. Behind them stands a long building, its windows hung with flowers and birds folded from colored paper.

Mounds of dirt are heaped around a dark opening to the east. It appears to be a shelter of some kind.

Several small children are happily chasing dragonflies north of the swing set. Turning south, you see a group of adults (schoolteachers, by the looks of them), wearily digging another shelter like the first.

Somewhat shaken, you rise to your feet in a child's sandpile. In the pile, you see an umbrella, an axe, and a birdcage.

We know what's about to happen and it's devastating. I gather together my things and discover that I can really only move east towards the shelter without being caught. Inside is a disgusting and rough hewn bomb shelter, filthy and smelling of urine from the people that had to relieve themselves while waiting out the terror outside. It's an awful thought. There's a spade on the ground which I pick up, but otherwise there's nothing else to do.

I leave and discover that a girl is now playing in the sandpit. She spots me and nearly runs to her teacher, but then she spots my umbrella and her curiosity gets the best of her. I can tell that she wants it, so I hand it to her and she runs off into the shelter to play. Could she be the scarred woman in London? Do I even want to consider that?

There is still nowhere else that I can go safely, but seeing folded paper cranes in a nearby school window gives me a thought. I follow her into the shelter and hand the girl my unfolded origami crane from the beginning of the game, the one that gave me the message to go to the Long Water by 4 PM. She folds it back into its original crane shape and I gain three points. It glows with a strange energy. I return outside and the crane grows into a giant living paper bird. I climb on its back and it takes me up to just outside the white door, still suspended in midair, where I can leap off and through. Whew!

From a game perspective, that was an interesting segment and very much "on rails". If I had not brought the paper or umbrella with me, I could not have progressed, plus it was really only two rooms that I had to move back and forth between to advance story segments. More than any other section of the game except perhaps the first near-future in London, this paints a human face on the misery of the bomb. Honestly, this section wrecked me and I needed to take some time off from the game. I'm really not cut out for reviewing this type of emotional experience. This game hurts. I don't even care that I don't know if that was Hiroshima or Nagasaki, I'm done and need to move on.

"You can either look at things in a brutal, truthful way that's depressing, or you can screw around and have fun." - David Spade

Calling a Spade, a Spade

With no more toadstool doors to explore-- I haven't found the third or seventh and the second one kills me immediately-- I resolve find places in the wabe where my new items might be useful. I still have up a spade, a lemming, and an open coconut. It takes some experimentation, but I'll skip my failures and move straight to the good part: I can open the crypt in the cemetery!

Using the spade, we pry off the lid to see the corpse of the "Wabewalker" (me?). This was well-hinted since I was told earlier that I needed more "leverage" to move the lid and a spade is certainly leverage. I had hoped the grave would be empty, but instead I look down at a "great missionary or explorer" in his final rest. I hope this game does not go all Infidel on me. The corpse is wearing a burial shroud, a bandage around his head, and two strangely colored boots: one red and one green. Like any good tomb raider, I strip the corpse and take all of his stuff. His mouth hangs open once the bandage is removed and I discover a silver coin inside. Fare for the ferryman? The boots each have a strange (but empty) recess at the tip of the toes. Do I have to hide something in them? With the corpse thoroughly desecrated, I'm nearly halfway through the game: 49 points!

While exploring, I also get the brilliant idea to float the Bubble Boy's bubble out through the "space" doorway. Amazingly, it fits! The bubble immediately freezes to create a protective shell and that somehow keeps us from dying in the cold vacuum of space. Unfortunately, there is no way to control the bubble and the white door drifts rapidly away from us. After a time, a satellite comes closer and then departs again without letting us do whatever we are supposed to do. There is briefly a Star Wars-style laser destruction of a missile, but nothing to do except wait it out and die. There are still things that I am missing before I can conquer outer space.

What happened to the other five stories?

Desert Island Decameron

I wear all of my burial clothes and the ferryman lets me on the boat! He takes the silver coin as payment (but not the London 20p one) and deposits me across the river. There is no entrance to Hades or two-headed dogs, but there is a small island with the expected toadstool on it. When I arrive with the seventh symbol set on the sundial, I emerge into another rickety shack next to a large metal ball covered with wires.

There are voices outside and if I leave prematurely, I am killed-- more on that in a minute. But if I explore the room first the voices eventually leave. I use that time to try to open the bomb via an access panel that I discover on the side, but no dice without a screwdriver. I even try using the London coin, but it doesn't fit. A book sits discarded on the floor, the Desert Island Decameron. Doing some Googling, I discover that it is an "unconventional anthology of humor"... a strange thing to find in a room with a giant bomb, but perhaps one of the guards needed a little light reading while he considered the hellscape that he was potentially helping to create. Inside is a bookmark with a poem on one side and a diagram scrawled on the other. I get four points for reading it so it must be important, but the only part we can "see" in text is the legend: "RD=DET, BL=POS, ST=INF, WH=GND". My guess is that we are looking at a wiring diagram and an explanation on how to defuse the bomb. In any event, it's useless without the panel being opened.

Once the voices are gone, I exit and climb down the ladder. At the bottom is a padlocked box… and our friend the roadrunner! He's finally back in his natural habitat and seems happy to see me. He even drops the ruby at my feet! I pick it up to gain a few more points and from this moment the roadrunner follows me around. I cannot open the padlocked panel, even when I try to smash it with the axe or spade. Letting the lemming go doesn't help either and I do not see any lizards here.

I'm going to pass on delving too deeply into my explorations of the New Mexico desert for now, except to say that we only get a few turns before we die and even with successive restores I do not find much of interest. I suspect that I am here before I am ready; maybe I find a way to slow down time? Maybe by defusing the bomb at the beginning, the test is delayed by a few minutes and I can explore further before dying?

Perhaps more importantly, this is the message that I get when I inevitably die:

All at once, the desert around you disappears in a flash of startling brilliance! You jam your hands over your eyes in the awful glare; never see the fireball closing in at many times the speed of sound; and never feel the stellar hear that annihilates much of the state of New Mexico.

The real Trinity test, which I am certain is where this gate has taken us, did not nuke the state of New Mexico. It was relatively modest as far as later bombs were concerned and so something must have happened to change history. Have I finally stumbled on the plot of the game? Did someone or something interfere with the Trinity test to make it even deadlier than before? It's a great twist if that's what happened and I am eager to see how the game continues.

For now however, I am stuck and have a few open problems to solve:

• I have yet to find the third toadstool. I thought it was by the Bubble Boy, but since we use the bubble to go to space I was probably mistaken. I will have to search for it since there's something I missed someplace.
• I do not know what to do with the wight, either to help it or kill it. Could the crypt's skeleton key by the solution to the lock in New Mexico?
• I do not know what to do in space.
• I do not know what to do with the magnetic meteorite.
• I do not know where to find a lizard. It seems most likely to be in New Mexico, but I doubt it given that even if we find a way to reopen the doors, I don't seem to have a path back across the river to the main part of the wabe.

I did manage to get 70 points, but I've reloaded now to before crossing the ferry so I will have to get some of those again.

Time played: 2 hr 15 min
Total time: 7 hr 25 min

Inventory: bag of crumbs, small coin (20p), silver coin, red boot, blue boot, bandage, burial shroud, credit card, wristwatch, birdcage with lemming, broken coconut, and silver axe. (Not all being carried at once.)
Score: 70 of 100

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A Eulogy For Saturday Morning TV

Image by the autowitch. Some rights reserved. Source: Flickr

So, Saturday morning cartoons are dead.


Last year, The Washington Post reported,

"This past Saturday, the CW became the last broadcast television network to cut Saturday morning cartoons. The CW is replacing its Saturday cartoon programming, called "The Vortexx," with "One Magnificent Morning," a five-hour bloc of non-animated TV geared towards teens and their families.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, Saturday morning time slots were synonymous with cartoons. Broadcast networks and advertisers battled for underage viewers. But that started to change in the 1990s.

In 1992, NBC was the first broadcast network to swap Saturday morning cartoons for teen comedies such as "Saved by the Bell" and a weekend edition of the "Today" show. Soon, CBS and ABC followed suit. In 2008, Fox finally replaced Saturday morning cartoons with infomercials.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a Saturday morning cartoon viewership could grab more than 20 million viewers. In 2003, some top performers got a mere 2 million, according to Animation World Network," (Sullivan).

Well, I suppose it was only a matter of time before this occurred. Saturday morning cartoons have left the public television stations for good. Of course, this isn't a bad thing. Kids can get their shows on demand from a variety of venues, be it Hulu, Netflix, and the wonders of cable. No need to wake up early in the morning with a bowl of sugary cereal, while your eyes sink in the flashing screens. I think this change is for the best, children should be doing more productive things with their weekends, but nevertheless, a eulogy is necessary.

I can't remember when I first started watching Saturday morning TV, but I do know that the earliest I'd get up at would be 7:00. A feat that'd be unthinkable for my more jaded self to do on a day off. 7:00, I'm sure, was when they'd play the classic cartoons, like Popeye. Then there were the principal shows that I followed every week, Pokemon, Digimon, Power Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation, and Transformers: The Beast Wars. I may have watched more, but I don't remember them. Of course, many of these shows, along with others like X-Men, Beetleborgs, and Spiderman, often played on weekday afternoons. Yet those were reruns. On Saturday morning, you saw things fresh.

Of course, none of these shows was anything particularly intelligent or profound, this was children's entertainment, after all. They just hit on all the right points, reaching those base, animal desires that most children wish to see. Namely, colorful, lively worlds with fantastical characters, be they transforming monsters, super-powered teenagers, or shape-shifting robots. Many of these shows, I imagine, probably introduced a generation of children to science-fiction, fantasy, martial arts, and most importantly for me, anime. That said, reading Calvin and Hobbes has made me reflect and question the wisdom of consuming so much silly television at a young age. While I don't believe television to be quite the scourge of civilization that some Luddites may make it out to be, to say it has no effect on us at all (if even a fleeting one), after habitual viewings, just sounds dishonest.

It's a bit regrettable that Digimon and Pokemon were released around the same time. No doubt, Digimon banked somewhat on the popularity of Pokemon, but it would always be under Pokemon's shadow. The reason I say this, is because Digimon was a smarter show, well, "smarter" by the standards of children's entertainment, but you get the idea.

Pokemon came out in 1998 and Digimon came out in 1999. While I can't speak for the developments of these shows in Japan, I suspect that Fox Kids licensed Digimon to capitalize on Pokemon's success and have an easy cash cow to compete with WB. I mean, as far as they saw it, Pokemon had monsters and that made money. Digimon also had monsters, therefore, it too will make money. While Digimon certainly had its peak, it never became quite the phenomenon that Pokemon was. Not where I lived, anyhow.

If you're too young to remember the Pokemon craze, then you'd best watch the "Chinpokomon" episode of South Park. While being in its own right an entertaining episode, it's a fairly accurate satire of how most children and adults reacted to the fad. So much so, that I'm a little embarrassed of my behavior then. In a nutshell, children became consumerist zombies, begging their parents to buy as much Pokemon-related merchandise as possible. While the adults were gravely confused as to why children found this cartoon so attractive. I recall one adult asking me why the Pokemon only say their own names and nothing else. Although unlike South Park, the Japanese weren't interested in using this franchise to cause another Pearl Harbor (or complement our comparative penis sizes).

Pokemon was based on a series of Nintendo video games, which are far more enjoyable than the television show. The point of the game was the capture 'pocket monsters' or 'Pokemon', and use them to fight other Pokemon. So yes, the premise of the franchise is essentially glorified cock-fighting (another South Park episode comes to mind), but electric Pikachu and fire-breathing Charizard are a far-cry from actual animals. I'm not aware of anyone who has said that they were drawn to cock-fighting, or even animal cruelty in general, because of Pokemon. So PETA's grotesque claims that Pokemon encourages such behavior, and the degrees of absurdity with which they attack the series, diminishes, if not destroys any credibility they have as an honest animal rights organization. Try the Humane Society instead.

Digimon, on the other hand, is set in real-life Japan, with Japanese children who fall into the digital world. The digital world is inhabited by digital monsters, or "Digimon". These children, dubbed the "Digi-destined" (because it has been prophesied) partner up with Digimon to fight off the threats to both of their realities. Much like the Pokemon, the Digimon can also evolve. Agumon can turn into WarGreymon and Patamon can turn into Angemon, the difference being that Digimon evolutions aren't permanent and didn't always work in a pinch. Digimon also dealt with more mature themes than Pokemon, like divorce, romance, and death. Yes, much of Digimon devolved to monster-of-the-week plots and very cliched characters, but some clever people were able to put their mark on it. One was Mamoru Hosoda, who would later gain fame for the films Summer Wars and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. He got his debut directing the "Four Years Later" or "Our War Game" section of Digimon: The Movie. Even if you don't like Digimon, you have to appreciate the physical realism that Hosoda brought to the series, and surreal, hypnotic design of the World Wide Web that were a clear influence on Summer Wars. In the English dub, this is all dubbed over with a pop soundtrack that includes The Barenaked Ladies and The Mighty Mighty BossTones. It actually kind of fit, somehow. The other talent to touch Digimon was writer Chiaki J. Konaka, who wrote mind-bending screenplays for Texhnolyze, Rahxephon, and Serial Experiments Lain. His pen went behind the third season, Digimon Tamers, which was also the darkest. The season is rather meta, with the past two seasons being a television show in this universe. The main character creates his own Digimon and has to own up to the responsibilities of that. I can't say I remember much from this season, except that it was pretty gloomy in comparison to the other two. So, to summarize, Pokemon was about fighting for fun, Digimon was about fighting for glory.

As dumb as Pokemon and Digimon were, they're probably the best examples in recent memory of anime becoming mainstream entertainment in the United States. I mean hell, I sang the Pokemon theme song in music class, and not the TV-edited version, either. Yes, Dragonball and Sailor Moon ran close behind, but they were aimed at a slightly older demographic, so they didn't get quite as much accessibility as those whose cerebrums were still wet. That isn't to say that Dragonball and Sailor Moon weren't accessible, or even all that unpopular, but again, I didn't sing the Sailor Moon theme song in music class.

Probably the most significant anime I saw on Saturday morning was The Vision of Escaflowne. It didn't get a long run, I only recall seeing two episodes. Anyone who's seen Escaflowne knows that it's not for kids, so the editors went to work on Disneyfying it. Yet as defanged and bastardized as this version was, those two episodes still left an impact on me. One so strong, in fact, that long after I had forgotten the title of the show, the image of Prince Vaughn sprouting his glowing, white wings haunted the dark corners of my brain. Escaflowne was really weird in comparison to all the Pokemons running around. The characters had detailed and mature designs, while the atmosphere was enigmatic and quiet. Even though I didn't rediscover Escaflowne until over a decade later, it was my first glimpse into the world of adult anime.

There's not much I can say about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation because I can barely, and I mean barely recall it. I can't even reproduce a full episode in my mind. All I know is that they had a female turtle, Venus de Milo, and that's about it. The show has aged terribly, and I doubt if I could stomach a full half hour of the stuff nowadays. Yet, nevertheless, this was the series that introduced my generation to the Turtles. (I think that's a good thing.) I know that the only episode of Ninja Turtles that left something of an impression on me, was their crossover episode with the Power Rangers, who were then, "lost in space." Again, details are fuzzy, but at the time, it was a pretty cool event.

Now Power Rangers was a show. To see young people like myself fight monsters in colored spandex and ride in giant robots inspired by prehistorical creatures, was all my hyper-active brain needed. Much like Pokemon, Power Rangers was also very repetitive in form, but unlike Pokemon, Power Rangers is still plenty of fun to watch. The campy aesthetic coupled with MTV style editing, a slapstick Saved By The Bell background, and hard rock soundtrack are all too much to resist. If you don't take it too seriously, which you shouldn't, the Power Rangers is entertainment for entertainment's sake. Kitsch, yes, but if you know what you're going in for, then you might as well have fun with it.

I was introduced to the Transformers through the Beast Wars series. So my understanding of Optimus Prime was not of a semi-truck that could transform into a robot, but of a gorilla that could transform into a robot. Beast Wars tried to do something different with the premise of alien robots who disguise themselves as vehicles, being alien robots who could disguise themselves as giant animals. There were also no annoying humans on the planet, just aliens on an alien planet, so the plot was not restricted by the red tape that previous and later Transformers installments dealt with. Not only was Optimus Prime a gorilla and Megatron a T-Rex, but new characters were also thrown into the mix. My favorite being Cheetor, who, if you couldn't already guess is a cheetah. His personality was very much like Johnny Storm from the Fantastic Four, arrogant, quick-tempered, and fun-loving. Beast Wars was so popular that it got a sequel series, Beast Machines. Things turned darker, with the Autobots on the lam in a futuristic city, and their designs changed to reflect their more robotic predecessors. It was awesome. At my babysitter's house, where I watched much of these shows, we played with Beast Wars toys, and let me tell you, they were as frustrating to transform as all hell. In the commercials, they made it look so easy. I mean, does Hasbro really expect children to be able to successfully transform the Cheetor into assault mode in between commercial breaks?

For what it's worth, I did try watching the original 80's cartoon, but I was older, and so, didn't care for it. I liked the theme song, though. Then there was that movie which had talents like Leonard Nimoy and Orson Welles. An irony that Welles's debut was Charles Foster Kane, and his final performance was Omnicron. The movie is very much a zeitgeist of what was being marketed to boys of the 80's, over-the-top action and loud rock music. How much has changed? While I'm at it, I may as well address the elephant in room, Michael Bay. Yes, his Transformers films are all very bad, but the first one, at least, was watchable. It was a decent action film with neat effects, but held many of the problems that were multiplied over the next couple of movies. What I find more offensive than the bad scripts, however, is the fact that Bay thinks it's appropriate to market towards kids, or any human being, a franchise littered with excessive violence, racial insensitivity, and crude, blatant misogyny. In fact, I'd argue that these terribly unpleasant and immoral films do far more harm to the minds of children than the cheap shows I'm discussing here.

Here's a sidewinder, Spongebob Squarepants. Yes, I distinctly remember watching the series premiere of "Bubblestand", in my mother's bedroom, on a Saturday morning. Now, Spongebob didn't always play new episodes on Saturday mornings, but I watched the series religiously since that first viewing, so I felt the need to reference it. It's hard to defend the ungodly receptacle of garbage that holds the banner of Spongebob today. Ever since Stephen Hillenberg left, the show produced some of the worst writing to ever grace the televised screen, it's real nauseating stuff. I blame Nickelodeon's producers more than I do Spongebob's writers, because a premise can only work for so long before it grows stale. Point of reference, The Simpsons. Though at least Homer still has some dignity left on him and after two decades, no less. Spongebob, on the other hand, is no longer the quirky, nervous, and hopelessly naive character that endeared him to audiences on his first appearance. Now, he's a blubbering twit, a moronic and deranged man-child, whose every action is designed to irritate the living hell of you. The masturbatory excess of Mr. Squarepants, along with his now depraved and unsightly "friends" will not recover from this milking from a long deceased cow.

Believe it or not, my interest in Saturday morning cartoons extended into middle school. Why? Perhaps it was out of a desire to relive the nostalgia of my former years, even though I knew what I watched was garbage. At the time, I was very much addicted to television. I watched it because I was bored, and terribly lazy. I not only lament the fact that I wasted much of my youth consuming television, but that it was bad television. Surely, I could've benefited from some Star Trek or The Twilight Zone episodes. That said, there was one show I watched religiously every Saturday morning with great fondness, about as much as Pokemon, Spongebob, or Beast Wars, and that was Yu-Gi-Oh!

Yu-Gi-Oh! was more than just an anime to me, it was also a trading card game, and a very fun one, might I add. A game in which one could summon monsters, cast spells, or spring traps against your opponent. Some monsters had special abilities, while others could fuse to create greater monsters. It was a lot of fun.

However, Yu-Gi-Oh! initially began as a tribute to tabletop games in general. The protagonist, Yugi Moto, is a shy high-schooler with multicolored spiky hair (it's an anime, remember?). He solves an Egyptian artifact known as the Millennium Puzzle. Inside of this puzzle is trapped the soul of a 2000 year old pharaoh known as "The King of Games." Whenever Yugi finds himself in life-threatening trouble, the spirit of the pharaoh possesses him, and challenges his opponent to a deadly game. A variety of different ones were played, like one inspired by Dungeons and Dragons. The card game, was one among many, but it stuck, being the most popular. So the anime focused on this aspect for the story.

That said, the anime is about as corny as most Saturday morning television, and the 4Kids chop-up didn't help. Yu-Gi-Oh! was very formulaic, featuring Yugi dueling an opponent in a game of cards and almost always winning (unless blackmailed by threats of suicide). Yet, we didn't watch to Yu-Gi-Oh! to see who would win, we watched the show to see the different strategies employed by the cards. Be it the destructive blowback from Mirror Force, or the dreaded one turn kill of Exodia. The simplicity of the game when it first began is now enviable, a time when summoning a high powered Dark Magician or Blue Eyes White Dragon could win you the game. The game has since mutated into a convoluted speed contest, with nonsense terminology, conflicting rules, embarrassingly high prices, and a rapidly growing roster of cards that may very well lead to an implosion. If there was one good thing to come out of Yu-Gi-Oh!, it's Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series by Martin Billany (aka LittleKuriboh). An abridged series is when someone makes an edited version of a show and overdubs it with humorous and often meta voiceovers. Some of the best moments are when Billany constantly notes the borderline hyperbole of seriousness with which people take a children's card game (who's rules are often broken for plot convenience). This isn't even touching the many lines that are popular amongst the otaku fandom, like "Screw the rules, I have money!"

On a side note, don't you find it a bit bizarre that we define our fading childhood memories by the films, television, and music that we consumed then? Nostalgia has never been so openly fetishized in America as it has now. The culprit behind this is, of course, the Internet. Music critic Simon Reynolds, who wrote Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction To Its Own Past, has said,

"It was gradual, but with the arrival of the Internet, and broadband access, and the rise of this kind of strange collective archiving thing, [looking backward] became irresistible. Now people put stuff on YouTube because it feels like they're doing something worthwhile and this enormous archive has developed. You're young, but I try to remember what it was like when it was actually really hard to get hold of information. If you wanted to look at old magazines, you had to go to the library and look at microfilms. Now all the records in the known universe are basically accessible at the click of a mouse. Don't you think that's weird? I think it's weird — but I have something to compare it to. I remember living in a culture of cultural scarcity," (Salon).

I agree with Reynolds here. Nostalgia is popular because it's so accessible. I probably wouldn't have been able to find Escaflowne were it not for the Internet. I also think that this nostalgia hunt comes from the effects that 9/11 had, and still does have on the American psyche. The War on Terror, and all that came after it, in the context of the Information Age, no less, made the world a complex and ambiguous place. The truth, however, is that it was always like this, we just want to believe that there was a magical, Reaganesque America where the mornings never ended. It's worse yet when one was a child, and could've hardly comprehended events grander than the events on your television screen. Now, a sort of cult has developed that puts the cartoons of the past on a pedestal, with entitled fans claiming that newer versions can never be as good as the older ones. The worst of it comes when Hollywood taps into this nostalgia for money, and is answered with cries that Hollywood "ruined my childhood." Yet this nostalgia that people hopelessly flee to is only fueling the film industries to make more adaptations. A Catch-22. Reynolds articulated some of these issues,

"This endless regurgitation of the familiar is dulling and vaguely depressing. It's nice to think there's a future for music, for example, and that people will do things that later generations can work with and take somewhere. I think if the preponderance of the music scene is based around recycling and revivalism, then it's like bad farming. Basic common sense in farming is that you sow as well as reap. If you're just reaping from the past, you're not really giving anything back. Of course, music and culture don't necessarily work in the way farming does, and ideas don't get exhausted in the same way natural resources do, but I think it's important for the ongoing project of music to at least try to come up with things that have never been done before. Young musicians, in particular, seem to be way more fascinated by the past than the future. That's my main worry: Where is it going? Is this a practice that is infinitely sustainable? At this point, we're well into the '90s revival, and then it will be time for the naughties revival. It just seems a bit boring that that's just how it's going to proceed," (Salon).

Our culture is in a feedback loop, stuck in the 80's and 90's, where twenty-somethings complain about how old they've gotten and indulge in listicles on the Internet that seem to confirm this bias. It's time that we stopped defining ourselves and our memories solely on the basis of the crappy shows that we were too dumb to turn off. Yes, some of them were fun, but let's not kid ourselves here, these programs weren't masterpieces. I had a good childhood, not because I had the privilege of eating soggy marshmallow cereals too close to a television screen, but because I had loving friends, teachers, and family. In any case, childhood is overrated. Some of us had terrible ones. I, for one, am glad to be older. Isn't it grand to be able to tell the difference between pearls and swine? It's easier to look back than it is to look forward. So unless you want Hollywood to reboot Spiderman every three years, I suggest we admit that the 80's and 90's were just as mundane as any other decade, and start looking ahead.

I wrote this eulogy happily.


Bibliography

Reynolds, Simon. Interviewed by Thomas Rogers. "Will nostalgia destroy pop culture." Salon, August 5, 2011. Web. http://www.salon.com/2011/08/05/retromania_simon_reynolds_interview/

Sullivan, Gail. "Saturday morning cartoons are no more." The Washington Post, September 30, 2014. Web. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/09/30/saturday-morning-cartoons-are-no-more/

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Download Resident Evil 2 Remake For PS4

Download Resident Evil 2 Remake for PS4

Download Links:

PART1
PART2
PART3
PART4
PART5
PART6
PART7
PART8
PART9
PART10
PART11
PART12

PASSWORD: AFTER THE PAYMENT

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A Close Race!

What's going on everyone!?

Today for the #2019gameaday challenge my dear ol' dad and I played a game of Ticket to Ride. 

It was a very close game and surprisingly I came away with the win somehow! 

As usual, it was a good game and he sure doesn't make it easy, lol.

As always, thank you for reading and don't forget to stop and smell the meeples! :)

-Tim

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Battle For Boulder Badge

After the devastating loss of Rascal, I went back to training out on Route 2 with Lucky. There was no way a mere Metapod was going to stand up to Gym Leader Brock. I had confidence that Rascal, Nibbles and Kiwi would help me earn the Boulder Badge, but without Rascal my confidence faltered. It took us a few days, but eventually Lucky sprouted wings and evolved into Butterfree, a significant improvement over the lovably little lump of a Pokémon he was as Metapod. I did not neglect Kiwi and Nibbles during this time, either, but their progress was a bit less important.
Once Lucky had evolved, I spent what little money I had on a couple of potions at the PokéMart. Although they were expensive, I would not let another Pokémon fall in the Pewter City Gym. I absolutely would not. My nerves were shot as I stepped into the gym for the second time. I remember I was sweating and shaking just thinking about facing Brock. I saw the Junior Trainer who had bested my poor Rascal. He gave me an approving nod, but it did little to improve my disposition. Brock stood at the far end of the gym and beckoned me forward. He had seen my fight with the Junior Trainer several days ago and was eager to face me.

I clenched my jaw tightly as I threw out my first Pokémon. Kiwi met Brock's Geodude face-to-face in the gym's arena. We wasted no time kicking up as much dust as possible to obscure Geodude's vision. Brock had Geodude spend most of its time curling up into a defensive ball, but every now and then it lashed out with a tackle that it simply couldn't land on Kiwi. When I felt it's accuracy was sufficiently incapacitated, I withdrew Kiwi and used Nibble to wear down the Geodude slowly but surely. The Geodude was powerless in the dust Kiwi's sand-attack had kicked up and against Nibbles relentless tackling.
Then Brock threw out his champion, the Onix. I tossed Kiwi back into the ring hoping to repeat our earlier performance on Geodude. Kiwi kicked up as much sand as he could, but Onix still managed to land a lucky strike on him. It hurt Kiwi enough to discourage me from keeping Kiwi on the field any longer. Nibbles was sent out while Onix merely bided his time. I knew immediately that any attacks on Onix while in this defensive state would be unleashed twofold onto its attacker. Your only choices are to crush it swiftly, which is difficult against a rock hard Pokémon like Onix, or to wait it out.
Nibbles began to stare down his opponent while it remained in its defensive posture. Slowly this would lower the Onix's defenses and leave it vulnerable to a massive strike. Eventually, Nibbles was exchanged for Lucky who covered the Onix in its string shot while it continued to wait for our attacks. Feeling safer, Kiwi returned to the battle to continue whipping up sand into Onix's face. Then as soon as Onix released its defensive posturing, Kiwi slammed it with a gust from his wings and knocked the Onix to the floor.
That was how I won my first badge in the great region of Kanto.

Brock was impressed and clasped me firmly on the back with a great slap of his hand. He knew about Rascal, of course, and was pleased at my stance on training. He liked how patient and defensive I was and as a reward not only gave me a handsome sum of PokéDollars, but a Technical Machine that would teach certain eligible Pokémon his Onix's signature technique of biding time and waiting for the counter strike. This strategy didn't really work out well for Brock that day, so I wasn't sure how I would incorporate it on to a team that I intended to take as few hits as possible. I didn't want to be rude, though, so I graciously accepted the TM #34 and the Boulder Badge.
I was now officially on the road to challenge the Indigo Plateau League. I really hadn't come to Kanto expecting to do something quite that dramatic, but I was slowly being pushed in that direction. Professor Oak had prompted me to take this journey and running into Wolf made me question what the journey really meant to me personally. The encounter with the snarky trainer in Viridian City helped me shape my personal goals and encouraged me to challenge the gyms to seek reputation and understanding in the world of Pokémon training. Now, I had my first badge pinned proudly to my backpack and I was on my way to the next adventure — with considerably more money to spend thanks to my winnings.

Current Team:
Attacks in Blue are recently learned.

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The Art Of Video Games: Persona 5

SPOILER ALERT:

Plot details for Persona 4 and Persona 5 follow.

"Who am I?
 Am I not unique?
 Maybe I'm not here at all."



Maybe I only speak for myself here, but I'd like to think that for a lot of JRPG fans, Persona 5 was everything we thought Final Fantasy XIII was going to be. A game that would advance a series we all loved onto the next-gen console, offering a new, but familiar battle system, as well as utilizing the engine to create an immersive storytelling experience that would have been impossible before. While FFXIII can hardly be called the worst in that series, it failed to live up to promise of that E3 2006 trailer, which boasted a fast-paced Matrix style gameplay and a gripping narrative. Battle in FFXIII was underwhelming and automatic, while movement was linear to the point of absurdity. The plot sloppily meshes elements from FFVII and FFX, but lacks the clear character motivations that made those stories interesting. Indeed, Lightning, the game's flagship character, was simply a gender-flipped Cloud, who lacked any of the latter's complexity. One could well fear the same happening with P5. It had a lot to live up to. Not only did P4 grow to be the most acclaimed game in the series, but further launched the Persona brand into the gaming mainstream, becoming, for many, their introduction into the series. A proper follow-up would be no easy feat. So what's most surprising about the reception of P5, isn't how well it met expectations, but how far it exceeded them. P5 is hardly a year old, and Famitsu readers have already voted it the greatest game of all time, with a Metacritic score that surpasses all others in the JRPG genre but Final Fantasy IX and Chrono Trigger. 

Whereas Persona 4 built upon and expanded the foundations of its predecessor, Persona 5 deconstructs them. P4 was pure escapist fantasy, it starred a Gary Stu protagonist who everybody loved in the Japanese equivalent of Bedford Falls. P5 starts you off branded as a criminal who is met with stigma and suspicion by everyone, even your guardian. Igor's Velvet Room, once luxurious, is now a prison cell, and his assistants, once alluring, now cold and threatening. Instead of sleepy, rural Inaba, you maneuver through the hustle and bustle of modern Tokyo. Inaba was the home you always wished you had, whereas in Tokyo, you feel as though you don't quite belong. P4 felt very rooted in Japanese traditions, from Amagi Inn to the Shinto-inspired Personas. P5 feels more international, with Personas inspired by rebels from around the globe, one of the main characters being of mixed ethnicity, the addition of a Christian church, and a school trip to Hawaii. The narrative is also structured differently than that of the previous entries. It begins in media res, as you sneak through a flashy casino, only to be apprehended and brutally tortured by the police. You were sold out by one of your friends, and Prosecutor Sae Nijima will lead your interrogation. The bulk of the game consists of you recounting those events to her, though the story will occasionally flash forward to the interrogation. Doing this provides enough curiosity about where the story will go, but creates enough anticipation as to how it will get there.

In P4, you explored the psyches of your friends, but in P5, you explore the psyches of your enemies. In the Metaverse, which can only be entered by using a Navigation App on your cell, a person's desires can get so distorted that a Palace can be created. These Palaces, much like the dungeons of P4, are manifestations of how these people view the world. Kamoshida, a former gold medalist, sees the high school as his castle, while the gangster Kaneshiro sees Shibuya as his bank. It should be of little surprise that these distortions echo the Seven Deadly Sins, with the sexual abuser Kamoshida representing Lust, the plagiarist Madarame representing Envy, and the ruthless CEO Okumura representing Greed. Your goal, as a Phantom Thief, is to steal away their "Treasure", or the manifestation of their deepest desire. Kamoshida's Treasure is the gold medal of his former glory days, whereas Madarame's treasure is the painting he's always tried to copy. Of course, the Treasure will only manifest once the owner of the Palace feels as though this desire is threatened. You create this sense of threat by sending their conscious self a "calling card", warning them of the oncoming theft. A successful heist yields a "change of heart" in the Palace owners, during which they are made to feel bad about their crimes and openly confess for repentance. By doing this, the Phantom Thieves hope to reform society, but unlike P4's Investigation Team, which sought to validate the law, you work to change things outside of it.

Art by Soejima Shigenori. Used for education under "Fair Use." All rights to Atlus.

The aesthetics of P5 make it stand out leaps and bounds ahead of any previous entry. This is the first Persona to explicitly use the cel-shading of anime games, and the menus have such style that they seem to pop out like the word bubbles in a manga. All throughout there are shades of Lupin The Third, Cat's Eye, Mission: Impossible, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Cowboy Bebop, Marvel, DC, and Ocean's Eleven, all of it brought to life with an opening animation that is reminiscent of the elegant ice skating in Yuri On Ice!. More than any other Persona, you have enough space to breathe and explore your surroundings. You can walk through the crowded city streets of Shibuya, travel through a rather accurate representation of the Japanese train system, and go on dates or outings at parks and planetariums. Even little things, like the loading screen, show silhouettes of the citizenry, going about their daily lives. You can even listen in on other people's conversations. The music from longtime composer Shoji Meguro takes on an acid jazz feel, with "Last Surprise" and "Rivers In The Desert". While songs like "Beneath The Mask" can also properly shift the mood into a more relaxing tone when you return to the coffee shop.

The gameplay is, by far, the best out of any Persona, or even any turn-based JRPG. As always, your days are divided between crawling the dungeons and forging Social Links, now called Confidants, with your friends. The dungeons are where P5 really shines ahead of what came before. In previous Persona games, the dungeons were the same repetitive hallways in search of a staircase. In P5, exploring the interiors of each Palace presents a completely new experience, ranging from Kamoshida's Castle to Kaneshiro's Bank to Futaba's Pyramid to Okumura's Space Factory. Instead of charging right in, the game takes a note from Metal Gear Solid and encourages success through stealth. Thieves, after all, aren't known for walking through the front door. To do this, you can hide behind various boxes and pillars, slipping in a whirl to the next hiding spot, before getting the jump on the enemy. Needless to say, preemptive strikes are far easier this time around, but require no less skill to select the right spots and routes through each challenge. Similar to The Last Of Us, you can also turn on a second sight that allows you to see hidden enemies, small crawlspaces, and of course, treasures. Sometimes, you'll need to solve various puzzles to go onward, which can range from literally going through paintings in Madarame's Museum to figuring your way through the airlocks in space. While not exactly Zelda level in their construction, they added some needed variety to the game. Indeed, tussling various enemies one-on-one in Sae's Casino reminded me a lot of Battle Square in FFVII's Golden Saucer.

Art by Soejima Shigenori. Used for criticism under "Fair Use." All rights to Atlus.

Battle is the traditional JRPG take turn with the series' traits of switching Personas and All-Out Attacks. Even so, it's still impressive to see old attacks like Agidyne in flashy high-definition. Guns are also thrown into the mix, and are very effective against most enemies with wings. Your party's Personas have also evolved quite a bit, in P3 they were Greco-Roman monsters, in P4 they were legendary kami, and here, they are cartoonish rebels, drawing on history, literature, and myth, from Ryuji's Captain Kidd to Joker's Arsene Lupin to Morgana's Zorro (how Atlus got away with using Zorro without violating any copyrights is an interesting question). They can also be quite stylish, from Makoto's nuclear motorcycle to Futaba's massive UFO. P5, though, also brings back an option in battle from the pre-P3 games: negotiation with the Shadows. This adds a new strategic layer to the fight, as you can request enemies for items, money, or even recruiting them into your party as a fellow Persona. All this, of course, is achieved on whether or not you say the right things, as the wrong words can open you up to attack. Some enemies will even take your party members hostage, and a refusal to comply will lead to their instant deaths. Persona fusions are still an important feature of the Velvet Room, but you can also sacrifice certain Personas to add experience and abilities to others, or even transform them into items. The fusions themselves are newly gruesome, carried out by guillotine execution, at the hands of Igor's two assistants, Caroline and Justine. Much like P4, the bosses take on exaggerated versions of a person's darkest psyche. So we have King Kamoshida drinking glassfuls of women, Kaneshiro running atop a giant piggy bank, and Sae rolling die in a giant roulette wheel. Sometimes, you'll be asked to send one of your party member's off to find a weakness in the enemy while you distract them. An enjoyable instance of this was in aiming a giant catapult at a flying sphinx to send it down where it was vulnerable. Once you defeat a Palace, it disappears, so grinding will have to be done at Mementos, which is a subway metaphor for the Jungian collective unconscious. As opposed to P3's Tartarus, where the goal is to ascend, Mementos is a long, burrowing journey to the center of the Earth. You ride around Mementos in Morgana's bus form (a cute reference to Totoro) changing the hearts of many, some of whom even tie into your Confidants.

Confidants are the new Social Links in P5, and as always, make up some of the best parts of the game. You get to spend your time hanging out with one of your friends at a ramen shop or in the mall, and learn a little more about them in the process. This goes beyond your fellow students to include the weapons seller, the pharmacist, and even your teacher. Friends who want to hang out will contact you through texting, a modern touch that makes the game more realistic. Some Confidants, of course, can only be advanced when one of your five attributes reaches a certain threshold. Fortunately, there are a multitude of ways to do this, from reading books on the train, to crafting lockpicks, to relaxing in the bathhouse, to watching films either at home or in the theater, to even playing an older video game consoles.

P5 recycles many of the character archetypes we've come to expect from this series. Ryuji is the loud-mouthed best friend, (Yosuke/Junpei), Ann is the young model (Rise) who always tries to keep the loudmouth in line (Yukari/Chie). Haru is the soft-spoken heiress to a family business and conflicted about her responsibilities (Yukiko). Makoto is the student council president, all too naive in the ways of the world (Mitsuru). Akechi is a young detective suspicious of this group's connection to all the weird goings-on (Naoto). Morgana is the cute, furry mascot with a shady past (Teddie). Those who break new ground are Yusuke and Futaba. Yusuke is both a caricature of the "tortured artist", while at the same time a sincere aesthete. He is equal parts insightful and clueless. Futaba is the geeky shut-in, who is great with technology, whose dialogue makes her a walking Ernest Cline. Of course, as always, even the archetypal characters are more interesting than the surface level. Ryuji is a former member of the track team, who is quick to let his emotions fly loose. One such incident was when he attacked Kamoshida and cost the track team their success. Between Junpei and Yosuke, Ryuji comes off as the most likable asshole, given his passion for helping out the track team, despite their dislike of him. Ann has a rather serious subplot in how to relate to Shiho, a victim of sexual assault, which, I imagine is more common an issue than one may think. Haru's introduction as the "Beauty Thief" with Morgana is endearing and humorous, but her character doesn't get too much attention after that. Makoto is very much like a young Mitsuru, though they're both technically the same age, I'd argue that Makoto's maturation starts at an earlier stage. Whereas Mitsuru starts off caring about SEES and spends most of the game learning how to express it, Makoto starts off as hostile towards the Phantom Thieves, but warms to them the more she learns. Morgana talks a lot more smack than Teddie, and is always ready to keep the team in check. This time around, you won't be irritated with bad puns, but by incessant orders to go to bed.

Trying to remain monogamous is P5 should be considered a form of torture under the Geneva Conventions. Most, if not all of the girls in this game are not only cute, but have irresistible personalities. How can you not fall in love? There's the goth doctor, Tae Akemi, who has a twisted sense of humor, using you for her experimental medicines. She can be awfully cute when she refers to you as "guinea pig." There's the journalist Ichiko Ohya, who is equal parts high-spirited and alcoholic. Her mood swings can be an annoyance, but her youthful energy is so very attractive. Then there also the shogi master, Hifumi Togo, who's warm and sweet, but also humorously melodramatic in the midst of a game. I eventually chose Sadayo Kawakami, though I didn't intend to, but intention means little as far as romance goes. I was moved by her desire to be a better teacher as well as drawn to her slyness. It can be easy to dismiss those won over by Kawakami as wanting to play out dominance fantasies, but I think what draws many to her isn't the maid, but the woman underneath trying to climb through. So while P5 has the best romantic selection out any other entry in the series, it's a a crying shame that they still didn't include a homosexual option for female or gay players, who are a significant subset of the game's audience. I mean, even I would've been tempted to date Yusuke.

The stories in Persona games revolve around themes. P3's was death. P4's was truth. P5's is justice. Modern society in the game is depicted as fundamentally corrupt and unjust, run by adults who either participate in the corruption or stand by and do nothing. So it falls upon the youth to revolt. It's hard to look at P5 and not think of the upsurge in youth protests, from Zucotti Park, to Tarhir Square, to Ferguson, to Hong Kong, to Caracas, to Kiev. This may not have been intentional, but it's hard to keep out of mind. Like P4, P5 is a high school fantasy. Whereas P4's fantasy was an idealization: with dependable friends, a cute girlfriend, and enjoyable festivals, P5's offers "just desserts" never served: what if you were able to stand up to all the adults who mistreated you in high school? As Julie Muncy wrote in Wired,

"You're old enough to see these evils clearly, but not yet old enough to do anything about them. Many adults will write off anything you have to say on account of your age, and often the ones doing the harm are the ones who ought to be protecting you in the first place. That awareness leads not just to frustration, but to a profound, inescapable feeling that the entire world of adulthood is corrupt beyond functional repair. Persona 5 senses this, it understands it, an it offers its teen heroes weapons."

The game's director, Katsura Hoshino, also acknowledged that this was a superhero story more in line with "the West", (further belaboring the contrast to P4) as it's focus was more on fighting individuals from within society, then invaders from outside of it,

"I'm going off on a tangent here, but I think that traditional Japanese superhero stories tend to be about fighting off invaders from outside their society, while Western ones focus on fighting against villains and misfits that come from within it. There's a sense of society being responsible for creating the evil, and such a setting let's the audience's imagination run wild, like "it could've been me." For instance, doesn't the Joker from Batman make so valid points that resonate with you?"

Yet while there is much in the way of discussion over the moral quagmires of youth rebellion, there isn't quite enough exploration of its consequence. It's similar to how Dirty Harry romanticizes an officer who takes the law into his own hands, while refusing to address the consequences of denying suspects Miranda rights. We see all the time how self-righteous groups which operate outside of the law quickly lose focus and turn sour. Anonymous fought the wrongdoings of Scientology and Stubenville, but was also prone to antisemitic jeers, as was made evident when they made cyber attacks on Israeli sites on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Wikileaks exposed corruption in governments around the world, from aiding the Arab Spring in Tunisia to exposing the secret killing of Iraqi civilians by U.S. forces, but the group has also been careless in leaking private info that has little to do with the public good, while its founder, Julian Assange, has been credibly accused of rape. Antifa, while taking a stand against the resurgence of fascism in America, isn't shy about its disdain for democratic norms and institutions, with questionable tactics (at best), of preemptive violence and destruction of property. It is true that lawbreakers can be heroes, but even lawbreaking in the pursuit of justice can go too far, and this reality isn't given the weight it deserves.

Visualizing the moral grey area of forcibly changing people's hearts could've added greater depth to the game. This isn't to say that the actions of the Phantom Thieves aren't justified, but that they should come with few consequences. Changing hearts is tactic far more invasive than Anthony Burgess' "Lodovico Technique." As in A Clockwork Orange, Alex DeLarge was brainwashed into associating his vices with pain and disgust, but heart theft erases the impulse for vice altogether. It reminds me of the Star Trek episode, "The Enemy Within", in which Captain Kirk is split in two, with one Kirk being purely docile and other being unrestrained id. While the "evil" Kirk was a nuisance, he at least had ambition, which is more than could be said for "good" Kirk, who was too castrated to lift a finger. The point of the episode was that although the id can commit great evil, it is needed to a certain extent to function properly as a human being. Lust and Envy, when taken to extremes, are clearly terrible, but both, when used judiciously can foster healthy romance and productive competition. Yet we never see the change of heart cause any negative consequences to the targets. Imagine if Madarame lost any impulse to create or if Kaneshiro became so loose with money as to fall bankrupt? Given Persona's roots in psychoanalysis, I was surprised not to see these intricacies realized. While it can be argued that changes of heart also occurred in P4, those were done willfully. They changed after being confronted with their own weaknesses and accepting them. This felt more realistic and enriched character. In P5, only Futaba undergoes this type of change, which made her palace among the most memorable. This is not to say, of course, that the Phantom Thieves deal with no negative consequences at all. The so-called "Phan Site" is a clever incorporation of social media into the game, showing how easily opinions can change, and how popularity on these forums affects personal motivations.

Your preconceptions of various tropes in Persona, from the role of Igor to the multiple endings, are played with here. When I began P5, I was irritated with the change in Igor's voice. In prior entries, his voice carried a sophisticated and foppish quality, whereas now, he sounded far too demonic and menacing. Usually, towards the end of a Persona game, when the chips are down, Igor comes in, right at the nick of time to give you the strength to triumph. Instead, Igor orders his servants to kill you, which they refuse, revealing the best twist in any Persona, that "Igor", this time around, is not only an imposter, and the final antagonist, Yabolveleth.

Then come the alternate endings. As any Persona veteran knows, choices you make near a certain point in the game can affect the outcome. You'll often be put into a morally compromising situation and be asked to make a difficult decision. In P3, it was the choice between fighting death or resigning to it. In P4, it was the choice between vigilante murder or yielding to imperfect justice. In P5, you are asked whether or not to sell out your friends or take the fall. When Akechi fires a bullet into your head and your friends are off returning to their normal lives, it dawns on you that you may have said the wrong thing, and now you're stuck replaying the last scene in your mind, thinking, where did I go wrong? Of course, this is just the game misleading you, but I appreciated it keeping the uncertainty on edge. It did strike me, though, that this series is probably the true fruition of those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books we all read as children.

Where this disrupting of tropes didn't work, however, was in the stunting of the precious character moments we've come to appreciate from Persona. While the plot and character are exceptional, especially as far as most games go, they didn't surpass P4's perfect chemistry of character interaction. I think back to the camping trip, the king's game, the cooking contest for Nanako, and the school festival costumes. In P5, it seemed they wanted to take these moments and have them fail in unexpected ways. It rains during the fireworks festival, the school trip to Hawaii amounts to little, and the school festival is more focused on plot than character. This subversion could have worked if it brought our characters to unexpected places, but instead, things just end there and circle back to the plot. In the Hawaii trip, for instance, there's a moment when Mishima gets sick and Ann gets locked out. I thought this was a set-up for some great comedy, but instead it becomes a shiny balloon that deflates just before it can pop.

Since we're on the topic of lost potential, we may as well get to the game's antagonists. Masayoshi Shido is an aspiring Prime Minister who was behind the incident that got Joker arrested. For a Persona antagonist, he's surprisingly generic, and his palace can get rather tedious, though the boss fight is satisfying, and would've worked well as the finale. Shido and Yabolveleth exist as statements on conformity, particularly in Japan, and need for individualism. A fine message, to be sure, and conveyed splendidly by no less than Satanael himself. Yet these two lack any intimate connection with the cast, so these boss fights lack the emotional investments they deserve. This could have been fixed had the game focused its attention more on one other character, Goro Akechi.
 
Akechi, like Naoto before him, is an ace detective who finds himself in opposition to our heroes before joining them. The twist is that Akechi had sided with Shido, his father, the whole time, and was responsible for various assassinations throughout the game. At the game's start, you are told that one ally will betray you, and for many, the one spent all his time critiquing the Phantom Thieves was an obvious choice. That said, Akechi could've been superior to P4's Tohru Adachi, had he been allowed to develop more of a rivalry with Joker, and his criticisms of their tactics given more serious consideration. Some have drawn parallels between Joker and Akechi with what was probably a direct inspiration, Sherlock Holmes and Arsene Lupin, while others have noted that Death Note's Light Yagami and L seem more apt, since their rivalry deals more directly with justice, and not simply a clash in methods. In Death Note, Light is given a notebook in which he can kill whomever he wants by writing their name down. Under the pseudonym "Kira" he pursues justice on his own terms because he doesn't find the law sufficient. L opposes Kira because of his belief in the justice system and allowing even one to subvert its norms could only undermine its effectiveness. Their rivalry is entertaining for its stratagems, moral implications, and most absorbingly, L's friendship with Light. Had Akechi been allowed to develop something similar with Joker, his betrayal would've been all the more heart-wrenching. Further, Akechi could've been a more nuanced character, had his concerns about the Phantom Thieves actions led to any real consequences. I could think of no better reason for Akechi to turn against his comrades after seeing their ideals fail. While P5 does a good job of demonstrating injustice from within the system, through Akechi, it could've done the same for injustice from without. Instead, we get an info dump about his daddy issues before he flips into a psycho.

As much as I enjoyed the climax of P5, it dawned on me just how tiresome of a cliche that deicide is becoming in JRPGs, even in a game as fresh as this. For only so many times can one reiterate, in the exact same way, that religious dogma is the opiate of the masses, until the critique becomes an opiate in and of itself. If killing god is to remain a staple of the JRPG, then it has to either nuance god or make god personal. In Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy VII, both Kefka and Sephiroth end up as gods, but they aren't just transparent stand-ins for philosophical commentary. Kefka and Sephiroth both had relationships with the protagonists throughout, and had affected them personally. So meeting them at the end, even as gods, was heightened with the anticipation to dispatch justice at last. Yaboveleth, however, has no such relation, he's just another god to be slain.

It would've been serviceable enough if P5's problems resolved themselves after the defeat of Yabolveleth, but game goes on, making us confront the legal fallout of what Joker's situation. It wisely forces the Phantom Thieves to overcome a situation with their wits instead of their powers. The whole sequence of seeing all of those whom you've bonded with attest to your good character is a new retelling of the "power of friendship" trope often used to defeat the final boss. It also cements to us the difficulty of "rehabilitation" in the eyes of society, prisoner or otherwise.

On a small note, some have critiqued the gay couple who chase after you at random spots in the game as a lazy stereotype of homosexuals. While they're a minor part of the game, I can't help but share some of the irritation. Persona is known for its complex characters, so why are we still getting cheap comedy villains? In P4, there were three: King Moron (ha ha, he's ugly!) Miss Kashiwagi (ha ha, she's old!) Hanako (ha ha, she's fat!). Even P3 makes a gag out of a trans woman hitting on you at the beach. There were always moments when I expected the other shoe to drop, and we'd learn something new to change our assumptions, but alas. That's not to say these characters couldn't be funny (in P4's case they often were), but it's just, I don't know, for a series that critiqued fat shaming through Ai Ebihara, explored homoerotic desire through Kanji, and even introduced the wise-cracking drag queen Lala Escargot, the continued use of these stock villains feels beneath its reputation. Oh, well.

This will be the last Persona game with director Katsura Hoshino, who first brought the series to global prominence with Persona 3, shepherded it into the halls of excellence with Persona 4. Whatever the future of this series, I imagine that Persona 5 may signal the end of an era that has fundamentally changed the way we think about JRPGs. A series that showed us that the everyday social activities of high school can be just as enthralling as fighting monsters in the dungeons of a faraway kingdom.

The Art Of Video Games

"The Art Of Video Games: Tetris."
http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-art-of-video-games-tetris-at-30.html

"The Art Of Video Games: Pac-Man."
http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-art-of-video-games-pac-man-at-35.html

"The Art Of Video Games: Super Mario Bros."
http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-art-of-video-games-super-mario-bros.html

"The Art Of Video Games: Super Smash Bros."
http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-art-of-video-games-super-smash-bros.html

"The Art Of Video Games: Final Fantasy VI."
http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-art-of-video-games-final-fantasy-vi.html

"The Art Of Video Games: Pokemon."
http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-art-of-video-games-pokemon.html

"The Art Of Video Games: The Legend Of Zelda."
http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-art-of-video-games-legend-of-zelda.html

"The Art Of Video Games: Final Fantasy IV."
http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-art-of-video-games-final-fantasy-iv.html

"The Art Of Video Games: Kingdom Hearts."
http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-art-of-video-games-kingdom-hearts.html

"The Art Of Video Games: Kingdom Hearts II."
http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-art-of-video-games-kingdom-hearts-ii.html

"The Art Of Video Games: The Last Of Us."
https://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-art-of-video-games-last-of-us.html

"The Art Of Video Games: Persona 4."
https://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-art-of-video-games-persona-4.html

"The Art Of Video Games: Danganronpa."
https://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-art-of-video-games-danganronpa.html

"The Art Of Video Games: Final Fantasy VII."
https://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-art-of-video-games-final-fantasy-vii.html

"The Art Of Video Games: Persona 3."
https://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-art-of-video-games-persona-3.html



Bibliography

Hoshino, Katsura. "Persona 5: A Special Thank You From Atlus To Fans." PlayStation Blog. Web. https://blog.us.playstation.com/2017/05/04/persona-5-a-special-thank-you-from-atlus-to-the-fans/

Muncy, Julie. "'Persona 5' Review: This Massive Game About High School Is All Demons And Angst---In A Good Way." Wired, April 14, 2017. Web. https://www.wired.com/2017/04/persona-5-review/

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