I just remembered about five minutes ago that I had watched Spirited Away. I sort of forgot it even existed and I’m not sure why my brain chose now to make me remember it. Now I think would be good time to share my thoughts on it.
Spirited Away is a pretty good movie. I like the animation and the settings and the scenery. I like the part where the main character has to clean a giant green blob. I like the part where she goes on a train that’s half submerged in the water. For such a weird story, there’s really not much to say about it. A girl’s parents are transformed into pigs and all of them are taken to a world of spirits and ghosts. She has to save her parents and find a way back. Pretty simple. If you’ve ever watched Alice in Wonderland you probably have a pretty good idea of what this movie is like. I appreciate that even though it’s a kid’s movie, it doesn’t hold back on the wackiness factor and explains next to nothing. If you’re a kid watching then you can just enjoy the strange visuals and the bizarre plot and if you’re older you can try to make sense of everything, like a mystery that needs to be solved. The strongest aspect of the film is the setting. The main character is forced into child labor and has to work at what I’m pretty sure is a hotel for spirits. The type of spirits range from a talking frog to a black blob thing that starts talking and eating all the employees. There’s also a giant talking baby. Why is there a giant talking baby? That doesn’t really matter. There’s ghosts and dragons and sentient pieces of paper; a giant talking baby is not the strangest thing to exist. The why isn’t the focus of the story. You just have to accept what you’re seeing. My main criticism is that there was no build up to the ending. You’re just watching the plot thicken and suddenly you realize the the movie is about to end. It didn’t really feel deserved. There isn’t really a climax either. No big spectacle. The main character just answers a question correctly and then she’s allowed to leave the spirit world. I’ve already said this before but my favorite part is when she has to clean the giant blob. Visually it looks awesome. The room is flooding with water and the main character is struggling to get this little soap boxes into the bathtub. Such a cool and creative scene. Very epic. It’s a shame the movie didn’t end with something like that. All in all I’d give this movie a strong 9 out of 10. I think really anyone can watch this movie no matter how old you are. In fact I’d say this movie might lean a little more towards an older audience since younger kids would probably be afraid of some of the characters, namely the guy who works in the furnace and the black blob monster.
I’ve been reading tq’s blogs for a while now and I never thought much of them since the topics she wrote about are pretty lame. Now when I read them it’s like reading the journal of a psychopath, slowly snapping and breaking down. I think we’ve finally reached the breaking point. At this point I think she’s literally addicted. She probably gets a dopamine rush every time she turns on her ipad and sees that one of her online pals has said something to her. From what I’ve read it seems all her friends do is make fun of her but it’s possible tq is just being dramatic when she writes about their remarks. Anyway, my question is: how did this happen? When I was younger all I ever wanted to do was play on my mom’s ipad. I guess you could say I was addicted as well and I’d get upset every time I had to stop. But never have I tried to make friends online. All my friends were people from school. Most of the people I talked to on Roblocks were also dumb little kids and most of our conversations amounted to “Dude you suck at this game.” It seems like tq plays with a lot of older people or at least a bunch of little kids pretending that they’re old. Maybe the roblocks landscape has changed since I was eight and now the kids playing Roblocks are older. I don’t know. I’m just going to assume that those are just little kids because if you are actually sixteen and unironically playing roblocks and befriending ten year olds, that’s just tragic. I guess it’s only natural for people older than eight to be able to form an actual bond with each other and become friends online. The people I played with when I was eight could barely type a full sentence. What I find interesting is that tq doesn’t seem to really care about her school friends at all, only the ones she’s never met. This could be that the people at her school are just bad people but I really don’t think that’s the case. It’s just easier to be friends with people online. You can say that you’re fifteen and they’ll have no choice but to believe it. Nobody has to know who you are. You can feel accepted into the group in ways you can’t in a real life friend group. This is all speculation though because I haven’t yet reached a low where my only reason for waking up is so I can talk to my roblocks friends. My last theory for why things have come to this is tq’s mom. The only thing tq writes about besides her roblocks friends is her mom. And not in a positive manner. Actually some of the things she writes about her makes her seem borderline abusive. Whether or not tq is just being dramatic, I don’t know. I’d probably be overstepping my boundaries if I said anything else so I’ll leave it at that. Disclaimer: this section was not in any way intended to insult anybody. I’m writing this because I know at least one person is going to be very upset after reading this.
On a lighter note, let me talk about Harvest Moon. I’m going to be writing a lot about video games because I like them and I also want everyone else to like them and to not see them as a waste of time. In fact I’d go even further and say that video games are and should be considered an art form, though that’s a discussion for another time. I know none o f you are seriously interested in video games so I’ll try to explain anything you don’t know. Harvest Moon is a farming simulator series that inspired games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley. (Both are popular farming games.) The first Harvest Moon game was released on the Super Nintendo Entertainment system back in 1996. In this post I’ll specifically be talking about the Harvest Moon game on the Nintendo DS. Harvest Moon: The Tale of Two Towns. The game is about, you guessed it, two towns. You have to pick between the two. One focuses on growing crops and the other is focused more on livestock. Once you pick there’s a pretty long and boring tutorial before you’re let loose to start your farming life. Grow crops, harvest crops, sell crops, buy seeds, repeat. There’s more to it than that but at its core that’s all the game is. You can talk to the townspeople and even complete requests for them to earn rewards, though most of the things you’ll get from them are pretty useless. If you choose the livestock town like I did then you can buy more animals to take care of to yield more products. You’ll have to properly take care of them too if you want the highest quality stuff. My main complaint is the lack of content. I know the game is eleven years old but the amount of things you can do is pathetic. There’s pretty much no progression system in the game at all. You can buy more animals and you can upgrade your storage unit. That’s pretty much it. Most of the items you get are just given to you. You can finish all your farming chores for the day and still have a few hours left before it gets dark. You don’t even unlock the ability to expand your farm until a month passes, which is equal to a few hours of play. I actually searched things up online because I thought I was doing things wrong and that I hadn’t yet unlocked most of the content. The game opens up more later but the first several hours are an absolute drag. All in all I give this game a seven out of ten. Really boring in the beginning. At least it gets better later. At any rate this is supposed to be a more casual game that you’re just supposed to relax with, so maybe I was taking the game too seriously.
Pokemon. Everyone knows pokemon. Even if the only pokemon you know is Pikachu. To be honest I’ve never been much of a fan of the franchise. The battle system is extremely basic. It hasn’t evolved at all since the nineties. For those who don’t know, the first Pokemon game was on the Gameboy. Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue. Essentially they’re the same game, it’s just that some pokemon are exclusive to each version. The goal of the game is to catch ’em all and become the very best. A special edition of Pokemon Red and Blue was released a few years later called Pokemon Yellow, which is loosely based off of the anime. It’s pretty much the same as Red and Blue except you can’t choose your starting Pokemon and instead you get this chubby little Pikachu who follows you around. Pokemon Yellow is the one I’ll mainly be focusing on. My first thoughts on Pokemon Yellow: it’s pretty fun. The visuals haven’t aged well and the battle system is as basic as ever, but still, it’s pretty fun. The first thing I noticed was that this game was pretty difficult compared to the newer entries. Let me explain: each pokemon has a different type, such as water or fire or grass. And types have advantages and disadvantages over each other. Fire beats grass, grass beats water, water beats fire. Pikachu is an electric type. Electric types are weak against rock types. The first boss in the game fights with only rock type Pokemon. As a result, the beginning of the game is pretty tough if you haven’t captured a pokemon that fares well against rock types. Aside from that, there’s not much to say about this game. It’s a Gameboy game so that’s to be expected. I give it a seven out of ten. It’s pretty fun.
Ace Attorney is a visual novel. If you don’t know what a visual novel is it’s like a book but with moving pictures and sometimes you can interact with it. You play as rookie defense attorney Phoenix Wright and you’ll have to prove that your client is not guilty of murder. (Every case in this game is a murder case.) You’ll have to use your wits to poke holes in the witness’s testimony and ultimately reveal the true culprit. The best part of the game is the satisfying feeling of piecing together the answer to puzzle. Suddenly everything clicks and you realize the truth and you expose the killer’s lies. When this game is good, it’s really good. The most boring and tedious part of the game are the investigation sequences. There’s hardly any puzzle solving or really any thinking at all. It mainly consists of collecting evidence for the upcoming trial and interrogating witnesses. Pretty lame. But it’s all worth it for when you get to the fun part. That’s pretty much it. The game is very simple so really anyone can play it. Unless you’re bad at solving mysteries in which case you should probably stay away. I give this game an eight out of ten.
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is the eighth main entry in the series if you don’t count the handheld games. It released on the Nintendo Wii in 2011, to a mixed reception. The main criticism people had with the game were the motion controls. In the game you held the Wii Remote and swung it around which would make you swing a sword in the game. If you swung up the sword would swing up. A lot of people complained that the motion controls straight up didn’t work while others said that the controls worked perfectly and that they loved them. For a while this was the most hated Zelda game ever, but over time the game has been better received and now the general consensus is that it was a pretty good game. Recently the game has been ported to the Nintendo Switch with a vast array of improvements. 1080p, 60 fps, free camera controls, ability to skip cutscenes, faster text, the ability to play without motion controls, and an improved tutorial. It’s definitely the best way to play the game now. And now that I’ve played it, I think it’s my favorite Zelda game besides The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The dungeons are awesome, the bosses are awesome, the swordplay is awesome, and the world itself is awesome. It’s a lot of fun to wave around the controller and seeing your character matching your movement. The sword duels are really cool. In the beginning you can just get by waving the controller around and whacking away enemies, but soon you’ll have to calculate what kind of swing you’ll have to make in order to get past your opponent’s defenses. Something that’s annoying is recalibrating your controller. On the Wii there was a sensor bar that automatically recalibrated your controller so that it always knew where your controller was. There isn’t one on the Switch so you’ll have to constantly recalibrate it. Otherwise it starts drifting and then your swings will be registered wrong, like swinging your controller left might make the sword swing right. Ironically, the motion controls on the fourteen-year-old Wii are more precise too. Flying is annoying. You get a giant bird that you can freely fly around the skies which sounds cool and is at the beginning. But soon you’ll realized how big the world is and how slow your bird is. It takes forever to go from one place to the other. Still a good game though. Nine out of ten for sure. Not a game for everybody, but definitely one worth checking out.
The Tatami Galaxy is the best anime. It’s my favorite anime. It probably will remain that way for a long time, if not forever. First. The show had a really unique art style. I feel like anime is a copy and paste job now and most shows look pretty much the same. Not The Tatami Galaxy. It has this bizarre art style that I really like. It’s proof that an art style can look both appealing and unique. If you’re wondering, no the show is not about space. It’s about a brand-spanking new college student who is looking for a rose-colored campus life. Let me give a recap of the first episode. The protagonist (we never learn his name) enters his college campus and joins the tennis club. But he sucks at tennis and also socializing with people and quickly he becomes a social outcast. Soon he meets Ozu who he quickly becomes friends with. Bitter over the fact that he’s lonely, Ozu and the protagonist become notorious pranksters who messes with everyone on campus. Two years pass, and his pitiful life of pranking remains the same. The protagonist, wandering the streets alone after his most recent prank, encounters a fortune teller who tells him that an opportunity is always dangling in front of his eyes and that he must reach out and grab it. When he gets back to his room, he stares up at the ceiling. Dangling above him is a small keychain which he attached to his light switch. It belongs to the girl he likes; she’d dropped it somewhere earlier and he had forgotten to return it until now. He reaches out, touches it, and chickens out, leaving it where it is. Later, he ends up on a bridge where he sees that a mob of angry campus students are tossing Ozu off a bridge and into the water for his crimes. They notice the protagonist, pick him up, and toss him off the bridge. And as he’s falling he thinks that if only he had chosen another club, he wouldn’t be a social outcast, he wouldn’t be hanging out with Ozu, and he wouldn’t be falling off a bridge. He would’ve had his rose-colored campus life. Time stops. Then it rewinds. End of episode. Each episode starts with the protagonist’s first day of college and explores what his life would have been had he chosen a different club. For example, one episode shows him joining the movie club, another shows him joining the cycling club. It’s not a time travel show. He doesn’t remember his past lives. It’s more like exploring parallel universes. What if he had joined something else? Some things do remain constant. He always ends up being friends with Ozu. He always ends finding the girl’s keychain. He’s always too afraid to return it to her. He always meets the fortune teller. He always ends up regretting his choices and wishing he had chosen a different club. It’s a cleverly told story about accepting your mistakes and about not chasing after something that doesn’t exist. The ending ties everything together very nicely. A warning though. In the beginning, the protagonist talks really fast, and I mean really fast. I could barely keep up with it. He slows down to normal talking speeds later, but you’re going to be pausing a lot in the beginning if you can’t read fast. And you can’t just switch the the English dub, because there is no English dub. Another thing is how the show looks. It moves very fast with many cuts and visuals that might be a little hard to understand. That on top of the speed at which the protagonist talks, can make things very very confusing, as in, you won’t understand anything at all. Still, like his talking speed, the animation becomes more normal over time. The show is only eleven episodes long, so you don’t have to commit that much time to it. I highly suggest you check it out. Ten out of ten, top tier anime. if you disagree your opinion is wrong and you probably like fairy tail.
It took me three hours to write this.
Also one last thing. The ending to The Tatami Galaxy. It’s really good. Really really good. It ties up all the loose ends and all the things you might have questioned in the show are answered in a way that’s extremely satisfying. Even why the show is called The Tatami Galaxy is explained. Like after you finish it’ll suddenly click and you’ll say, “So that’s why it’s called that!” You might find the episodes repetitive but trust me, the last two episodes are a masterpiece.