Time Travelin' and Gibson Hackin' - LoZ:WW, Summer Wars and GWLtT
By L33tfella_H 1 Comments
So i recently decided i'd dive back into Wind Waker after taking a break for like a week or so, and managed to finish it in 2 sittings lasting about 6-7 hours total, also figured i'd watch the Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Summer Wars since a friend reccomended both to me, and i guess i'll break it down.
Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker
Some of you might've read my post about Ocarina of Time i did a while back, after that i decided i'd play either Majora's Mask or Wind Waker after that, but i played Metroid Prime for a while and then kinda took a break from the Gamecube.I've started up Wind Waker a couple of times before, but i've usually never really made it far and i haven't really gone back. This time i decided i'd go all the way, and i was pleasantly suprised. The game looks simply stunning (especially on my non-HD tv ;D ), alongside my playing of Metroid Prime made me realize that Nintendo and their 2nd parties (some of them atleast) managed to make a very strong push for an art direction that helped their games age better than their previous attempts (atleast i feel that way).
Wind Waker makes use of Cel-Shading and a more 'drawn' style to help the world around look alot more colourful and to make all the character much more expressive, this is especially the case with Link, who has never been one for talking (unless you count bad cartoons and CD-I games), comes off as a great character with just the way he reacts at times. The gameplay feels much more simplified both in the sense of the dungeon exploration, sidequests and combat. This isn't just me saying that the game is 'easy', more like...it's less 'annoying'. I feel it helps smooth out the gameplay, and perhaps it makes it a much shorter gameplay experience, but the sailing more than makes up for that with padding up the wazoo ;).
The basic story progression is that Boy wakes up, finds out it's his birthday (who forgets their own birthday?!), and gets to wear some cosplay ge...i mean 'traditional' outfit that all boys of a certain age need to wear when the time comes. He then ends up in some situation that ends up in his sister getting kidnapped, and him bailing her out of it. From there we have failed sneaking missions, boats that talk, and the Wind Waker!. What's a Wind Waker?
It's a conductor's rod. Yep, exciting isn't it?! (Personally, it does it's job, but the Ocarina is still alot cooler an instrument than a stick used to guide the orchestra). So he uses his talking boat, and his Magic Stick to get 3 magical orbs, and then after that he's gonna go disturb the dead, and then he powers up the Master Sword and goes fucks Ganondorf's shit up. The End.
All Said and Done, Wind Waker is a wonderful and charming game, and it's certainly a great starter game if you wanna see what the Zelda series is all about. It's polished and improved itself down to a fine point, and there are some negatives to it, like the sailing and perhaps it's quite lacking when it comes to not doing the main quest, and having to keep switching the wind all the time (even with the warp spell) can get quite irritating. Wind Waker is an A-Grade effort on part by Nintendo, and even though the Main Platform games have kept the old, more-realistic looking artstyle, the handheld games seem to have found their definitive style, which i think is appropriate for the tone it evokes.
Rating 5/5 (Kevin Bacon out of Kevin Bacon)
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The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
So what happens when you take a teenage girl, give her the ability to time travel, and let her go wild with it? Probably something completely chaotic and absolutely messed up, but in this case, you get this film i suppose.So yea, Makoto, the main character isn't exactly having the best day, when she happens to have a near-death experience, where she discovers that she can 'leap' through time to any point in the past. She for the most part thinks small when it comes to using it (including being able to sing karaoke for 10 hours in a row), but later in the film she gets her head in gear and helps a couple of people out, when she learns that helping others feels pretty nice. The film is a pretty fun feelgood film for the first hour, but then takes a bit of a dramatic turn, which then leads to a bit of a left-field 3rd act, which i'm not gonna really talk about, but let's just say that i feel that while the film ended just fine and it wasn't 'bad', i thought it dragged the rest of the film down a bit.
I think the Main Character of Makoto is a pretty fun individual, inside she's really just a kid and you can definently see this at times, but she knows what she needs to do to set things right in the end. She ends up causing trouble for other people over the course of the film with her actions, but you can tell she means no harm and feels guilty for her actions. I think the drawing style is a pretty nice sight for the eyes and in general most of the characters have 'character' in them, even the ones that don't really feature that often. It's a pretty great film overall, it kinda makes the point that no matter how a situation turns out, there's always consequences behind every choice we make in life.
Rating 4/5 (Earl Boen out of Kevin Bacon)
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Summer Wars
And here's a film that manages to use the Internet to bring people together, but not in ridiculous arguments about websites or talking mess about this or that. No, here's a tale about people coming together to beat up Computer Viruses.We kick off with an introduction to 'OZ', a virtual infrastructure that's basically if the Internet was an MMO and everything was connected to one unified system. It talks about creating your 'Avatar', how you can access the different parts of OZ, and how even big corporations make use of it to conduct everyday business. Then we meet Kenji, who along with his friend work as Moderators for OZ, who are invited by Natsuki to come help her family prepare for her grandmother's 90th birthday. Because only one is allowed to come, an unseen Rock-Paper-Scissors game decides that Kenji gets to head out, and soon it becomes apparent that he's there for a bit more than just manual labour. We get to meet the family (most of it), and after some introductions, we end up in a situation where it seems OZ has been hacked and Kenji's been suspected of commiting the deed. And that's only the first 30 minutes or so of the film, the next hour and 15 minutes is a back-and-forth series of events transpiring and getting wilder and wilder, and ends with everyone coming together to finish off the evil A.I that's taken over the whole system.
I feel that the film was trying to kinda hint at just how much we all rely on the Infrastructure of the Virtual world for our everyday lives, everything from our bank accounts to government systems to Emergency Response Systems, it all runs through 'OZ' which ends up in what i'm assuming is people kinda looking down going 'Why did we think it was a good idea to link all this to one system?'. It also has the whole family coming together and helping eachother through this troubled time and keeping eachother's backs covered.
I think Kenji comes off as a wimp-a-lot at times, but he's got his head in the right place and he helps organize efforts which yield in quite a few strings being pulled (supercomputers and Military-Grade Mobile Radar Devices for example). Natsuki is...a bit of a girl at times (no offense, but if you've seen the film, you get what i mean right?), but to her credit, she's the only one giving her uncle a chance when everyone else has already figured he's just a giant jerk (he kinda is), which in the end plays into events a bit, also..she's plays a helluva game of Koi-Koi. We also have Kazuma, who apparentaly is their version of fatal1ty or something like that, a shy kid who spends most of his days playing OZ or training his Shaolin Kung-Fu. Wabisuke, the estranged Uncle that's a jerk for the most part, and kinda the reason everything happend, but he comes around in the end when he finally realizes what's going on. And lastly we have Grandma Sakae, a sweet old lady who's full of heart throughout the whole film, and essentialy the catalyst that brought everything so close together in the end.
Rating 5/5 (Kevin Bacon out of Kevin Bacon)
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Some Notes
- Master Sword is a really generic name, yet we all hold a special regard for it nonetheless.
- Makoto, whenever she 'rolled' into the past, were quite possibly some of the best moments i had with TGWLTT.
- Someone really should've thought things through before they decided to allow a virtual infrastructure access to pretty much anything it could ever desire.
I also wanna mention spazmaster666, who did a pretty good write up for The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and is going to do one for Summer Wars as well apparentaly..keep on truckin'.
So yea, all in all, quality stuff. You should check all of 'em out if you haven't yet.