Synergy 2010 Posts Index

(only tangentially related) On Events and Benefit Concerts

2010: Ode to Synergy

My Synergy Photograhy Odyssey

Conversations with Synergy

Synergy ‘10 Snippings

(also, Synergy 2008 stuff)

(only tangentially related) A Week in Taiwan 1: Shuangshi

A Week in Taiwan 2: Synergy

A Week in Taiwan 3: Snippings

Synergy Snippings

Yeah, doing this again just like last time.

* I’ll say it now and I’ll say it over and over again: either come back, or go to Taiwan. I’ll be the first to tag along. I hope you don’t mind.

* Friday. Slow day, yet I could hardly sleep, thoughts fraught with uncontainable anticipation for Synergy tour. As an attempt to suppress my overly excitable state, my sis and I saw the movie “Shall We Dansu?” (the Japanese one, not the remake starring Richard Gere) I liked it very much!

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Conversations with Synergy

* Conversation 1

Antonio: PAGCOR is a Casino where all the money you gambled away will be given to the government, which they use as funding for their projects.

Me: Cool. Gambling in good conscience.

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My Synergy Photography Odyssey

To avoid feeling mediocre like I did the last time I traveled with Synergy, I tried to make myself useful to the group by doing two things. First, by being a useful guide. I wasn’t half bad at it. Though I do not possess the same encyclopedic knowledge as our travel agent Antonio Tan (he’s a pro in the business, after all), I’m well versed with its culture and I speak its language fluently enough to get by.

Second, I took a dSLR camera with me, effectively giving me the same duty as Dane Christensen’s back Taiwan, 2008 (he wasn’t on this trip as he’s serving in Denmark). What it boils down to is that I have to take as much photos as I can of this group. I might not have any gears – not even tripod; hey, cut me some slack, the camera is new – and I don’t have a telephoto lens, but with the camera being a Canon EOS 1000D (or Rebel XD as it’s called in the west) I thought I was well prepared.

The camera wasn’t the problem, and even if I had the gears I don’t think they’d make much of a difference. The one to blame? Me. I wasn’t even a photographer, but more of a wannabe with a dSLR. Despite lacking the experience, I volunteered to take concert pictures. Someone is overestimating his abilities!

Needless to say, it often yielded disastrous results.

(Hit the jump to see the pics)

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2010: Ode to Synergy

The worst part of writing this blog is the realization that it’s gonna take a while for this event to repeat itself.

A Voice to the World

What happened? I hinted at it in my previous post: Synergy, a performance group from Utah, came to perform in the Philippines for 10 days. They went back to Utah last Monday, leaving me feeling crushed and having yet to come to terms with returning to my daily routine. Hence, I write this post as a way to counter the stress the abrupt return to normalcy causes.

Personally, I don’t open up to people that much, and would not have been this emotionally invested with just about any tour groups. To be fair, I haven’t toured with other groups, but my sis has had with many, and she told me several times that she felt more connected to Synergy than most, a few of them having bored her. We are fond of Synergy because despite the enormous talents each member possesses, they behave like anyone you befriended in school or at other social gatherings. They don’t look at you with disdain just because they can do something you can’t. They’re down-to-earth individuals, who happen to have passion for singing and dancing, and rehearse 7 months so that they could go around the world and touch people’s lives with their songs.

Synergy’s song and dance numbers remind me of Hairspray, in that both are so happy and chipper that I can’t help but smile whenever I experience them. Synergy’s performances get me every time, with feelings of optimism inspired by the heartfelt and positive messages of love, friendship and peace. They also please the crowd with their acrobatic stunts that could land them roles in action movies. I’ve toured with them twice (the first time being 2008, which I also wrote about), and I’m still left craving for more. I will never tire of them, and I’ll watch and support them as many times as I want.

So thank you, Synergy. Though brief, our times together brought me nothing but joy.

On Events and Benefit Concerts

People led to believe that event organizing is an easy and worthless job should lose that notion, fast.

Yes, I understand why you write this profession off. You read about them in magazines and newspapers. You say, it’s for the rich and annoying. You say, you don’t need talents to arrange events, only connections. After all, compared to plowing the fields, sweating under intense heat, just how hard is it to band people together in an electronica club? You see feature articles of events with pictures of the indulgent lifestyle of the rich and fabulous, while the rest of the country get poorer. You detest people those self-proclaimed “eventologist” who made statements supporting all the partying from the elite class while calling the mindset that one should feel guilty about it passe.

My post won’t defend those eventologists, which I despise as much as I dislike watching the rich not reaching out to help the poor. On the other hand, what they do and what events they cover do not represent the whole profession. Did you know that you need event organizers for benefit concerts? How about distribution of goods from non-profit organizations? Or, just about anything where you need groups or individuals to get things done in a manner presentable to the public? While the difficulty of their job may vary, only a few would have everything on leisure pacing. Worse, they don’t always pay high.

My sister is an organizer of tour for benefit concerts, and last week I saw her at work for the second time, with the first being in Taiwan back in 2008. Those days I spent with her back then became one of the memories that I most treasure, having met some amazing people. After we parted ways, I wrote that I missed the tour group, Synergy, and wondered if they’d ever visit Philippines.

Call me a psychic, because Synergy fulfilled my “prophecy” by coming to the Philippines last week. Of course, I would give full credit to my sister for making it happen. Her planning of the tour didn’t go easy, though, for she had to do myriad things, which started with asking various contacts to let them perform in certain venues, only to be rejected by many (including the college I’m an alumnus of). She searched for travel agencies to help her with their itineraries, one time having to meet one while braving the merciless Ondoy, only for that endeavor to turn out futilely. When she eventually got everything planned out, with a few universities and a travel agent agreeing to accommodate her, she hardly saw the end of all troubles. What with life being unpredictable, the tour met many hurdles, incompetent airport staffs, uncooperative people, uncoordinated people, and bad venue surprises, like the mystery cafeteria food that tries even the hungriest. To add, she not only had to do this in Philippines, but also in Peru, China, Taiwan, and Japan, in the span of two months. Without the resilience, one would be quitting this job before long. Only the assertive, patient, and strong-willed ones press on.

So leave aside your prejudice for event organizers. They don’t have it easy.

What of the groups going all over the world for their benefit concerts then? They impact their performers significantly, especially when they take place on less-trodden venues. Many performers live every day spoiled by the comfort of their suburban homes, and yet they are discontented, seeking out greater material wealth. They’d think, wouldn’t it be nice if I get this new gas-guzzling SUV? Or that Prada bag? Without taking them to places where they perform in the presence of the homeless and the orphaned, they might never understand how fortunate they are, and might never feel compelled to help out. They look at this and it affects them on an emotional level:

In other packaged tours, all you get to see are the presentable, sanitized, gentrified parts of a country. A travel agent in the Philippines rather takes his/her tourists around the commercial areas like Makati or the beaches with pearly white sands, but not revealing the true state of the poverty existing within our soils. Few dare let foreigners see the people who live in house the size of matchboxes, breadwinners scraping the deepest recesses of sewers to put food on their tables. We don’t realize the impact that these sights bring to our tourists, but those who help make the benefit concerts happen reveal to the performers the harsh realities in many parts of the world, that many lives are lived in dire conditions. They learn to be content, to value the people around them, and, most of all, to reach out.

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney (A Retrospective)

** Post contains heavy spoilers for Apollo Justice **

Let’s say that Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney (AJ) worked like a traditional videogame. It only has to have a great gameplay for it to be good, and with features the previous 3 Phoenix Wright games don’t have (sans the DS-exclusive fifth chapter of the first game), AJ could easily be considered a superior game. With AJ, investigations are more involving, since evidences are no longer static objects and you had to view them in 3 dimensions, occasionally requiring that you use cool scientific implements to see traces of fingerprints, footprints or bloods, or to manipulate recording equipments to find telling signs of struggle. It’s also more streamlined, in that if you’ve picked up every evidence and spoke to every witness in a given location, the game will not permit you to stop by here again.

By the standards of a normal videogame, AJ bests Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney 1-3 (PW).

Of course, AJ being a text-heavy adventure game means that it should be judged differently, with its technical aspect playing only a side fiddle to its leading component, the story. Point and click adventure games were first conceptualized at a time when game designers wanted to offer players an interactive role within a complex narrative, but technologies limited the ways videogames can accomplish this. Enter Infocom’s Zorks, the Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker games, with their workarounds being that while you’re reading copious amounts of texts, you’re still “gaming” by typing the correct verbs and nouns to “win”. Then that kind of gaming evolved into what became the colorful Sierra and the LucasArts point-and-click-fests where you’re presented scenarios, then met with obstacles you’re, hopefully, creative enough to make sense of with the items that you’ve picked up along the way (how’s chicken on pulleys work for you?). Any game of the Ace Attorney series is the mix of the amount of reading from the Infocom era, plus the graphical presentation and puzzle-solving from the Sierra/LucasArts offerings. They all require that the gameplay be functional, but only in the sense that it should not get in the way of enjoying their stories and clever writings.

I was not prepared for AJ’s story to be as weak as it turned out to be. A post I wrote in January 2008 reflected the uncontainable hype I had for this game after having played the demo of its first chapter. It’s funny that I should be disappointed, because I knew and accepted right away that I’d play as another rookie lawyer Apollo Justice instead of the much beloved, my personal favorite Phoenix Wright. Phoenix Wright in this game has fallen from grace, with his attorney badge revoked and his whole career changed to that of a gambling lord moonlighting as pianist in a shoddy bar. I was genuinely interested to understand why all these happened, and more to the point, why the writers decided for someone like the eponymous Apollo Justice to replace Phoenix Wright as the leading guy.

Apollo Justice is awful. He and Phoenix Wright are not exactly fan-base dividing new-versus-old leads like Kirk and Picard, who each has his own personalities and quirks; everyone will prefer Phoenix over Apollo, the latter practically the former’s copycat. Both are bumbling lawyers who lack self-confidence, the only differences being that Phoenix is more passionate and more cognizant of events than most of the cast, while I never got the sense that Apollo cares to win his case. He’s so slow that people like his rival prosecutor Klavier Gavin and even his sidekick Trucy Wright have to spell out the logical context of the events for him. Those would’ve make Apollo Justice far less interesting than Phoenix, but to add insult to the injury, it has never been made clear why he became a lawyer in the first place. He has one thing going for him though, which is that he has a special ability to detect suspicious body movements; unfortunately he could only do that when witnesses are testifying in courtroom, making that feature under-utilized. What his motivation is for taking up his profession, no one knows, and after playing as him in one game I’m not sure I care to know anymore. He’s like what happens sometimes when I meet an acquaintance and in our brief interaction, I can’t say I know everything about him/her, but know enough to decide that I’m not interested in learning more about him/her.

Has Capcom learned nothing from Raiden of Metal Gear Solid 2? You don’t replace a popular lead with another guy who’s exactly like him and expect this to go over well with fans. Devil May Cry 4 is another game where Capcom has done this (and released on the same year, to boot!). What’s odd is that Capcom has effectively replaced the lead of one of its franchises before. While no one is ever going to mistake Megaman as a series known for quality storytelling, the way it made us accept Zero should’ve become a model of how to change leads. First let the audiences warm up to the new guy, such that by the time he takes over they’ll embrace him like they did in Megaman Zero.

Apollo Justice, though, isn’t the only guy holding the whole game back from achieving the wacked-out greatness of the previous titles. All the main characters pale in comparison to their PW’s counterparts. The sidekick, Trucy Wright, is exactly like Maya or young Ema Skye (from PW1’s case 5) except that she is a magician-in-training (as in, a prestidigitator) instead of spirit-medium or forensics scientist. The grown-up Ema Skye is not the lovable oaf that Dick Gumshoe was but rather a detective with so much attitude you’d think she was perpetually PMS-ing, making most of your interactions with her thoroughly unpleasant (she keeps throwing snack bits at you).

But, by far, the biggest wastes of great storytelling opportunity are the Gavin brothers - defense attorney Kristoph and prosecutor Klavier. Kristoph is Apollo’s mentor, who turned out to be the true culprit of the first case (and tried to frame Phoenix for it). Later it is shown that his heart is full of darkness, hiding secrets so wicked that not even Phoenix’s truth-seeking gem (Magatama) could unlock them. I don’t know why he turned this evil, and if you presumed that his outlook has any relation to his younger brother Klavier you’ll be dead wrong. Nothing about Gavin’s brotherhood mattered – I wouldn’t know they’re brothers if they didn’t share the same surname and hairdo. Consequently, Kristoph is an interesting character who ultimately lacks depth because of writer’s neglect.

Klavier infuriated me the most. Here is a new prosecutor designed with every pop star appeal that women squee over – he’s good looking, he’s part of a rock band, he has swagger. He’s clinically made to rock, and yet he failed big time at that. Unlike most prosecutors Phoenix encounters, who stake their reputation to defeat Phoenix, Klavier couldn’t care less that he loses cases as long as he’s on the right. The whole “white knight fighting for justice routine” that made Superman and Captain America iconic yet boring, except that Klavier is not iconic because he looks like a rejected design of Devil May Cry’s Dante – who’d definitely be a better prosecutor than Klavier. Am I against a story having a goody-two-shoesy guy? No, but that guy needs to resemble a flesh and blood human being rather than a cardboard cut-out placeholder of justice. His non-reaction from seeing his brother (in cases 1 and 4) and his band-mate, who also happens to be his best friend (case 3), getting convicted of murder is so inhumanly and emotionless, Rick Deckard from Blade Runner should’ve suspected him of being a Replicant.

By the time I finish the game (which didn’t take long) my indifference to the game’s story bothered me enough that I started a minor discussion over at some forum saying I wasn’t feeling any of the game’s characters. One guy told me that AJ’s brilliance is that if one would sit back and think about it one would observe that all its key characters deliberately reversed the roles of their counterparts in PW. The mentor is evil unlike PW’s Mia. The sidekick can take care of herself unlike PW’s Maya. The prosecutor is nice and isn’t antagonistic like Miles Edgeworth. The detective, unlike Dick Gumshoe, is smart yet hates her job. Cool if you’ve noticed all that, and I would agree, but I’m not exactly asking for role reversal. All I wanted was fresh story, and genuinely engaging characters. Besides, in the process of reversing everything about what made PW’s characters likable, you get aloofness as opposed to passionate, and you get boring instead of engaging. No one in AJ is developed well, and they don’t seem to care that you don’t know them either. So why should I bother?

I didn’t want nor expect AJ to leave aside Phoenix from the story, but boy does it feel like everyone else is a bit player to his personal drama. Apollo, Trucy, Ema and Klavier pretty much are fencesitters throughout the game, observing their clients and Phoenix’s lives with nary a care. What’s most damning is AJ’s very own Phoenix Wright, an unrecognizably aloof, lazy-eyed, indifferent, overbearing hobo figure, a ghost of the awkward excitable guy everyone loved in PW1-3. The game goes at great length to explain why he’s changed. In case 4, he is revealed to have inadvertently submitted fake evidence on court, where he got penalized by a ban from practicing law. I don’t buy this, and here’s why:

1.) In PW1-3, Phoenix wouldn’t take this sitting down; here there’s no desperate plea to set his record straight.

2.) AJ betrays its world’s logic because there has never been an issue with Edgeworth and both of von Karmas when they submitted fake evidences.

3.) The many lives Phoenix saved and the reputations of the court of justice he helped preserved, and he gets severely punished for the one folly he did not intentionally do?

By case 4, we’re presented a supercomputer by which all the remaining events of the game – the courtroom and the investigation – will be viewed, while Phoenix Wright travel back and forth from 7 years ago to present, unraveling the mystery that led to his loss of lawyer stint. The game screws up logic square in the face, requiring that you present evidences you acquire in the future to people of the past. Then once the game is near completion, the game flat out asks you if you would like to see the good or the bad ending (and since the credits don’t roll in the bad one, everyone can be secure in the knowledge that this won’t be the canonical end). Sci fi and AA blend about as clumsily as a plumber critiquing the art exhibit of Salvador Dali, but if anyone has to do the time traveling, the writers have to do it. Please go back to the drawing board and may I have your attention: will the real Ace Attorney please stand up?

Sick Man

I don’t know if there’s a good time to be sick. Mildly sick, maybe, like when you can get your body temp somewhat high that you’d convince your boss that you need to stay home and rest, when all you wanted to do was to read or play books or videogames you just got your hands on.

On the opposite, I haven’t thought up a list of worst times to be sick, but if I were to do that, “while traveling” would rank high up. In my past 6 days I was spending every waking hour loathing that fact, suffering through my fever as I traveled Taiwan’s locales.

I usually deal with my sickness by resting and fasting. This fever I contracted on Taiwan, though, came when it’s not convenient for me to be lying on a bed all day, covered in blanket and taking drowse-inducing pills. I spent my days there busy, and even as my condition wore me out I had to stay awake, doing my job. I needed a fast cure, even one that might not be the best cure. I did not know how to do this, so I consulted from an assortment of people – relatives, people who handed out those brown Chinese medicines with weird bitter tastes, acupuncture therapists, and doctors who prescribe western medicines.

When it comes health advices, I find myself surprised that there’s rarely a consensus. In my six days recovering from a fever, I’ve heard one guy tell me that I should not eat because fasting is a way for the human body to clean up, but then another guy would say that, in spite of the lack of appetite, I should eat lest I don’t take in any nutrients that would cure the disease. One would tell me to not take a bath, another would say it’s ok to take a bath – and with the weather reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s hard to not resist a shower now and then. The only thing that people agreed on was that I needed to get some sleep, but then even the condition of sleeping was subjected to debate, like if it’s ok that I sleep on an air-conditioned room or should I sweat it out in the absence fans and air-cons.

In six days, my back was all red because of Gua Sha (a Chinese back scraping treatment), I’ve spent 30 minutes with needles punctured on both my hands, I’ve gone to “nasal treatment center” (that rose in popularity because of SARS and H1N1) where my throat and nose were dabbed with weird concoction sticking on a cotton swab, and I got some neck twisting massage that was so rough that I’m surprised my breath still hasn’t left me. And then, finally, I went with eating pills, which let drowsiness hit me as fast as a train traveling at bullet speed would kill me. I don’t know which of them were most effective, but although my fever has gone away, I still have persistent cough bugging me.

My days in Taiwan, all spent in illness. I don’t think I have much travel insights for this time around. There was something I wanted to say in this post, but some time in the writing, I forgot what it is.

Kung Fu Dunk Live Tweet Experience

I’m tempted to watch Jay Chou’s Kung Fu Dunk just to see if it’s as ridiculous (in a good way) as the title suggests

Also, Jay Chou and I have the same surname. You’ve just read a fact that you could not give a rat’s ass about. Thanks for reading.

I’m gonna live tweet Jay Chou’s Kung Fu Dunk. At the first 5 mins now and it already has 3 jokes that fell

Ooh slow mo already? It took Shaolin Soccer half an hour into the movie to use that gimmick. MORE IS MORE!

Stephen Chow’s character in Shaolin Soccer didn’t have to rely on some wish fulfillment scenarios, but Jay Chou has to?

I mean what the hell, every girl in Taiwan thinks Jay Chou is a stud, yet I’m supposed to be convinced that he’s a dweeb in this movie?

[the_nutbox responds: My name is J too but nobody thinks Im a stud. The world is so unfair! ]

I’m pretty sure no master in history has ever died from practicing kung fu stances in the snow.

Jay Chou’s acting is horrible. Like, there’s no heft in his enunciation, in a language that often sounds animated.

Oh so we’re supposed to think that a guy who can shoot coins straight into the mouth of a man is a basketball genius?

Btw just a disclaimer, my tweets for the next few minutes will contain major spoilers for Kung Fu Dunk

So look away if you’re someone who gets bothered by somebody spoiling a sports movie.

This is the kind of annoying strawberry generation pandering movie where the young people always have greater abilities than the elders.

Look, shooting bullseyes on dartboards doesn’t make one a better baller! Why not just call the movie “kung fu shooter”?

maybe nba teams should take cues from this movie and draft players by going to those shoddy bars with dart games in it

first fight scene kinda decent even if it looks like a gentrified suburban kid trying to flail his foot around

btw Stephen Chow’s surname is also the same as mine! Yet another fact no one cares about.

you know a movie is not doing it for you when its protagonist get beaten up, dramatic music plays, and your reaction is tweet about surnames

So Jay Chou guy gets to learn to play basketball by watching a powerpoint slideshow about its rules? THAT’S HOW JORDAN LEARNED TO PLAY TOO!

why do these movies make it so obvious who’s going to be the love interest by playing some romantic piano music when the girl first show?

Jay Chou is so stone faced, like Richard Gutierrez but Chinese. In Taiwanese I would call him “Jiu Tao Bin”. In Tagalog “Batong mukha”.

“Whoever gets the rebounds wins the game” yeah good job stealing lines from Slam Dunk, which is infinitely better than this trainwreck

Jay Chou can consistently shoot 3s from half court despite having never played before and having only practiced by shooting cans on bins.

Another plot stolen from Slam Dunk: the love interest being the younger sister of the team captain. Wow.

The dribblings from the obvious pop stars are so bad they would be called traveling, except when Lebron does it.

Why the hell does a jumpshot need a slowmo?

I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to drink wine while on bench. Hmm lemme ask ron artest to confirm this!

What the hell, the gym this team practices on look like those halls from taiwan’s famed computer expo. Maybe even its world trade center!

(looks at wikipedia and learns that it’s actually Shanghai’s Science Museum. Scrimmage in a science museum?!)

THIS IS SUBURBAN BASKETBALL, NOT THE REAL BASKETBALL WHERE PEOPLE FROM THE POOR HAVE TO TOUGH IT OUT

No joke, people in this movie can jump higher than those players from NBA Jam

A ball arching downward getting blocked was not called for goal tending and then it magically catapulted to the other hoop and went in.

The only comedic moment that managed to illicit a response from me came from a player making fun of Jay Chou’s gentrified upbringing.

First dunk Jay Chou does in game is a 3 point line dunk WHAT IN THE WORLD IS THIS!

the acting in this movie is so bad there are more awkward silences in it than there are dialogues

What the, there’s a team who wears american gladiators-like costume as basketbball jersey!

wow the opposing team flying kicked a baller and did not get called foul

i’m pretty sure you’re not permitted to wear metallic shoulder blades in a ball game

between the leg reverse layup ???

so the match is cancelled because the power was cut off, and will be resumed in 3 days. The score? 50 against 4. riiight.

how come everybody who’s into “illegal business” in this movie speaks cantonese? hk stereotype much?

another chinese movie trope: camera panning around the female actress when she’s crying

KFD’s idea for a pickup line: “i’ve always wanted to eat ice cream since i was a kid, but never had the chance. you’re like that ice cream”

ok i’ve stopped being entertained by how bad this movie is. it needs to end post haste.

what in the world, now some Qi bao wearing group shows up in a basketball game and plays?!

i’ve witness like 10 whole court pass alley oops already

some kung fu guy blocks a shot by sticking his body on the board!

why is no one in the movie indignant over how poorly officiated the game is?!

it makes home court games in Cleveland Cavaliers look like professional, balanced officiating!

an all out kung fu brawl in the court but no one in the audience was terrified for what happened. Malice in the Palace taught nothing

KFD is trying so hard to be Shaolin Soccer and even Kung Fu Hustle, and fails tremendously at either.

i give up. not watching this any longer.

(hours later)

So I’m gonna finish this crappy piece of crap movie “Kung Fu Dunk”. Live tweeting the remaining 10 minutes.

What an awful looking dunk. Toss the ball up while you’re at the peak of the jump, then catch it while you’re stationary airborne

WHY IS IT THAT THE MUSIC THAT PLAYS ON THAT BASKETBALL GAME HAS A GUY SINGING “TOFU TOFU TOFU”. HOW IS TOFU RELATED TO BASKETBALL?!

OH I GET IT I GUESS THAT MEANS VEGETARIANS WILL LEARN TO BALL LIKE PRO. I GUESS I STAND A CHANCE AFTER ALL!

3 pt line between the leg posterizing dunk my God this is so ridiculous

And why isn’t any one of these ballers sweating at all?!

OK so in final possession is the only time any players started working a sweat? In the last 2 sec?

Block the ball by punching it up below the hoop, and no one protests. Wow.

Step aside Christopher Reeves’ Superman, Jay Chou can reverse time by using kung fu moves, so that he can do the last possession again.

I mean sure, what Shaolin Soccer was missing was some sci fi time travel plot, right? THAT MAKES KUNG FU DUNK SO MUCH BETTER.

(Batrock responds: I didn’t much like Shaolin Soccer, myself. )

@Batrock I don’t either, but it’s “Hoop Dreams” in comparison to Kung Fu Dunk.

Time travel meant background became full of clouds & assorted objects like airplanes and evil faces. You got nothing on this 2001 Space Odd!

Next in Kung Fu Dunk 2: Jay Chou learns to use the fifth dimension and can tesser from hoops to hoops at will.

Not an ounce of this movie is genuine. It’s so crass and calculated and pandering.

Whole crowd cheered for the “villain team” when they won in d alt timeline, & did d same when d hero team won. Whose home is this anyway!

What the hell is with this abandoned son reunites with his guilt ridden rich dad scene? It’s so sappy and pointlessly sentimental

His mentor gets cast aside coz “real dad who abandoned you in bball court” loves you more than “wine expert involved in shady dealings”.

But then of course they get some teary reunion because Jay Chou eventually realizes who has been there for him all along.

You know people can’t tell if a scene is supposed to be sad or not unless you play violin in the background, of course.

Why is the theme song of this movie “please wear some qibao or else I’ll eat your tofu”? Isn’t “eat tofu” chinese slang for “eating skin”?

Charlene Choi in KFD looks uncomfortably close to one girl I dated and parted with much bitterness.

What is the point of stealing Slam Dunk’s “whoever gets the rebound wins the game” when the people in KFD don’t rebound, like, ever?

KFD is terrible and those who want to see it because it’s a Jay Chou’s product are better off diving into his mansion’s sewage.

Robo Bunny

There are a few constants in life that never cease miffing me, and I’m gonna mention one now. It’s spammers. My blog here used to have moderate exposure, because I was consistently posting back then. Oftentimes I would get comments that responded to my posts. Sure, I have only myself to blame for not writing as actively as I used to, but dang these spammers just won’t stop posting garbage everywhere, and I’m not going to tolerate them anymore.

So I’m going to permanently delete my shoutbox.

Anyway, I’m still in the process of finishing my Ace Attorney blog posts. I’m still trying to be energized about the whole business of blogging again, because as it happens I’ve fallen to the wayside for too long that it’s hard to find the main road again.

By the way, here’s my latest digital art creation:

Final Fantasy 13 Posts Index

Just to put the table of contents on top again.

Intro

1st Failure: 25 Hours of Linearity

2nd Failure: Unintuitive Open World

3rd Failure: Mortally Repetitive Combat

4th Failure: Eidolons, Agents of Uselessness

5th Failure: Pointless Crystarium

6th Failure: Confusing Equipment Upgrade System

7th Failure: Terrible Storytelling

8th Failure: Dialogues

9th Failure: Characters (MAJOR SPOILERS)

10th Failure: Villains (MAJOR SPOILERS)

11th Failure: Lightning (MAJOR SPOILERS)

12th Failure: Poor Design Choices

13th Failure: Repetitive Theme (MAJOR SPOILERS)

The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 13): Repetitive Theme

(spoiler town)

(more…)

The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 12): Poor Design Choices

Possibly the biggest recurring rebuttal that I could get for all my gripes about FF13 is what I’d call the “big picture” rebuttal. It happens when people say I can’t appreciate the beauty of the product as a whole because I concentrate on picking apart its finest details. After all, I should, as they say, acknowledge FF13 for the thought that has gone behind its designs, its sceneries, and its wondrous spectacle. I should like its “big picture”

To which, I respond: No. I don’t like FF13’s designs. I think they could use a lot of work.

Sure, if you’re talking about the abuse it must’ve given the graphics processor, I will acknowledge that the amount of graphical details rendered in FF13 has yet to be surpassed by other games. When considering that its characters wear elaborate accessories, it’s mighty impressive that neither the accessories nor the hair clip through themselves or other objects. Other games have struggled, mostly failed, in rendering 3d objects that don’t clip with each other. I praise FF13’s graphical department for this feat.

As for the design, now that I will pick on. I found that all the sights, the sceneries in FF13 as nothing more than glorified recycles of the earlier games. Sure, I think there’s a target audience who will be thrilled to see some locales from earlier FF games rendered in full-3d, but I’m more of the camp who, whenever he/she plays an FF, expects that it would be unique, with different feel from its predecessors. Not so with FF13, no. Specifically, its many futuristic interiors, forests, and cities felt like cutouts from FF10 but with brighter lights and greater details. With the exception of Gran Pulse, which, really, was but one great field of plains, none of the locations left a mark to my memory. So I guess a plain is what I would associate FF13 with. Not impressive. I had a steampunk city of Narshe for FF6, a cyberpunk junkyard-town of Midgard for FF7, a moving school of Balamb Garden for FF8, a seaside town of Besaid for FF10, and a sprawling medieval marketplace of Rabanastre for FF12.

Even the characters designs felt uninspired. I hinted at this when I talked about Eidolons, but Square Enix’s characters’ fashion styles have become one of my favorite stuff to ridicule because they, like Rob Liefield’s characters’, reveal weird fetishes. Since FF7, at least one character in a Final Fantasy or other SE game, notably Kingdom Hearts and The World Ends With You, wears superfluous belts, zippers, and pouches, and is asymmetrically accessorized. It looks jarring. Not just that, some of the characters in FF13 reuses previous designs. For instance, Hope…

looks like Vaan (FF12).

Lightning and Princess Ashe (FF12) share the same color scheme.

Snow…

looks nearly identical to Seifer’s Kingdom Hearts’ incarnation.

They also are one-dimensional, overused anime archetypes: Hope is emo, Snow is heroic, Lightning hates people, Vanille is hyper, Fang is the strong female, Yaag is ruthless and has a name that sounds like a yell (YAAAAAAG!!!!), Jihl is sadistic, Dysley is the evil pope. They lack identity in how they look and in how they’re written.

I hate saying this because I would come off as a writer who knows better and could do better (when I probably couldn’t), but if there’s one thing I learned about reading various books and instructive writing guides, it’s that if you’re crafting a fantasy world, you’re going to have to make the world come out as alive as you can. Meaning that people can get immersed into it. I realize that “immersion” is a loaded word warranting further, more academic scrutiny, but all I could give you is, I hope, a primer, and why I think FF13 fails in immersion.

First I’ll talk about how FF13’s world-building runs counter to the qualities that would make an involved world. FF13 has all these locations that the player will have trouble connecting. Some people would think that this problem stems from the game’s lack of world map, and that makes sense, but I think that even without a map you could somehow comprehend its world’s scope if you could get a feel of how each areas are related. FF13 fails here, because it constantly whisks your party members from one location to another without giving you a sense of which direction they’re going. Is it north, east, south or west? Who knows. Yes, those cutscenes with planes and various assortments of vehicles may impress as technical showcases, but they’re done at the expense of obscuring how a forest connects with the base you’ve left, how this city connects to that tower, how far the mountain is from the airborne base, and how the world below and above can come into contact. I’ll repeat the last one: the central plot of FF13 has to do with the above and the below world, yet it’s too much to ask to know how they connect.

Much has been made about FF13’s lack of towns, it being the hater’s greatest knock on FF13’s failure as an RPG. While I don’t necessarily think that towns are a requirement for an RPG, I believe that they help give significance to its main crisis. A good 90% of videogame’s stories (and RPG’s specifically) are about saving their world, and I hate to put this bluntly, but I really don’t have the time and the desire to save every fantasy world. A game has to make me feel something about its world — and for that to happen, I have to feel something about its people. I have to feel that it matters for its people to be free of all sufferings.

A game with good towns accomplishes this. For example, Fallout 3’s Big Town. Now, Big Town is an optional area, and you may finish Fallout 3 ignoring it altogether. Yet, when I visited and heard about flesh-eating orcs (or mutants, as they are called) coming here to abduct its residents, I was impelled to go the trouble of rescuing all of them by going into the mutants’ hideout. I returned to Big Town having rescued the abducted, and stayed behind so that I could help defend its residents against another mutant attack, sending mutants message that no, we’re not taking your abuse anymore. After I succeeded routing the mutants in Big Town, all of its residents cheered me on, thanking me for all the help that I’ve brought them. By then, I got a rush, a joy I rarely felt elsewhere, because of a sense that what I did actually mattered.

By keeping the towns and their interaction at bare minimum, FF13 gave me none of the satisfaction to care about its world. I don’t – I can’t – get involved with anyone populating it, even in the barest minimum way. Support casts, those not part of my group, come and go within a matter of 2 minutes, without appearing again. Even if I get to see people partying and watching light shows in cutscenes, when I’m playing, its world might as well have been an unpopulated dystopia. If someone nukes its whole world down I would’ve felt nothing, no remorse because I don’t have anyone to mourn for! Not for the kid who gives me pies, not for the drama club schoolgirl who has feelings for me, not for the granny who gives me foods for thought, not for the shady merchant who welcomes me out loud whenever we do business, nobody. Since no one mattered to me, why should I be compelled to crush its enemies, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentation of their women? Why should I care to defeat its evil rulers who intend to annihilate its world?

Sure, I get that some people are annoyed by the quests that come with towns. But you know what? So long as they’re optional, are enjoyable, and don’t require insane amount of time commitment, I don’t mind. Besides, don’t we all play RPGs to earn rare items? If performing these chores would reward me a legendary weapon like a lolcat-slayer-DX, I’m all for it.

In terms of story, the game often looks like it’s going out of its way to be as anti-immersive as possible. For instance, the gobbledygook. When you’re talking about a fantasy story with lots and lots of fantasy proper nouns, you’re going to have to warm the readers up about what these nouns mean to ensure that you’re not losing the readers. Which isn’t what FF13 did. What FF13 did is start off with characters talking to each other knowing full well what’s going on, but not cluing us in because we’re nothing but ignoramus viewers – so screw us! Go read the bloody datalog and if it bores us we only have ourselves to blame! And when the dialogues aren’t confusing, they’re hilariously hokey. How can anyone possibly take a drama seriously when its people say “moms are tough” twice before dying?

(The wikiquote entry of FF13 is somehow longer than The Godfather, Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars combined. I don’t know if that’s a sick joke, but at least I can always refer to it whenever I’m feeling down and need to “revel” on gems like “We live to make the impossible possible.” Or “When prayers turn into promises, not even fate can stand in their way.” Or “Here comes the Hero!”)

It’s not even for a fact that FF13’s terminologies couldn’t have been made more comprehensible had they made certain design choices. Since Fang rose to the upper world by her lonesome, she would’ve spent time understanding what’s the deal with all the l’Cie and fal’Cie. Wouldn’t it have been better for FF13 to tell its story in Fang’s POV, instead of Lightning’s? Someone care to tell me what Lightning’s worth is again?

Finally, we come to player’s output. When I play a game, I just want to feel like I am of any import to its world. In the modern era of gaming, we’ve reached a point where the illusions of choice are seeming less like illusions. Game like Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect, and Fallout 3 oblige the players to make some tough decisions, which would affect the course of the game. Even the older games that we’d consider “retro” now allow more freedom than FF13. FF7 permits you to date various party member when you visit Golden Saucer. In Chrono Trigger you can fight Lavos anytime and get different endings from it. Can you do anything in FF13 that would alter its course even in the slightest? Well, the greatest variation of your experience from others is if you see the poorly-animated optional cutscenes from Gran Pulse, which are nothing but fillers, like most “deleted scenes” from DVDs/Blu-Rays. That aside, everyone playing FF13 gets the same story, follows the same linear path, and does the same three things over and over again: to fight, walk, watch cutscene. Fight, walk, watch cutscene. Fight, walk, watch cutscene. You can’t even interact with the objects rendered by this game with its supposedly jaw-dropping visuals. All the columns, the forests and the faunas here, the cars and the statues there? Meaningless window dressings.

So there you have it, the elite RPG company that is Square Enix spending millions of dollars on a game that is so counterintuitive to everything an RPG offers. The gameplay is broken, the story is silly, the world-building is ignored in favor of all its overcompensating, yet pointless, visuals. Messed up priorities if you ask me.

The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 11): Lightning

(Yep, spoiler central again)

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The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 10): Villains

(includes major spoilers)

(more…)

The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 9): Characters

(with major spoilers)

(more…)

The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 8): Dialogues

“Moms are tough.”

“We live to make the impossible possible.”

“When prayers turn into promises, not even fate can stand in their way.”

Need I say more? In FF13’s dialogue, you’re either sifting through confusing made-up words, or enduring hokey dialogues. Sometimes, both; Sazh said, “Cie food”.

The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 7): Terrible Storytelling

I’m getting something out of the way now: FF13’s story should be judged as a movie. I know some people might carp about my comparing FF13 to movies because “games are not movies!”, but let’s stop pretending that FF13 isn’t a movie. Tell me, do you interact with anything in FF13 that would alter its plot? When talking about a narrative that takes advantages of the medium of videogames, it’d have to involve some player choices, no matter how small. At the very least it shouldn’t be excluding you from its adventures. If you can put down your controller while watching the cutscenes, you effectively are watching a movie, in the same way that the outcome of Blu-Ray movies like The Godfather won’t be affected by the remote. FF13 would be a BD-ROM where the movie gets interrupted so that you could walk in one direction and fight monsters, and then it resumes. Pause, attack, play. Repeat this a few thousand times and you get the whole product.

See? It’s a movie!

Besides, director Kitase wants you to think of FF13 as a movie:

“Yes, Western RPGs are more about freedom. But Final Fantasy is a different sort of game. It is much more akin to watching a movie, where you appreciate the world and are immersed deeply in the story. You get to experience dramatic moments and big events. In that sense, the concept of FFXIII is much more like a first person shooter such as Call of Duty.”

Isn’t it fair that we judge the game based on the vision of its artist? So FF13 = movie. And, really, I don’t mind a videogame that tries to be films if it has a gripping plot.

I’d like to think of myself as open-minded. Meaning, whenever anyone expresses an opinion I don’t agree with, I would always be able to understand them and could come to terms with our differences. Yet, Final Fantasy 13 betrays my romanticized view of myself. I have read pretty much heard what every camp has to say about FF13, and there is one praise of it that I cannot tolerate, which is that it has a good plot. No, please, FF13’s plot is indisputably bad — I don’t care if you start all this “all opinions are subjective” debate. Sure, why not. Not all opinions are created equal too. Some are plain stupid. Like the opinion that FF13 has great narrative.

And now, a surprise: I loved every minute of its story. Yep. I said it. Compared to the combat that I found insufferably repetitive, story is what I most enjoyed in FF13. I don’t consider it a delightfully campy, so-bad-it’s-good variety of entertainment in the same veins as Commando (which they are inexplicably remaking as a serious action movie). It’s not; FF13 is more of a self-indulgent passing-itself-as-high-art spectacular failure. That, right there, is why I love it. As a struggling writer, I can’t find a better guide on how not to tell a story, thus I thank Square Enix for spending millions on this delightfully vexing tale. You could not find a company with a nobler goal, which is why I hereby forgive them for suing the Chrono Resurrection fan project. Pft. What do Chrono fanboys know; by devolving Square’s storytelling quality, FF13 is the true progressive!

Regressive! 

Here’s how the game is set up. You have this shiny luxurious hermetic spherical little world above, and you have this vast plains world below. Both have ruling godlike entities; they can brand a person into fulfilling missions – fail and you become a zombie, succeed and you turn to a crystal. Entities from above do not like those from below, so they tell the populace that their world is constantly at war with the sinister world from down low, and anyone who comes in contact with below are exterminated by militaristic forces. A girl named Serah, from the village Bodhum, has recently come into contact with an entity from below, which propelled the military to start an extermination operation for Bodhum. Serah surrendered to the military to save Bodhum, but this led resistance fighter Snow and the ex-soldier Lightning into infiltrating military bases, where they find her turned into a crystal.

I managed to make that paragraph as direct as possible; directness not being a quality that you can appreciate when you’re playing FF13, with its in media res pomp confusing the viewers into curiosity. But, of course, that has always been how Final Fantasy games begin. Where the rest differ is that they feed you the info required to appreciate their settings — and by setting I mean not just the environment, but the facts and circumstances surrounding them. FF13 hides all those info beneath mounds and mounds of texts, in an in-game encyclopedia called “datalog”. You will have to read the datalog time and again if you want to know the history, politics, and religions of FF13’s world. You will have to peruse the datalog to know the supporting casts’ backstories. You will have to consult the datalog to get a faint sense of what the hell FF13 jargon means.

By burying myriad plot details in datalog entries that you are expected to read, FF13 fails as a movie. Can you imagine an actual film doing what FF13 did? You go into a theater, and then a warning tells you: The Little Mermaid has a complicated story. Here, take this Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales. Read this while Ariel sings! No movie should present its story by obliging tedious researches. Gee, it’s a visual medium! Isn’t the adage “show, don’t tell” so old it has grown a long white beard, yet still relevant and true that it’s engraved “subliminally” into backmasked recordings? (Try playing Stairway to Heaven backwards and you’ll hear someone say “Dial 666 for showing and not telling mwahahahahaha”.) A datalog should only be used for supplemental info (like what’s done in Dragon Age: Origins or Mass Effect), and not be a requirement to somewhat comprehend the tale!

Yes, somewhat, because Heaven helps you wrap your head around FF13’s dialogues. Boy are they littered with needlessly dumbfounding jargon! FF13 writers got the wrongheaded idea that if you want your story to be deep, you have to fillet it with techno gibberish. A normal dialogue exchange in FF13 has an unhealthy dose of fantasy proper nouns like Cocoon, Purge, Pulse, fal’Cie, l’Cie, Cie’th, Focus, Eden, Orphan, etc. (Orphan being the name of FF13’s world. Who on earth names a world Orphan? What’s it abandoned by, the sun and the moon?) To understand just how confusing this is, I will rewrite the settings paragraph from before as though running on a babelfish from English to FF13’s ‘Cienglish:

“In Orphan, there’s Cocoon, and Pulse. Both have fal’Cie; fal’Cie can turn a person into l’Cie and an l’Cie has a Focus – fail and it becomes a Cie’th, succeed and it turns to a crystal. Eden dislikes Pulse, telling Cocoon that they’re at war with Pulse, and anyone who comes in contact with Pulse l’Cie will go through Purge. A girl named Serah, from Bodhum, has recently become a Pulse l’Cie, which propelled Sanctum to start a Purge in Bodhum. Serah surrendered to PSICOM to save Bodhum, but this led Snow, of Operation Nora, and Lightning, an ex-soldier of PSICOM, into infiltrating PSICOM bases, where they find Serah turned into a crystal.”

I spent 50 hours playing the game, yet had never grown accustomed to hearing those gibbers. When a story is populated by people whose dialogues are exercises in code breaking, you know it will have a difficulty in getting an audience immersed in its world.

The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 6): Confusing Equipment Upgrade System

For the most part, FF13 does a good job instructing the player various bits of its gameplay, but then it gets lazy about equipments. Here’s the gist: you can upgrade every weapons and accessories by using components in them. Depending on the components used, you’d get varios exp points, and when they reach set numbers, they level up the weapon/accessories. For weapons, it means they can deal more attack and magic damages, and for accessories… I don’t know what.

Final Fantasy 13 for the DS! the top pic shows the machine where you do the upgrades. the bottom pic is the upgrade menu

I hope you didn’t sell off those components early into the game because of the way they clutter in your menus and because you were short on gils (FF’s grueling-to-earn currency). The components can be counterintuitive and you’ll wonder what they have to do with anything. Realistically, why would oozes and fiber optic cables and kitchen sinks enhance your weapon? The game doesn’t say and they just do, so shut up and play look at the HD graphics we spent millions on these guys! Each component adds varying points and some will add multipliers so that the next component’s points double or triple. But the game does an extremely terrible job instructing you which of them multiply, and how many you have to use to multiply - and yes I know this sounds confusing, but that’s exactly how this works. Sometimes, you might toss component that raises a very insignificant number you wonder why you bothered, and then you learn later that they could’ve and should’ve been sold for thousands of gils instead of disposed for upgrades. Then you hate yourself and contemplate starting the game all over again. Then you remember the 25 hour needed for the game to get good, and you flare up and write some emo entries on a site with the letters F, M, and L.

These will make your swords better. Especially the Christmas lights.

When your equipment reaches its maximum level, you can make it “evolve” by using a specific transformative component. Does the game tell you which component you need to evolve your equipment? No. Is it easy to get transformative component? No. Can you buy them? Yes, but they’re prohibitively expensive, and good luck earning gils in this game, to buy a component that might turn your sword into a bigger sword — but wait it might not so you either have to buy another prohibitively expensive component or reset your game and sit through loading screens. Wee.

Of course, all these confusions are meant to lure you into purchasing a guidebook, which is an absolutely reasonable $20 in case you don’t think you’ve spent enough ($60) on this snoozefest of an RPG.

so worth it!

The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 5): Pointless Crystarium

FF13’s crystarium is by far the stupidest most time-consuming waste of man-hours ever constructed by Square Enix. The name sounds stupid too. You see this elaborate but linear 3d nodes and lines and you ask, “Why can’t Square Enix either make it two-dimensional so that it won’t be so confusing to navigate, or ditch it completely and stick to the traditional way of leveling up?”

In their podcast, Pitchfork and Spydakween speculated that the crystarium must’ve taken thousands of dollars to make. For what is essentially a linear skill-learning and stats-increasing system. You collect CPs from battles, then you use them to improve your characters by going to the crystarium and holding a button and a direction for 5 seconds per node. This is the extent of a minigame FF13 has, and it’s pure drudgery.

And, I know, some people are going to stop me right there and defend crystarium by saying, “But it allows you to choose how you want to build your character.” Yes, it does, but in a simplified and contrived manner. In most chapters, you can max out your main classes’ crystarium easily with all the CPs that you get. Even if side classes open up eventually, why would anyone spend points getting a commando-saboteur-sentinel character to be a medic when the skills cost more than if you’ve simply focused on his/her main skills? When - for what amounts to minimal stat increase and low-tier ability others have learned 10 hours ago - they aren’t rewarding?

If SE insists on using crystarium, couldn’t they at least have made it so that all you need to do is go to a node, press a button and PING! you learn skill or raise stat? Why should I be forced to wait for a gauge to fill up? Why waste so much time? You spend so much dead hours in this menu and it’s about as much fun as pumping gasoline in your car.

Shouldn’t Square Enix have spent the time and money they used for crystarium for better features? Such as, I dunno, towns?