Europa Universalis IV: Becoming Leviathan

Posted on by Henry

Leviathan_by_Thomas_Hobbes
Out of many, one.

I wrote a love letter to Crusader Kings 2’s intricate dynastic backstabbing a while ago, and I thought I should let you know about the game’s semi-sequel Europa Universalis 4.  I’ll even toss in a few tidbits about the myriad DLC available for both titles at no additional charge.

First, a brief introduction: Crusader Kings 2 is strategy-as-individual, a fascinating look at the intimately personal nature of politics and power, spanning the years from 1066 CE (867 CE with Old Gods DLC) to 1453 CE.  Europa Universalis 4 follows this with a shift from the myopically personal to the strictly national, covering the years 1444 CE to 1821 CE.  With both games and the appropriate DLC, it’s possible to convert a CK2 save game into an EU4 mod, letting you pick up the reins of your budding nation-state right where your Machiavellian ruler left them.

I loved CK2 from the start, even though it took a long time for me to feel like I could play the game without stumbling over my shoelaces.  Despite having an easier time learning how to play EU4, it took longer for me to really fall into it.  I think it was because the game is simply less personal.  It certainly wasn’t because of the interface, which has only improved.

In my first game of CK2, I was presented with a moderately ugly portrait of a lecherous Irish earl, told that that was me, and told that I really ought to get married.  I lived that earl’s life with gusto, trying (and failing) to better my position in the world, and I still have fond memories of him.  I identified with him, in much the same way that I have since identified with Queen Ximena and several other rulers of mine, and I felt connected.  EU4 simply doesn’t offer that experience, and at first I was dissatisfied.  I didn’t understand why I would want to play this grand strategy game without all the little people desperately trying to grease the wheels of power in order to ease their rise to the top.  I put aside the game and didn’t come back for a few weeks.

I’m still not sure what it was that pulled me back in, but I’m glad it did.  Despite looking so similar to CK2, EU4 is a very different game; it offers you the chance to shape a state as it transitions from the deeply personal politics of feudalism to the larger scale conflicts of colonialism, nationalism, and empire.  It gives you a chance to make Thomas Hobbes proud.

Continue reading →

SHIELD takes a turn for the better

Posted on by Henry

First things first: if you haven’t watched The Winter Soldier you should most definitely not watch any more Agents of SHIELD.  Captain America 2 is lots of fun to watch, and is way better than Agents of SHIELD.  It would be a shame to have the less entertaining one spoil the better one for you.

Second, despite how much I’m mentioning it this isn’t a review of Captain America 2.  I did love watching that movie though, and I’ll review it later and probably see it again in theaters.  You should go watch it, and keep in mind that all spoilers in this post will also effect your knowledge of that movie.

So then!  If you’ve been watching Agents of SHIELD you’re probably familiar with many of the problems of the show.  Even ignoring any complaints about the acting, one of the show’s big problems is that SHIELD agents (and especially our heroes) appear to be utterly incapable of acting in a clandestine fashion.  Nor are they very good at keeping secrets in a more general sense.  Their incompetency in the realm of secrecy is a running joke between me and my housemate.  And while I’ve been watching in the hopes that the show would improve and perhaps live up to the potential that I thought I saw at the beginning, it’s been stuck on maybe-not-quite-mediocre for a while now.  Every so often there are flashes of fun, little nuggets of something worthwhile jumbled into the dross, but they’re consistently buried.

This most recent episode helped change that.  Look below the break to learn more.

Continue reading →

Madoka: Tragically Magical Girls

Posted on by Henry

There’s so much that I want to tell you about this show, but telling you would be a disservice to you and to Puella Magi Madoka Magica.  This show deserves better than that; I might even go so far as to say that it deserves to be watched.  I’m not saying that it is the alpha and omega of anime (or even of magical girl anime), but it is exceptionally well made.  From the standpoint of appreciating artistic storytelling craft, this is a show that you will want to see.

The art itself is of variable quality.  Some episodes received more time and effort than others, in part because of the end of the show’s release schedule coinciding with the 2011 tsunami.  Background facial animation, for example, is minimal regardless of episode, while the last two episodes truly shine with the extra time that the studio took to release them after the tsunami.  But the anime’s visual design is just as fascinating and worth attention as the storyline itself.  The witches, foes of the show’s magical girls, are bizarre and appropriately unsettling, and each feature their own distinctive style of illustration.  More on that later.

However much I liked the studio’s fascinating art choices, my favorite part of Madoka still has to be the storyline.  I’ll try not to spoil you, so let me put it this way: if you want a happy show, you should pick something that doesn’t have schoolgirls struggling to shoulder the burden of protecting the world.  Sound interesting?

Continue reading →

Brotherhood of the Wolf and the Importance of Editing

Posted on by Henry

Monday night I introduced two of my friends to the oddly enjoyable mystery-adventure movie The Brotherhood of the Wolf.  At least, that’s what I thought would happen.  Instead, we suffered through an interminable introduction, nonsensical pacing, a piss-poor mystery plot that was never explained well enough to make the reveal make any sense, and some CGI that has aged a little harder than I remembered.  It was a train-wreck of a film, and I’m not sure who exactly signed off on releasing it.  I was at a complete loss and repeatedly apologized to my friends, because the movie that we watched was not the movie that I remembered seeing years ago.

It turns out that it wasn’t the same film at all.  Oh, the actors were all the same, and the footage was clearly all collected at the same time.  I doubt that the CGI aged any more gracefully in the version that I do remember, but at least the rest of the movie would still be there to back it up.  The problem, you see, was that we watched what we could only guess was the edit intended for UK theatrical release.  It was atrocious.

The version of the film that I first saw, and the one which I would recommend to my friends, is a lovely action-mystery-thriller which features slowly building tension surrounding a series of wild animal attacks, culminating in a wonderful set of reveals and some good old ass-kicking.  The protagonists gradually piece together that the mysterious beast responsible for the local deaths is no natural creature, and recognize that there are connections between the beast’s killings and a secret society which appears to be trying to supplant the King’s authority in the land.  The film is still a trifle weird, but it has pretty costumes, fun action scenes, and a rewarding reveal of a conspiracy plot.  It has inspired several of my own RPGs, and I would consider it decent background material for anyone looking for adventure ideas.

And thus we come around to the importance of editing.  I was already aware of how much influence editing can have on others’ impressions of your work, but I’d never seen such a painfully clear example of it with something which titillated in one form and disappointed in another.  The experience reminded me of Alison J. McKenzie’s good article on drafts, an intimately related topic, and to be honest I’m quite glad that I have chosen an art form in which the overhead costs for creating and prototyping new drafts are so low.  The costs and scheduling associated with film make it far less forgiving.

Unfortunately for the version of Brotherhood of the Wolf that I just watched, I can’t really bring myself to forgive it.  The experience that I wanted to share with my friends, the one that I thought I was sharing right up until the film started to diverge from my memories of it, was effectively ended by the bizarre editing choices that went into that version of the movie.  It was bad enough that I can’t really blame my friends for not wanting to find and watch the version that I remember.

I would still recommend Brotherhood of the Wolf to you for all of the same reasons that I wanted to show it to my friends, but be sure that you’re watching the more standard US release.  Otherwise, you may be sorely disappointed.

Kill la Kill: Fashion, Fascism, and a Heroine’s Shonen

Posted on by Henry

Kill la Kill is a bizarre combination of disparate elements.  It follows the genre expectations of Shonen manga, with semi-constant fighting, growing friendships, and that strange running theme of turning one’s previously defeated foes into new allies, but it replaces the normally male leads with female ones and does the same for many of the villains as well.  Despite this refreshing gender-reversal, the show still drips with male gaze and fan service; there are a few moments where the show mentions how ridiculous this is (as the protagonist rages against the stupidity of her outfit), but Kill la Kill still falls into the same visual patterns and doesn’t really change that paradigm.

Kill la Kill (careful, spoilers) excels at the absurd, as one might expect from the same creative directors who brought us Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, and offers a look at fascism and fashion.  Or maybe it’s fascism by means of fashion?  The story begins as one young woman’s quest to avenge her father’s murder, as she sets herself against the leader of Honnouji Academy, whom she suspects of having arranged his death.  This school is a fascist dictatorship in which power-augmenting school uniforms are used both as a reward and as a means of control.  Things only get weirder from there.  I think it’s quite enjoyable in the end, but you should probably read at least some of my mixed feelings below.

Continue reading →

Flash Fiction: Following “When Dawn Broke”

Posted on by Henry

No review for today, just me making more material in the setting I created with When Dawn Broke.  I haven’t done an exhaustive examination of what the bits and bobs I casually conjured up in that first piece would mean for a setting, so I’ve decided for now to continue to fly by the seat of my pants with this one.  Sorry, Stephanie.  Enjoy the short scene after the break.

Continue reading →

The Queen is Dead, Long Live the … Oops

Posted on by Henry

2013-11-21_00004

It wasn’t my fault, I swear.

I died because I didn’t know enough battlefield medicine.  It turns out that you’re not supposed to push an arrow through yourself when it’s stuck in your chest.

It wasn’t really my fault: I’d never been lonely enough to put lots of time into mastering the basics of medical care, and I’d spent all my time focusing on intrigue, learning who’s who, and figuring out what plots I might have to worry about in the weeks before my coronation as Queen of Nova.  After my disastrous showing at the grand ball, I’d tried to play catch-up with my long neglected social skills.  Somehow I never got around to learning what to do about arrow wounds.

I just didn’t think they’d be an issue, you know?  Or at least, not as big an issue as accidentally starting a rebellion by pissing off my nobles.  I’d already had one of them assassinated, and had only succeeded because of all the time I’d put into mastering my network of agents.  Next time, I’ll make a different mistake.  I’m sure of it.  Welcome to Long Live the Queen.

Continue reading →

Reserved For The Cat, by Mercedes Lackey

Posted on by Henry

Reserved for the Cat is another one of Mercedes Lackey‘s send ups of old fairy tales, still predictable and still entertaining.  It’s a fine retooling of Puss in Boots, but as with all of the other Elemental Masters stories you can’t expect too much in the way of surprises.  Well, that’s not quite true: it does diverge from the original story to offer the heroine a more decisive place in the final climax, but I’ve come to expect that from Lackey’s reworked fairy tales and can’t really count it as a surprise.

I doubt that Reserved for the Cat will win any particular awards, but if you’ve enjoyed the other entries in the series I expect that you’ll like this one too.  In fact, you’ll probably like it more than some of the others; unlike in Shadow of the Serpent, the heroine here actually has a chance to take care of her own problems.  And unlike the original Puss in Boots, the cat here creates nearly as much trouble as he solves and has to deal with the problems his own overconfidence has created.  I find that altogether more satisfying than the alternative.

My thoughts on the book’s high notes after the break.

Continue reading →

The Wizard of London, by Mercedes Lackey

Posted on by Henry

The Wizard of London is Mercedes Lackey‘s reconstruction of The Snow Queen, by Hans Christian Andersen.  It comes as the fifth book in her Elemental Masters series, and follows in her tradition of giving the heroines of the story considerably more power and input than they had in the original versions.  As with almost all of the other entries in this series, this one is also set in England in the early 1900’s.

If you’ve read any of Lackey’s other books in this series (or indeed, nearly any of her other books at all), then this story’s style will be intensely familiar to you.  Even if you don’t know the original fairy tale, there are few surprises to be had here; the biggest puzzle I faced came in deciding which of the groups of main characters would be the primary representatives of the original fairy tale.  That said, Lackey is a solid author and routinely manages to make the predictable entertaining, which in my opinion is quite an accomplishment.

Do I think you would enjoy it?  Most likely, yes.  Do I have a few other thoughts to share?  Read on.

Continue reading →

The Wind Rises: Touching and Troubling

Posted on by Henry

Last night I went with my friends to see The Wind Rises, Hayao Miyazaki‘s most recent film.  As an artistic creation, as a story, it is both touching and impressive.  Yet I found the story and the film’s romanticism, in the context of modern Japanese politics, to be unsettling.  It is a tale about an actual historical figure, but to the best of my knowledge is heavily fictionalized.  In other circumstances, with a different subject, I might feel less conflicted about the end result.  But while I love this film as a piece of art I’m still not sure how to feel about it in a wider context.  Let me explain.

As I would expect from a Studio Ghibli production, the movie is gorgeous.  More than that, there’s a dreamlike quality to the film that is both endearing and entirely expected.  This is heightened by the audio design, which uses a whole chorus of voices melded with more standard sound effects to produce the sounds of engines, wind, trains, and even earthquakes.  In many ways this softens the sound profile of the film, and leaves even moments of supposed reality still faintly surreal.

Appropriately enough, this movie tells the story of a dreamer, a boy obsessed with flight who is limited by his poor eyesight and finds solace instead in designing the machines that will fly.  He pursues his dream of flight with a singular devotion that puts others to shame, and as much as anything else this film tells the story of the joys of flight and the tumultuous path of following one’s obsessions.

But the person this film is about is more than an inspired dreamer; he’s also one of the leading architects of the Japanese Empire’s air force.  In many ways, he is the seemingly oblivious representation of Japan’s military expansion into the rest of Asia, along with all the suffering that that implies.  The film barely touches on this, preferring to focus instead on the majesty of flight and the joy of pursuing the perfect craft.

I am, of course, over-simplifying.  This is a movie about a man, myopic in his focus on the few things that truly matter to him.  It is less about history and more about one person’s (fictionalized) love and dreams.  We are treated to bittersweet romance, the joy of obsessions followed and realized, and the pain of knowing that all of the beautiful things that one creates will only see suffering and will likely never see times of peace.  Though there are moments of brightness, this is not a happy movie.  And despite its fictional nature and close connection with unreality, it’s a very real and human film.

So why am I unsettled?

Continue reading →