The Rebels have arrived at the
mid-season finale disappointingly early, as Hera leads a strike team to try and
rid Lothal of the Empire for good. Things go awry very quickly however, as
Thrawn plays everyone right into his hand yet again.
If there’s one thing this episode does
right, it’s the action. The opening sequence with the X-Wings is awesome, as is
Hera and Chopper running through the streets of Lothal trying to remain
undetected. The tension they created was great, as with Hera essentially by
herself you felt the Empire was actually a threat, unlike when she’s with the
rest of the Rebels and they just steamroll over them like nothing.
I’m still not feeling Rukh, though. He
seems like such a non-entity villain since we have no background for who he is
and what he does. And it’s not like Rebels
hasn’t done a great job at introducing new villains before. Even if you didn’t
know him from Phantom Menace or The Clone Wars,Darth Maul entered the picture as a force to be reckoned with by
robbing a main character of his sight permanently. More recently, Thrawn was
quickly established as a major strategic powerhouse and an Imperial officer to
be feared. Rukh just feels like a fancy looking baddie with no actual character
or background as to why we should be intimidated by him.
Kanan also had a small but significant
part this week. After the rest of the Rebel squadron crashed into the Lothal
city, Kanan went to help instead of following Ezra and crew to safety. Along
the way he met with the white lothwolf again, who repeated “Dume” to him. Only
this time people on the Star Wars Rebels subreddit
who watch with closed-captioning on are saying it said “Doom” instead. Is the
wolf foretelling Dume’s doom? Or was this a misspell by the closed-captioning
team? Or maybe the lothwolf is really excited to play DOOM on Nintendo Switch? Only time will tell, I suppose.
The episode ends with Hera captured by
the Empire, but Kanan able to get Chopper back in time. Overall, I felt this
mid-season finale really suffered from not being a two-part episode like we’ve
been having since the premiere. It felt way too short overall. Why couldn’t we
get one episode of the squadron fighting Thrawn in space and one episode of
Hera hiding in the streets? It would’ve made things feel a lot less rushed for
me personally. I would’ve much preferred more of this instead of the stupid
Mandalore episode getting two parts or the random sandcrawler episode last
week.
In any case, I was satisfied with what
we got. The action especially was on point this week, and I was also glad they
didn’t shy away from inserting some new details on the season’s arching mystery
in here too. I still think this episode would’ve benefitted from a little bit
of extra time (22 minutes to be precise) to really give it the depth and
quality a mid-season finale deserves.
Last week we talked about how EA’s
closure of Visceral Games in order to move into development of what seems to be
exclusively multiplayer games might’ve been a bad play on their part. Today
I’ll be continuing the argument on why single-player games are still not just a
requirement in the industry, but the bread and butter of video games and what
makes them great.
The notion that the days of
single-player only games are numbered is one that various publishers and gaming
news outlets have preached several times for many years as if they were
doomsday prophets. Especially since the Internet reached gaming, creating the
juggernaut known as online gaming as a result. Now you could play your
favourite games with randos from all around the globe if the game would allow
it. Suddenly everyone was jumping on the online craze, adding in multiplayer
components into games that didn’t even need them, for better or for worse.
Gaming would never be the same.
As a result, plenty of people were
saying the end was nigh for singleplayer experiences as a whole. But just like
how the Angry Birds developer said
that mobile gaming was going to destroy consoles entirely, they’re still going
strong over a decade after the argument began.
So why are they so important? For that
answer, we can go back to a familiar argument: the Howard Moskowitz spaghetti
sauce argument.
If you’re unfamiliar with Moskowitz
and his pasta story, you’re in for a treat. Sometime in the 1970’s, Moskowitz
was working for pasta sauce company Prego who wanted him to design the perfect
type of sauce for them that would make millions. But instead of creating just
one supreme sauce to rule them all, Moskowitz went in the complete opposite
direction: he made forty-five. Each of the different type of sauce varied from
each other, whether they had more garlic, more spice, less of both, and much
more. He offered the different types of sauce to Americans, and discovered that
they tended to fall into three groups: those who like plain spaghetti sauce,
those who like spicy sauce, and those who prefer their sauce to be extra
chunky. Thanks to his research, Prego was the first company to supply an extra
chunky style of sauce, earning them the cash money they’d hoped for.
And that’s what companies are missing
when they say single-player games are a dying breed. With multiplayer games
nearly all falling into the first-person shooter category, the variety brought
by the single-player market is what brings variety to the industry. This year
alone we’ve had spending single-player games such as Horizon: Zero Dawn, Uncharted:
The Lost Legacy, Nintendo’s offerings and several more, resulting in one of
the best years for gaming ever.
EA wants to keep giving you the same
pasta sauce they know makes money, but they forget that a huge portion of the
people paying for their games prefer extra chunky sauce.
Girls’
Last Tour tried something a little more different this week: another
one-segment episode featuring a new one-off character the girls help out, as
well as having most of the episode take place in a rather slow-moving montage.
As always, it was a success, although
I felt myself a little more disinterested than usual thanks to the lack of
necessary dialogue to follow.
The jalopy has broken down, but
thankfully there’s a mechanic nearby to fix it. Her name is Ishii, and she is
trying to escape the city via airplane. Chi and Yuu agree to help her build the
plane in exchange for fixing the car, and them working together take up the
majority of the episode.
Most of the episode is spent in a
musical montage. Beautiful operatic music that we’ve heard a few times before
in the series plays in the background as they repair the plane. It’s not the
most engaging thing in the world, but it sure is relaxing to watch. Things
start to get a bit grimmer towards the end, but as is the norm for this show,
it all ends in a pretty cushy and cheerful way, but not without some darker
overtones.
So yeah, not the most eventful episode
overall. It’s definitely worth seeing for how cute and relaxing it is, but it
does nothing for the overall building story of discovering what’s up with this
crazy city and where everyone went.
After a shaky last two weeks, The Orville returned with full force
this episode. Easily the funniest episode we’ve seen from them so far, this was
a really fun take on the classic Trek “crew
members going coocoo for Cocoa Puffs” storyline, blending both humour and a
serious alien diplomatic dispute excellently.
The cold open with Bortus getting cut
off before we finally got to hear him sing set the tone for the rest of the
episode, which felt like near non-stop jokes. There were running gags,
references, physical humour and one-off jokes aplenty, and in a case pretty
unusual for this show, nearly all of them landed perfectly. I was laughing from
beginning to end this week, and while I’m not sure I’d want every episode to be
this way, it was a welcome change of pace from the previous two episodes.
The crew has been caught into a
dispute between two warring alien races fighting over ownership of a planet. An
archeologist has been brought onboard to discover who really owns the planet,
but surprise! It’s blue alien Rob Lowe!
In all seriousness, Rob Lowe plays the
alien who Ed found Kelly in bed with in the pilot. It’s a great twist that adds
some extra depth to their relationship, a plot device that hasn’t seen much
action recently. Things get especially complicated towards the end, but one
thing at a time.
It turns out that blue alien Rob Lowe
secrets a toxin that makes anyone he touches fall in love. Ed and Kelly quickly
fall head over heels for him (but seriously, it’s Rob Lowe. I’m straight and
even I’m in love with the guy), and meanwhile Claire has suddenly become smitten
for Yaphit the green slime guy. It’s a fun premise that thankfully knows its
boundaries and never gets too annoying.
The ending is equally fantastic. After
the toxin wears off and everyone goes back to normal, Kelly confronts blue
alien Rob Lowe and asks if she was under the influence of the toxin in the
opening scene of the pilot, to which he responds he doesn’t know. I couldn’t
tell you if they’re setting up Ed and Kelly getting back together as the big ending
for the season, but this was a subtle and sublime ending to an overall over the
top episode.
My only real complaint is how obvious
the solution was to solve the diplomatic issue with the warring races. As soon
as it became apparent what blue alien Rob Lowe’s powers were I knew they were
going to be used to make the leaders fall in love. It felt a little too easy
and I would’ve liked a more complicated answer to a problem with so much
build-up.
It would’ve been so easy to make this
another annoying episode with everyone running around and being a jerk, but
thankfully the writers didn’t go that route. This episode was a complete joy to
watch, juggling the comedy and the serious moments with perfect balance. I
really hope this is a sign of what we’re in store for later on down the line.
“I
sure hope it won’t be long before we return to Steven’s universe.”
-Me,
roughly 150 days ago.
I love cartoons. Always have. Really good ones have the
ability to lift you off your seat and take you into a weird and wacky world
only animation can bring you. Part of that is why I fell head over heels in
love with Steven Universe when I
first stumbled upon it in the summer of 2015. With Gravity Falls (still my favourite show of all time) coming to an
end, I was on the hunt for not just another great cartoon, but one with the
linear narrative and strong characters of Gravity
Falls that was still airing.
Enter Steven Universe.
While not to a replacement for Gravity
Falls by any means, it was darn close. This show had everything: An expansive world with
cool sci-fi elements. Well thought-out and three-dimensional characters with
intricate backstories. An awesome soundtrack with great songs composed by the
creator herself. Morals that tackled current topics like sexuality and gender
in ways kids could not only understand, but relate to. And, best of all, an
overarching story with continual character growth and mysteries o’ plenty.
After binge watching all of Season 1 and what had been released of Season 2
thus far, I was in love. I couldn’t wait to see more.
And here I am today explaining why I’m both cancelling my
review series on this blog and no longer tuning in for future episodes of Steven Universe.
There are three reasons why I can’t keep watching this show
anymore, but they all tie together.
#1. The show doesn’t know what genre
it wants to be anymore.
The warning signs were there in early Season 2, but we mostly
brushed them off as isolated incidents. Let me put things in context: Steven Universe started off as a sci-fi
show with slice of life elements mixed in with the episodes where Steven just
hung around his hometown being a normal kid. But there was a catch: every
episode had to have at least one sci-fi element to remind you of the magical
portion of the show, whether it was a cool new location, a crazy monster, or a
mysterious weapon, every single episode of Season 1 features either the Crystal
Gems or some magical element from the world.
Starting in Season 2, the showrunners began to separate the
two. Instead of walking hand in hand, more and more Beach City episodes were
being released with no Gem presence, and vice versa. The Gem stuff was being
saved for big, game-changing event episodes, leaving the Beach City episodes feeling
like filler.
Imagine if in Gravity
Falls we had an entire episode just about Mabel cleaning the local diner
and interacting with the locals and listening to their sob stories, or an
episode of Rick and Morty where Rick
left Morty behind and told him to clean out the garage. It wouldn’t be fun.
Which leads me to Season 4, and where my interest in the show
took a dramatic plunge. Nearly every episode of Season 4 is just Steven talking
to these boring people he lives with, with no Gem or sci-fi elements
whatsoever. The Gem-based episodes feel like events instead of the norm, as you
think “FINALLY! We’re seeing the stuff we watch the show for!” Steven Universe is no longer a sci-fi
show with slice of life elements. Now it’s become a slice-of-life show that goes
to space on rare occasions.
#2: Poor scheduling.
So how do you kill interest in a show
that’s already losing its fanbase after an underwhelming season? Easy. Stick
the fans in a seemingly endless stream of hiatuses with no return dates!
I kid you not, there are entire blogs
dedicated to documenting how long Steven
Universe has remained on hiatus, with the latest ranking in at a record
150+ days! It’s near impossible to stay invested in a show that takes such
lengthy breaks during a season. I’m used to cartoons being gone for weeks, even
months at a time. But half a year out of commission is just flabbergasting.
I don’t think it would be nearly as
bad though if Steven Universe was still
interesting. I remember being fine with the hiatuses during Seasons 2 and 3.
But now after the Towniepocalypse (as I like to call it), there’s no guarantee
that the wait will be worth it. When Gravity
Falls came back after hiatus, I knew I would get good laughs, crazy
monsters and maybe a bit more about the overarching mystery. When Rick and Morty comes back after their
long hiatuses between seasons I know I’ll get hilarious dark humour and crazy
alien worlds.
When Steven Universe comes
back after a hiatus, you’d be better off trying to predict what you’ll get from
a slot machine. Will it be boring townie episodes? Will it be the stuff you
actually watch the show for? Who knows! But you’d better enjoy what you get,
because after the five episodes they give you over the course of a single week,
they’re going back on hiatus for another three months!
#3. I’ve moved on.
There’s a weird thing about what
happens when a struggling show vanishes during a season with no point of return
in sight: it gives the fans ample opportunity to seek out new and better shows.
Since I can’t rely on Steven Universe for regular episodes
that are all of the same quality, I’ve just plain lost interest in the show and
moved on to other cartoons. I can guarantee I’ll be watching the next DuckTales when it premieres, but I just
plain can’t be bothered to even touch the latest “StevenBomb”. I know it’s just
more townie garbage I don’t want to see.
So that’s it. Instead of excitement, I
just feel apathetic towards Steven
Universe at this point. If you still love it, great. I’m glad you can find
enjoyment in something I can’t. I’m also still willing to come back and catch
up on it at some point in the future (preferably after it’s finished so I can
only see the episodes that matter), because despite my distaste for the
direction it went in, I still love the first three seasons.
As Rebels
approaches what I can only assume is the mid-season finale, things got more
interesting for the team this week as they faced off against both the Empire
and some reptilian miners, while also learning more about the mysterious white
lothwolf.
The first episode was easily the
better of the two, especially for longtime fans. Thrawn has hired an assassin
named Rukh to hunt down the rebels once and for all. Simultaneously, the team
needs to get Hera off Lothal and back to Yavin IV with the hyperdrive from the
TIE Defender.
Rukh’s character was…okay. His design
was easily the best part of him. Being a sort of cross between a chimpanzee and
a snake, he was pretty creepy looking. The only problem was that we didn’t see
him do anything that made us feel frightened by him. He felt like just another
Imperial for the rebels to outsmart and escape by the end of the episode.
The episode also finally gave us some
closure on Kanan and Hera’s relationship. They finally kissed, so that’s nice.
I’m still certain Kanan isn’t making it out of the season alive, so the
showrunners will have plenty of emotional drama to capitalize on when that
happens thanks to this.
Lastly, we got a little more of info
on the Lothwolf this week. It’s been confirmed that the wolf isn’t saying “doom”,
but rather “Dume”, as in Kanan’s real name. The wolf also was able to transport
them across Lothal through some weird Willy
Wonka scary tunnel, meaning there’s definitely some Force ties there.
The second episode isn’t quite as
memorable. It’s just another “let’s save the slaves!” storyline. I did enjoy
having Kanan and Zeb be the major characters in the episode instead of Ezra and
Sabine again, and Ezra’s fight with the captain of the crawler was awesome.
Overall it’s a good episode, but not one with much to talk about.
It looks like next week is the last
episode before we go on break, as Hera will be leading an attack on the Lothal
blockade. Before we get to that, this week was fantastic in terms of both fun
action and building the lore and characters.
I think I might be a bit too proud of
that pun, to be honest.
Oh, EA. Not a year seems to go by
without one of gaming’s most notorious villains making a blunder. Their recent
strategies have proven to be…confusing, to say the least. After attempting for
years to shove Activision out of their throne as the king of the November
Warfare season, now that they have a fair shot at having one of their many
shooter franchises become the industry darling with interest Call of Duty on the wane, they seem to
be working overtime to make things unnecessarily complicated and frustrating
for both gamers and developers alike.
I gave them a lot of grief last year
for throwing Titanfall 2 under the
bus by releasing it in the same week as their own Battlefield 1, essentially destroying any fighting chance the game
might’ve had with casual consumers who typically only buy a few games a year
and typically go for brands they recognize over something new they might not
like. But this year’s Star Wars
shenanigans might just make me forget last year’s brainlessness, because what
EA pulled this year confirms to me one thing: EA doesn’t care about making
quality products anymore. EA just cares about making money.
I can hear you all right now saying
“Well haven’t they always been like that, EA is terrible lol”. Yes, but while
this is true to an extent, EA has been known to put out several quality
products in the past that gained love from both critics and gamers alike. Mirror’s Edge, Dead Space, Mass Effect,
and the previously mentioned Titanfall 2 are
all great games that came from the house of gaming’s most hated publisher.
But this is 2017, the year of the loot
box and the year of awful publisher decisions. Honestly, when you arrive at the
end of the year and Ubisoft of all companies look like one of the good guys,
something’s gone horribly wrong in the industry.
Putting aside the whole Battlefront II loot box shenanigans for
now (I’m waiting until I play the final version of the game to talk about
that), today I’m here to talk about the tragic tale of Visceral Games and how
they hold the key to discovering how EA might’ve already botched the reputation
of future Star Wars games as a whole.
Even if you aren’t familiar with the
name of Visceral Games, you probably know their work. In the early 2000’s they
were responsible for a bunch of licensed titles, from Lord of the Rings to The
Simpsons to even Tiger Woods. It
wasn’t until 2008 when things really took off for the company. At the time EA
was trying desperately to win back gamer approval by creating new and
innovative ideas. This ploy led to the creation of two franchises: one was my
beloved Mirror’s Edge, which promptly
dropped off the face off the Earth after the first installment before being
unceremoniously revived for a sequel last year (I don’t care that your story
sucked and nobody else played you, Catalyst!
I’ll always love you!). The other was developed by Visceral, as a brand new
survival horror series similar in style to the Alien movies. The game came to be known as Dead Space, and became a huge success with fans of horror games.
Dead
Space later spawned an equally successful sequel in the form of Dead Space 2, but when it came to making
Dead Space 3 things started to get
muggy. A clear victim of publisher intervention, Dead Space 3 inexplicably jumped onto the multiplayer craze that
was sweeping the industry, diminishing the intensely scary atmosphere the first
two games created almost entirely thanks to the feeling of being all alone.
EA also had ludicrous expectations for
the game. Infamously, EA declared that Dead
Space 3 needed to sell 5 million copies in order to be called a success and
for them to decide whether or not the series was financially worth keeping
around for future installments. Putting this into perspective, Nintendo
recently has been especially happy to boast that Super Mario Odyssey sold 2 million copies, calling it the biggest
success gaming’s most famous icon has ever seen. Mario is perhaps the franchise with the widest audience imaginable
in video games. On the other hand, one of the scariest horror games ever
created isn’t going to have quite the same amount of fans as the
family-friendly plumber in red.
Unsurprisingly, Dead Space 3 fell woefully short of EA’s expectations, and that was
the end for a franchise once promised to become a multi-media horror
juggernaut. The team at Visceral went on to develop the equally unsuccessful Battlefield Hardline, before announcing
that they were one of many teams chosen to develop Star Wars games for EA.
Fast forward a few years, and things
fell apart completely. EA announced that Visceral was joining the increasingly
lengthy list of companies they’d unceremoniously killed off, and they were
taking their Star Wars bounty hunter game with
them. In an announcement, the company stated that “due to the fast-paced
movement and changing in the game industry” they would be getting rid of the
game, so they can “give players an experience they can keep coming back to”.
Yeah. So basically this means they
want to keep making multiplayer games, because Star Wars is one of the biggest licenses imaginable and multiplayer
games make the most money with all their loot box and microtransaction garbage
EA loves injecting into them.
So what does this mean for Star Wars as a gaming franchise? Well, I
can tell you one thing: 1313 sure
ain’t rising from the grave anytime soon. It also means EA thinks we want more Battlefront, despite the loud public
displeasure with the first title in 2015 and the fact that the sequel due out
later this month has already garnered itself more controversy than most games
ever see. According to EA, we don’t want single-player games anymore, but that
couldn’t be further from the truth.
I’ll talk more about why single-player
games are still the bread and butter of the industry next week since this
article’s run on long enough, but I’ll end off by saying this: EA just wants
your money. They don’t care about quality products or anything like that
anymore. Mass Effect: Andromeda was a
monstrous disappointment for franchise fans, and it looks like Battlefront II is going down the same
path. My favourite franchise deserves better, but since it’s stuck with Gaming
Satan, it likely will become just another moneymaker franchise casual gamers
gobble up biannually.
If all games end up the same, any
credibility gaming will have as an art form will be moot. Look at movies. Thor: Ragnarok is nothing like The Godfather, which is nothing like Finding Nemo, which is nothing like IT, which is nothing like Night at the Museum, which is nothing
like The Disaster Artist. Each movie
gives a different flavour for a different audience. If every game ends up being
exactly like Battlefield 1, the
industry will be closing up shop quicker than you could imagine.
Oh well. At least we’ll always have
the Lego games.
