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Joe has pointed out to me that Masuhiro may be the most eccentric character in the comic. He goes from stoic, empathetic leader to murderous, honor-bound psychopath to wacky, forgetful stooge at the flip of a switch. Who is the real Masuhiro? And who is the mask? WE MAY NEVER KNOW.

I don’t have too much else to say today! Although this video’s been making its rounds on the web and I found it very relevant to the comic:

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Cho’s comment is actually a callback to this ol’ page. Yeah, I thought it was obscure, but Joe revels in obscurity!

My internet bro Pascal’s Wilde Life kickstarter is on it’s last 45 hours, and she’s $6k away from her final stretch goal. If you don’t already love Wilde Life, you may as well go dig into it, and if you do and haven’t already jumped on board the KS, now’s the time!

I got that Gravity Rush HD remake for my birthday (which was back on 2/23) and finally started playing it. Gravity Rush is likely the most fun I’ve ever had flying in video game, sorry Pilot Wings 64! The great music, quirky writing, memorable art design, and wacko plot make it this gem of a game that no one played because it was on the Vita. Well, that’s not the case anymore and I’ve got to recommend the darn thing! It also helps that I love temporal dilation plots and the novel concept of gravity manipulation as a flight mechanic. I realize it was released on PS4 in large part to pump people up for the coming sequel, and I’ve gotta say, mission accomplished!

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And we’re back! I guess talking politics is a big turn on for these two. Must be the world they live in, though. You just can’t separate your personal life from your professional life when you’re a fugitive third party in a brewing war!

I went on vacation for a bit, picked up Fire Emblem Fates the day I left. I have every intention of playing all three campaigns, but I’m currently working on Birthright (If you ask me ‘samurai or knights?’, I’m going samurai! so predictable). I’m loving it so far. My favorite character is probably Hana, but that’s a tough choice amongst a great cast (except for Azama, I hate that guy). The support conversations are still my favorite part of the game! I know it’s going to take me forever to beat because I’m obsessed with unlocking them all. Word of warning, if you want the ninja Kaze to survive past chapter 15, you have to get him to at least an A Rank relationship with the main character, regardless of whether you’re playing on casual mode or not! GOODBYE KAZE, I didn’t even get your offspring before you fell! It’s stuff like that which demands multiple playthroughs, but after I finish the other two campaigns, I may be Fire Emblem’d out! Granted, I have probably put more time into Fire Emblem Awakening than I have any other game I’ve ever owned, so…maybe I won’t be? (Favorite Fire Emblem Awakening character is either Lonqu or Owain, for the record.)

Also, I saw Zootopia and it’s pretty much the most brilliantly relevant animated film of our time, so everyone should probably go see that. I love Wreck It Ralph and Inside Out, and I think Zootopia’s a better film than both simply for its current relevance. Easily my favorite film of 2016 so far (not that I’ve seen many films in 2016 yet).    …I also have a weak spot for buddy cop movies.

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In summary: Ina points out an obvious plot hole and Cho makes a daring strategic retreat!

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, I love video games! By happenstance, I also love videogame websites. Kotaku.com, polygon.com, destructoid.com, and a myriad of youtube channels are on my daily browsing list. But my favorite gaming site for years has been gametrailers.com. And as of February 8th, the entire staff was laid off and the site stopped updating. The business reasons behind the layoffs, while not public, are pretty obvious in that the site’s traffic had been waning and Defy Media, the owners of the the site, didn’t see it fit to put effort into making gametrailers.com profitable so much as they’d rather let it fade away and forget they ever bought it.

I discovered GT back in the days when finding video content about games was not as easy as searching youtube. I spent a lot of time watching trailers for upcoming games, but I really fell in love with the site when it started generating original content, such as the podcast Invisible Walls with Shane Satterfield and Marcus Beer. The podcast covered the games industry and their often sarcastic/pessimistic thoughts on it. The site created videos of game retrospectives as well, and they were always something to which I looked forward. Eventually Shane and Marcus both left to pursue other opportunities, and many of the behind-the-scenes interns and staff stepped up to take center stage. The site began to morph into something a less like a game industry information and  game trailers repository, which youtube had made unnecessary, and more into an original content and internet personality generator. The younger team was filled with enthusiasm and optimism that was infectious, and they always came off as a lot of funny, hard working people who loved the hell out of what they were doing.

After watching gametrailers.com’s original shows for years, and, more recently, their nightly Twitch streams, I can safely say I feel very close to the site’s entire editorial staff. I could probably go on for hours about how much I loved Mandatory Update, The Final Bosman, Trailer Score, GT Time, and the many game reviews and opinion editorial videos. Brandon Jones, Daniel Bloodworth, Kyle Bosman, Micheal Huber, Ian Hinck, Elyse Willems, Brad Ellis, and Brandon Jones feel like family to me and it still feels very weird to know that there will never be any new gametrailers.com videos. I wish them well in whatever the team does next, and I hope they can do whatever that may be together, because I’d be there to watch!

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SNIP SNAP SNIPPITY SNAP!!! No leaf is safe from dual wielding Yorikiro!

LEGENDS OF TOMORROW!!!! … is one of the dumber time travel adventures I’ve seen (the dumbest still goes to Looper). I mean, I love the CW’s Arrowverse, way more than any recent DC related movie, but I do admit I spend the majority of my time watching these shows with my head in my hand groaning at the sheer cheese of it all. If they weren’t so much fun, I would have no reason to be invested. Rotten Tomatoes gives LoT a solid 56%, which, I think, is about right. The show feels like they squeezed all the awkward dialog and cornball plots of Arrow and Flash into a syringe, and injected it straight into Legend of Tomorrow’s veins. The premise itself is so dumb it hurts my brain. I mean, If you’re a TIME MASTER, maybe recruiting a bunch of unknown quantity superheroes (and a super villain and his brother) and taking them through time to fight an immortal dictator while giving them only the bare minimum of exposition as to why they’re there and just trusting they won’t horribly alter the timeline seems a tad reckless. But I suppose if your family had been horribly murdered by said immortal dictator, maybe you wouldn’t be thinking clearly, such as thinking that maybe going to just before your family was murdered and whisking them to safety ahead of time might be the easiest solution. But, as Looper has taught us, the general audience doesn’t want to wrap their heads around the semantics of time travel, they just want to see stuff explode. And I did notice plenty of explosions in Legends of Tomorrow!

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LOCK AND LOAD, EIJIRO!!! (I suspect I’ll be typing ‘lock and load’ quite a bit as the comic goes on, because I love that phrase and I’m quick to forget how often I use it when fictional guns are involved)

I saw Kungfu Panda 3 and thought it was GREAT! I don’t have much to nitpick, but I’m sure I can find something! Once again the Furious Five are relegated to almost tertiary characters, except for Tigress, who is more a bottom of the rung secondary character. Also, the  very likable bad guy meets the same fate as the other villains in the series. I kind of wish Po had a better track record for reforming evil, since he seems to have the ‘let’s be buddies’ Naruto-style personality for it! I’m a sucker for redemption stories, and I’d also have liked to see previous bad guys return as protagonists, but this is more wishful thinking and less a criticism of the storytelling. There’s also a plot hole where Po’s dad establishes that the Panda Village is in a super secret location, but both Tigress and then the bad guy Kai are able to find it without any trouble. There’s also the matter of what ‘mastering Chi’ actually means, and why Po had never heard of Chi up until this point! But that’s semantics; since the movie didn’t actually define what constituted  mastering Chi, it’s not hard to assume that the feats Po pulls off during his Spirit Realm battle aren’t a form of mastery. Granted, despite Sifu, and every panda in the village being able to channel their chi into Po, Sifu still feels he needs thirty years (and a cave) to master chi himself. I also couldn’t help but note how inconsistent all the characters are in terms of their fighting prowess. Sometimes they do things that are implausibly amazing, and other times they feel like push overs. Certainly we WOULD NEVER be responsible for such inconsistencies in our martial arts epic! >_>; And despite that  I noted these things during the film, they did not detract from the sheer joy of the movie as a whole, it is certainly an excellent conclusion to the trilogy.

The Kungfu Panda films are easily my favorite Dreamworks animated franchise, followed closely by How to Train Your Dragon and Rise of the Guardians. It’s almost as great as the first film, which is really quite rare when it comes to movie trilogies! My question now is what’s next for Kungfu Panda? Are the movies done? The third film feels like a finale; it’d be difficult to progress Po’s  character in any meaningful way. But, much like Puss in Boots or Penguins of Madagascar, I’d certainly like to see some spin off films! An obvious choice would be a prequel film about a Furious Five origin story, or about a young Oogway, either on his own or meeting and training Sifu. They could potentially time skip into the future and introduce the next Dragon Warrior, or focus on the students of Grand Master Po, whoever they might end up being. I feel like, since the franchise is essentially an homage/parody of Kungfu films, there are still a huge number of tropes to explore. HONESTLY I DON’T EVEN THINK THEY EVER HAD A BLIND WARRIOR?! That is a grave oversight! Plenty of naturally blind animals to turn into martial arts masters out there!

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Standing up to Nataku is probably inadvisable for one’s health, but someone’s gotta do it!

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YOU CAN NOT KEEP THIS GUY DOWN!!!

I finally saw Force Awakens a second time, and still enjoyed it! I feared that all the decidedly correct criticisms of the film’s plot and characters would cause me to be too cynical of it upon second viewing, but my experience remained intact. Things that stuck out to me a little more the second time through, though, were how muddled Finn’s reasons for leaving the First Order were, and Captain Phasma’s general lameness. Also TR-8R got a big laugh out of me this time! Man, as much as I love him, that guy really should’ve just been Phasma. If Finn had been fighting Phasma, and, at the same time, had a conversation with her about why he left the First Order, that probably would’ve solved all those problems with the movie at once! Granted, despite Finn’s less-than-clear background, he’s still so much fun to watch. “Why do you want to go back to Jakku? …You got a boyfriend? A cute boyfriend??”

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So I guess Nataku knocked Genchu’s sword pretty far. Luckily, Genchu’s drawn back to his blade via the Tao, so it’s all good. Despite the sound effect, I assure you that luck had nothing to do with it!

I watched Netflix’s Jessica Jones. It was solid but super depressing! I think it caught the Man of Steel syndrome of bleak super hero storytelling (although it is way better than Man of Steel, to be fair).

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RICARDO’S WRATH!!!

Friends, the comic has returned! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday week. I know I had quite the good time. I’ve invested a few hours into a specific Christmas gift, Xenoblade Chronicles X. I’m loving it, but I imagine it’s quite the divisive game considering its ugly faces, relentlessly energetic music that can’t be muted, and unnecessarily complex character leveling systems (not to mention it’ll take 30 to 40 hours of gameplay before I even get my giant robot). On the other hand, it’s a game that takes basically all my favorite scifi anime tropes and crams them into a single game. All the mech, weapon, and armor designs are so rad, and the world is crazy fun to run around and explore. Also, even though I’ve read a lot of complaints about the soundtrack, it’s actually composed by on of my favorite Japanese composers, Hiroyuki Sawano, who’s also done the soundtracks for Attack on Titan, Gundam U, Sengoku Basara, and Kill la Kill (this is his first game OST so I’ll cut him some slack, especially since I still love it). I’d probably only recommend Xenoblade Chronicles X to scifi anime lovers who always liked the idea of exploring a richly detailed MMO world without all that social stuff getting in the way. I’m guess that’s probably a pretty niche group, but I guess I’m in it!

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