Besides the time change that means I'm seeing less daylight than before (soon I won't see any sun at all), my Monday/Friday workload was increased for no reason, at first effectively doubling it, then after seeing how backed up I got by doubling a workload I already have trouble keeping up with, it was taken down to like 120%. It feels mostly like a ploy to get more money out of patients, anyway.

To give a bit of context, apparently the PA (physician's assistant) to the doctor I work with on Mondays & Fridays went to some conference where they were really pushing to do entire leg-length images on EVERY new patient (doctor is a hip & knee specialist). The problem, besides some patients simply not being able to step up onto the platform or steady enough to stay up there for the images, is that there is only so fast that those images can be taken and it adds another 4 images AT LEAST to what needs to be taken, and I have to manually stitch the images together which adds even more time. I was sending like 12 images every other patient where before I was doing 4-5. Finally, after three and a half hours of running behind yesterday morning, they decided to change it to "just" an extra knee image for hip patients and an extra hip image for knee patients. I know that the patients are being charged for this, too, though, so aside from it adding to my workload, I'm feeling convinced that it's being done mostly to leech more money from those that come to see that doctor.

Oh, and we were given a pack of Extra gum by my manager to tell me they're "Extra thankful for us", which only soured my mood further because of how shallow a gesture it is.

While I guess I could say I was entertained in reading it because, unlike my current slow-read of Pumpkin Scissors (another of the manga I got from Humble), it kept me interested enough to continue reading through what I had, I cannot say that I enjoyed it. I guess I should start with the conclusion I finally got to, after reading through my 10 volumes and watching like half the episodes of season 1 out-of-order just to see how the "good parts" were animated.

It's F#$%!^ BLEACH all over again but all the powers are fire.

Like, I could damn-near make a checklist for all the similarities:

• main character is a bit of a punk
• who was bullied and shunned for a physical quirk
• and has a hero complex because of it
• and turns out to be "the chosen one" in the villains' grand scheme
• big battles are always showcases of how exactly each character's powers work (or how they've upgraded said powers)
• the powers that be are organized into numbered military-like sections
• each with their own uniquely-powered captains and lieutenants
• the villains have both infiltrated and come from the high-ranking members (including captains) of those sections
• and they have someone very important to the main character that he must save no matter what

I'm sure I could go on, but it's just stupidly uncanny. On top of that, the anime was, in my opinion, disgusting. It's like they spent all the budget on the fire, most of which was CG anyway. There were so, so, so many stills (or still 2D layered over simple CGI fire effects) for so many scenes, including the action scenes. I have no desire to go back to BLEACH to compare, but I daresay Bleach was better-animated most of the time. It's just not pretty to watch. It's actually a shame, because one thing I took notice of was the way the original manga really made use of the fire powers to lead the eye and lend flow to a page during fights, the same way Dragon Ball Z did with its energy effects.

But as to the story and characters... yeah, I'm still going to say it's BLEACH but I'm not 15 years old anymore and Japan has become more mainstream, with all that entails.

So part of the problem with having such a huge cast as Fire Force has (the small core of main characters, all the major captains and lieutenants, all the villains, and several others besides) is that, almost by necessity, they each need to be easily defined and shallow to make an impact, because of how little time they spend on-screen. That means pretty much every character is one-note (or one-joke), and unfortunately most of those notes I do not like. One of the main characters, for instance, fancies himself a "knight" but is so gods-damned stupid that he forgot he was right-handed and was losing a fight until he remembered to put his sword in his other hand. Another does the Edward Elric thing that whenever she hears anything about herself being strong or muscle-bound gets angry and shouts "who are you calling a gorilla cyclops?" -- the same exact line, every time.

I said "I'm not 15 years old anymore" because those "character traits" are so shallow that every single one of them gets on my nerves. There's not a single character that I actually want to see more of. I also have a problem with the, for lack of a better word, "sex" in the series. One character introduced early on but who doesn't become part of the main cast until later is a girl with some unexplained "Lucky Lecher Lure trait" that takes the anime cliché of "girl falls into awkward position" and pushes it past 11 to 12. She'll fall onto a man and their hand will end up under her top (she wears a bikini under her open-jacket getup, of course), or she'll manage to fall out of ALL of her clothes for no reason. After having my eyes opened recently I've been trying to forgive things like this but across 10 volumes -- almost 90 chapters -- I took careful stock of it and it added nothing to her character and did not move the plot forward at any point. None of the other female characters are sexualized to her extent, either (unlike in BLEACH where I could point to seemingly half the female cast as being equally sexualized). It just really grinds my gears.

My breaking point was, after all this, a little while back the same meatspace friend who said I'd like it was poking me about some article written about a future chapter where the author goes on a rant about "sex appeal" -- something I refused to touch both because of my sensibilities and my quite frankly depressed state currently. Having just about given up on caring to continue, I decided to look it up and

*screams into facepalm*

The author breaks the fourth wall heavily to make a strawman argument against a cultural misunderstanding of what's being objected to, in a medium where the argument (that he puts forth) doesn't even make sense.

*screams into facepalm*

I'm just F#$%!^@ done with it. Fire Force is trash. Trash that I sincerely hope becomes more popular than Attack on Titan, but I will never recommend it.

Unicorn shipping:
I've only watched I think, two episodes, but I'm already liking the Benagher/Mineva dynamic. Everyone Mineva knows, even Mineva herself, evaluates her worth in terms of her political value. When she runs into a handsome boy who puts her well-being above the fate of nations she can't help but be charmed. She's practical enough to realize Benagher is a Shonen protagonist with no practical reason for believing any of the things he believes (except maybe for new type stuff), but she finds herself charmed regardless.
Or am I reading too far into that?

Ugh Newtypes
The whole New Type angle is handy for turning any character the writers introduce into an instant ace pilot. It also justifies some writing conceits that most media just handwave. It pulls weight in terms of narrative structure, but the lore and the theming behind it are simply insipid.

THe actual gundams
If "gundam" is just a designation for certain mobile suits, how does everybody immediately recognize which mobile suit is a gundam? Is the gundam look copyrighted within the Gundam franchise? That would explain how seeing it once clues everyone in. Is "gundam" just in-universe slang for the newest and most powerful mobile suit? By the time of the newest films, wouldn't the gundam actually called "the Gundam" be laughably obsolete?
I bet the original producers wish they named the series after mobile suits and not just a mobile suit. Could've called the important one the "Super gundam" or something.

On dicks:
I'm surprised to hear that Kycillia was one of the worst Zabis. She only put in a few appearance but she mostly came across as the sane one.
I wish I got to see more of Degwin Zabi. A man who sets up a fascist dictatorship and hints that philosophy he espoused was a temporary political measure? And then he gets killed by his son who took that philosophy to heart? There's a story there and I hope the franchise covers it somewhere.
I picked up only mild-medium dickishness levels from Amuro. Amazingly short-sighted though. Why would you even consider handing over a superweapon to terrorists in exchange for a single hostage? If people are sacrificing themselves to stop a comet from hitting the earth you don't yell at them to stop! Did you even consider that burrying the gundam in the desert might seal the fate of the people you left behind? ... ok maybe he's a dick.
Char's dickishness still kind of amazes me. His priorities basically go: billions of innocent lives < racist philosophy < proving I'm stronger than the guy my crush had a crush on. I wonder if maybe there's a "death by cop" aspect to it.
Quess joined a war she had no strong convictions about mostly to piss off her dad. Hathaway killed a woman to avenge her death. Wasn't worth it dude. She was a dick, and now you're one too. He did end up with his own tv show out of the deal though, so I gotta see where that goes.
Lalah Sune's kind of a dick. She was completely onboard with murdering people for the sake of her crush... who she pretty much rejects in favor of somebody she just met? And then strings them both along from the afterlife? Wow.
...Most of the Gundam cast are dicks. No wonder everyone's always at war with each other.

Unicorn Shipping:
Minerva is a really well written character and her arc about her value and coming to terms with her heritage is really good. It actually starts further back in ZZ, but there's more to Banagher's story that makes their chemistry work. I think a good portion of why she's charmed just goes in for his reaction in general to getting tied up in this. Saving her life helped too.

Newtypes
There's a lot of meta reasons behind the existence of newtypes that gets into Tomino himself thinking humanity was screwed and the only way earth survives is an entirely new species to replace them. Guy had issues, so don't expect the Canon to find good justifications for what amounts to nihilism.
That said, the "newtype noise" is iconic af.

Gundams
So, long of the short, yes, Anaheim Electronics developed a signature look that characterized a Gundam. The reason being primarily a psychological warfare tactic, as the performance of the original Gundam deeply shook the Zeon confidence. It was mostly because of the performance of the suit and Amuro's BS newtype abilities that caused so many rumors.

Once the war died down, the infamy of the Gundam was so pronounced they even changed the name of Luna Titanium to Gundarium, and in the subsequent peace times, most prototype suits and especially ones developing newtype technology were designed working off the Gundam. In Anaheim's mind, it was basically a marketing tactic, but for the Federation it was a declaration of authority. The Gundam mk 2 was effectively an elite mass production unit used in Zeta.

Beyond that, the Gundam series of mobile suits were primarily an iterative design scheme building off the test technologies developed in the original Gundam, while the mass produced units built to be cost effective were stripped down versions of the tech the Gundam was a test bed for and eventually deviated from the Gundam design schemes.

Kycilia
So, the thing is, she was a spy master and didn't act overly, but she was nearly as ruthless and driven as Gihren had been. She didn't have the same zeal, but was a lot more cunning about her actions and she was, specifically, the one responsible for Zeon Daikun's death.

Degwin was really nicely fleshed out in Gundam Origins. It's also where we see a lot more of Kycilia being a nasty person.

Amuro is a dick. He never stops being a dick.

Char
So... Having skipped Zeta, you missed both his redemption and downfall. By the time we get to Counterattack, he's tried to be a better man and even succeeded to a fair degree, but he's been kicked around and broken by the world so badly that he's genuinely lost his mind by being subjected to the atrocities he's had to endure. There's a LOT of story missing there, including what amounts to the death of his faux-son figure.
He's a man so far gone he has nothing to lose by Counterattack. Death by cop is not at all inaccurate, but there's also some newtype junk tossed in too about the wheels of history and fate. Basically, he kind of knows he's crazy, so he does what he does thinking history will either vindicate him or fate will intervene to stop him.

Lalah's backstory informs a ton about her character. She's been through some ****. As far as stringing them asking from the afterlife, that's just what you get when you abandon your AT field, to mix mech metaphors.

There are lots of good Gundam characters who keep the dickishness to a minimum. Or at the very least, grow out of it a lot more gracefully than the UC cast.

After finally finishing the game and looking up a few articles to explain the story, I'm actually of the opinion that Shadow of the Colossus is ever-so-slightly too pretentious for its own good, but it's still a marvelously good example of video games and I wish there were more games like it -- drawing on the Zelda style traditions and having what amounts to a puzzle-boss rush. There are points where I think the game is just a tad overproduced, especially given the amount of time a death can set you back; it's less about the loads themselves and more the amount of time before you regain control of your character as well as travel time. I won't deny it's a very pretty game even on PS2, but sometimes the amount of time it spends wresting control away from the player can be frustrating.

Eggroll the horse ended up being the worst, in my opinion (yes I know he's known as Agro but I'd rather demean him by calling him Eggroll or Lag-ro). It was just so difficult to control that I often found myself running on foot until its pathing AI decided to come find me. Maybe this wasn't as much of an issue in the re-releases and remaster, but on the original PS2 version Eggroll had analog movement but you could only give him digital inputs, which was frustrating in and of itself without all the more realistic things they added in to his behavior like the way he took jumps or stopping against walls.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I also had to look up the way to defeat several of the colossi because of the hint system not being obvious enough. I was rarely in much danger during the fights (though shoutouts [derogatory] to the small colossi which can and will stun-lock you) but a few of the fights are simply not straightforward enough for my current brain. A lot of the time you have to lure out an attack at a specific location by experimentation, and that's where I have troubles considering the game as part of the "video games can be art" group. I forget where this phrase originated, but I've heard it tossed around that "video games are the only artistic medium where you can be skill-locked out of the work you bought", and while that is true of most any video game, I don't think that leaning into that is necessarily an argument for an video-games-as-art.

My point is that, while I understand making the colossi tests of skill for the PLAYER in order to convey the trials that the CHARACTER they play as goes through, it's not what I hold up as evidence for why video games are an art form, because it locks out people from experiencing the story that the developers undoubtedly wanted people to enjoy and appreciate. In my opinion, the better way to demonstrate "video games can be art" is through doing what only video games are capable of doing, things like having multiple endings or branching paths, commentating on the player's actions, and ESPECIALLY things to do with how the player controls the game. I usually hold up Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons as the best example of what video games are capable of as an art medium because it pulls off something that cannot be done in another medium (though spoilers for what that is).

Shadow of the Colossus actually gets points for its controls, even its original wonky controls, for conveying physically what they were trying to convey. Holding onto walls/colossi being bound to R1 is great because it makes you actually grip the controller yourself and you end up FEELING that if you have to hold on for a long period of time. The horse acceleration/deceleration controls are also “good” for what they were trying to do, it's just a painful way of controlling your best method of traversing the massive map; I wish they would have made a more intuitive and reactive horse instead of a more realistic horse.

By the same token the camera was... I guess they were going for "cinematic" but I was fighting with it SO OFTEN. The worst part was that the camera was a physical entity, so it could get pushed around by nearby walls or even THE VERY COLOSSI YOU WERE FIGHTING into awkward positions. Often it was also trying to get into certain positions where your character was in the lower left or right corner (depending on the view at the time) and because of the zoom level it was often frustrating because part of your view was actually being obstructed by the camera position.

As a lesser point, because I am playing on a very-stupid-”smart”-TV, I found the game frustratingly dark much of the time. The game is already kind of unrealistically contrast-y with very dark corners away from the light – and I get it as a stylistic choice, it does make the game POP – but sometimes I found myself completely surrounded by inky blackness with no indication of how to get out. I think I would have appreciated a game with less/fewer shadows (no pun intended).

I did really enjoy it even when it wasn't being quite straightforward, though, and the story is REALLY good (exactly my kind of esoteric and unexplained), especially since I'm a sucker for stories which use nonverbal storytelling. I feel I could raise half a complaint for the (original) map being too large for as empty as it is, but that adds to the atmosphere and setting and I don't think I would change it even if I had the power to. I would love to see more of each individual element in other games, though I'm not exactly thrilled by Team Ico's dedication to the "experience over ease of play" style. If I find the time I might play through it again and likely enjoy it and grow frustrated in equal measure.

The very first thing I want to say is something I said to myself many times while playing: this game has many camera angles, none of them good. Because God of War is so interested in its action setpieces, it has no camera controls, and the camera is much like an old Resident Evil type game with fixed locations for every area. Sometimes it moves smoothly from anchor point to anchor point, giving you a constant over-the-shoulder as you walk along, other times it cuts completely like when you walk into a new room. Either way, it so often messes with your movement as the camera switches angles but you’re trying to maintain a straight path, and because combat is 3D often enemies hang out out-of-view of the camera (or worse, a setpiece like a locked door is blocking your view of part of the arena) so you’re trying to lure them to a better location so you can simply SEE them to fight.

By the same token, the game goes heavy on its QTEs – Quick-Time Events in case anyone’s not knee-deep in video game jargon – often having you finish your foes with a series of button prompts which don’t make me feel “like a badass” the way the game was advertised. The worst is having to repeatedly press the interact button (R2 of all things) for near every door because Kratos needs to show how much he lifts, bro. There was only ONE time I felt they used that mechanic properly: in a hall with flaming boulders where you had to quickly time the door openings or be run over. It was especially bad outside of combat where he’s doing things like tear heads of dead skeletons and you can just have him indefinitely hump the skull if you don’t mash fast enough.

As long as I’m talking about clear stylistic choices, I mentioned how the game sometimes tries to be “dark and edgy”. Besides the obvious over-the-top and gratuitous violence, there are several naked PS2-polygon boobs on display, some rendered in-game and some in more detailed cutscenes. In the past I might have railed on that point alone, but to be honest I think on its own – like, in a vacuum, ignoring the poor state that video games went down for the longest time and are only just starting to grow out of – the game is perfectly fine for a piece of entertainment; kind of like 300 in video game form. The bigger problem I have that makes me only want it as an occasional distraction is how hard it leans into all the violence, especially from Kratos, ESPECIALLY when the point the story is trying to get across is that he’s repentant and haunted by his past as a war general mad with conquest. It leads to a bit of ludonarrative dissonance for one, but also it just… doesn’t feel necessary? It feels absolutely gratuitous when you’re made to immolate someone to get past a door when they’re begging for their life the entire time you drag them there. Like, even Kratos’s signature pasty look is (spoiler maybe?) because the ashes of his dead wife and child have been bound to his skin.

Although the game pleasantly surprised me by having a bunch of non-white characters. Of course Ares himself looks Nordic for some reason (maybe limited PS2 graphics?) but like even in flashback cutscenes, Kratos and his family are kind of darker-skinned, as are a lot of the unnamed characters that come and go. I can’t speak towards accuracy but I appreciated it.

But something that added to the “edginess” which I suspect was less a stylistic choice and more a necessity to be published in that day and age was how all the enemies are just clearly demons and zombies.
Like, the minotaurs have too many horns and sharp teeth and long thick tails, the harpies are tatter-winged imps unless you see them in cutscenes, even the centaurs are green and orcish-looking above the waist. Add to that the way the gods are portrayed (Artemis has horns, Hades looks like a demon himself, Ares sprouts spider legs out his back) and it feels less like a stylistic choice and more an attempt to slide in under some arbitrary ratings line by making all the enemies more clearly “evil”.

Similarly, the gods’ involvement in the story feels pasted in, very much a “this is a video game” type of addition. Ares serves as the story’s antagonist, attacking Athens, so Athena acts as the mentor figure, guiding Kratos forward, but the other gods are just there to give him powers for… no reason? The plot even outright says that war between the gods themselves is forbidden, so I don’t know why they take an interest in Kratos, or why they want Ares put down. On top of that, Ares seems to be doing this for some daddy complex, which I also don’t understand given Ares was one of the 12 Olympians in Greek mythology?

There’s also a disappointing amount of instant death pits and other traps that really grow frustrating even on a single playthrough. I’m glad the game loads so quickly because that artifact of old game design, especially when the game is otherwise EXTREMELY generous with its health, feels bad to play.

Lastly, I want to mention how poor the intro was for someone like me. It just kind of throws you in, in a very “gamer’s game” type of way, without explaining the controls very well. It wasn’t until like 4 hours into the game, when I got a move upgrade, that I even knew that R1 did anything, much less that it was an attack button.