The Fair Unknown

The problem (well, a problem) with Final Fantasy VII is that being its hero, Cloud Strife, is kind of a raw deal. Let’s take a look at all the wonderful things that happen when you’re Cloud:

You grow up alienated from your peers, set off to make something of yourself by joining an elite military organization (the one to which your hero, your idol, belongs) only to be denied, and consigned to be one of the faceless rank and file. You make a cool friend in this military elite, a sort of role model, but your whole life goes sideways once more when you’re sent on a mission to your hometown with your cool friend and your hero. You’re too embarrassed to show your face after having failed in your one grand ambition, afraid even to go to your own mother’s house or confront your childhood friend because of it, and then over the period of a few days your hero completely loses his shit. He burns down your hometown, kills your family and severely injures your childhood friend (at least she gets better). He beats your cool friend nearly to death, and does quite a number on you, too, but you manage to put him out of commission for a while. Your reward for this is to be put in a coma for four or five years while a mad scientist runs experiments on you and your cool friend. Then, when the two of you break out (really, when your cool friend breaks out and drags you along with him because you’re catatonic), your cool friend gets killed protecting you and with his dying breath asks you to live on for him.

So you do.

You become a mercenary like he planned to be, use the sword he used, unwittingly fall in love with the girl he fell in love with, and wind up building an entire false reality for yourself. In this false reality, your memories are no longer trustworthy. Without quite realizing it, you revise your memories so that you see yourself doing all the things your cool elite military friend did because now you are the badass, and you forget all about him. Then you inadvertently help fulfill the dark designs of your old hero (you know, the psychotic one who burned down your hometown and killed your mother? Yeah, he’s back), who has determined to erase all life from the face of the planet. Then you get to watch as he kills the woman you (and your cool friend) loved, and are eventually made to confront the humiliating truth that the story of your life as you have thus far presented it to everyone you know is a lie. Your misery is made complete when the scientist who ran the experiments on you tells you that the experiment was a failure (and by extension, so are you).

And in your mind, a certainty begins to emerge: you are clearly the world’s whipping boy.

All of which helps to make Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII so refreshing. In it, you play Cloud’s friend from his days as a Shin-Ra military grunt: Zack Fair. And Zack enjoys his life. He likes being in SOLDIER, the organization that (as it turns out) Cloud could only dream of joining in reality. Zack is kind and upbeat and kind of cool. He’s big on proving his honor and being a hero, but he’s also still pretty in touch with reality, which makes him a rarity among role-playing game heroes in general. He’s what you’d get if the sort of plucky young heroes who populate a lot of RPGs ever grew up and had some sense knocked into them without having all the idealism knocked out.

Crisis Core also benefits from taking place at a point in time some years before the events of Final Fantasy VII proper occur, so the world doesn’t seem to be in quite such a dire position at this point. Shin-Ra doesn’t seem to be quite so evil, and Sephiroth seems – shockingly! – to be a relatively well-balanced person.

Speaking of Sephiroth…

I always wondered about this “being a hero” business he gets credited with in the backstory of Final Fantasy VII. Cloud looks up to him, and when he’s explaining the backstory in the village of Kalm, just after the party escapes Midgar, he mentions that Sephiroth was sort of his role model. The world at large, and Cloud in particular, apparently saw him as some kind of hero at the time. Which is funny, because, however much we know we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, one look is all it takes in this case. Something about Sephiroth just screams psychotic, unrepentant, nihilistic destroyer of worlds.

Crisis Core gives us a much-appreciated look at him before the insanity set in, though, and what we see is someone who could actually have been a decent guy if he was left well enough alone. But part of what Crisis Core does is widen our gaze on this era of the Shin-Ra Electric Power Company, and we see that Sephiroth isn’t the only superhuman badass on the company’s payroll. In fact, there are two others.

One is Genesis, who looks a whole lot like Sephiroth, except his coat (and overall color scheme) is red instead of black, and he wears a shirt under his coat. He carries a straight, double-edged sword, and his face is modeled after the Japanese rock star and actor Gackt. He feels like the sort of Mary-Sue character who inhabits online role-play forums, and he’s just about as annoying, what with his constantly quoting from the in-universe play Loveless. He’d probably be insufferable if he had a greater presence in the game.

Genesis is also something of a monomaniac, with the overarching obsession of proving himself greater than Sephiroth. In this, he serves to make Sephiroth himself (even the 100% pure, distilled villain Sephiroth of Final Fantasy VII proper) seem calm and well-balanced in comparison. For those reading who thought Sephiroth was overwrought and overplayed as a villain (both in the setting of Final Fantasy VII and related media, such as Kingdom Hearts), I ask you to look at Genesis and take note: it could have been so much worse.

The second of these superhuman characters is Angeal, who is kind and good-natured, even-tempered and humble. He is the peacemaker of the three, the one who strives for harmony, and also manages to be kind of a tree-hugger. How this man manages to live with himself, being a member of Shin-Ra and all, confuses me to no end. In terms of appearance, he looks a lot like Zack (and therefore, to an extent, a lot like Cloud). Or rather, since Zack is his protégé and Cloud has based himself more or less completely on Zack, it might be more accurate to say that they both resemble him, but more on this later. In any case, it is partly Angeal who instills in Zack a sense of honor and a need to do whatever is right, despite the costs.

Sephiroth comes across somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, as someone who is troubled at times by the mysteries in his past which he cannot or will not face (yet), but who is capable of real warmth and likability. And you have to like the silver-haired villain if for no other reason than that he finds such an eloquent, almost poetic, way to tell Genesis, late in the game, to fuck off and die.

As for the game proper, it covers a period of time between Shin-Ra’s ascendance (having recently conquered the nation of Wutai) and the beginning of their truly serious troubles with the terrorist organization AVALANCHE which occupy the beginning of Final Fantasy VII proper. This is a period that sees the fading of the heroic pantheon of SOLDIER, who seem to have little purpose now that the major wars and conflicts have been fought, and the dredging up of a plethora of dirty little secrets Shin-Ra would prefer to leave forgotten. As the danger and the violence spiral further and further out of control, Zack finds himself sent hither, thither and yon trying to exert some basic form of damage control. As he tries to find and capture those responsible, it begins to feel like the world he knows and has been trained to protect is crumbling around him. And yet, he keeps his head squarely on his shoulders, keeps his upbeat attitude, and in general behaves like the only sane man in a world going rapidly insane.

Unlike the main game, Crisis Core is a more action-oriented game. It still has the trappings of an RPG, but they support and underpin a game that is largely a frantic scramble carried out in real time. You still have random encounters, but they occur in the same space you explore the game in. There's still a sort of “beat” to the fighting, though, which still allows it to retain a very, very vague sense of having turns. Increasing experience levels are determined by part of the Digital Mind Wave, which also determines when Zack will perform a limit break. The leveling-up seems random, but that may be a consequence of the DMW resembling a doubled set of slot machine wheels (one controlling increases in Zack’s level and the level of his material, and the other controlling which attacks or techniques he uses in battle). Level increases happen with relative regularity, and it seems like they’re either not actually randomly determined, or else the randomness is mitigated by other unseen mechanics.

The DMW also serves another purpose: it serves to tell us what thoughts are going through Zack’s mind as he repeatedly throws himself into dangerous situations. This becomes clear in the game’s final encounter, though it’s fairly apparent beforehand, in the way that new events and characters are added to it as you progress.

As you might imagine, Crisis Core expands generously on the original material. This is of course unavoidable. The story of Zack as presented in Final Fantasy VII is brief – you could barely even make it a short story, if you were to write it in prose. Certainly it doesn’t justify a game all to itself without expansion.

Part of this expanding comes in the form of missions, which you can take on at any time throughout the game (and never mind how illogical or nonsensical it would be to be able to do so at whatever time you choose to accept them). I don’t much care for the missions. Most of them are unimaginative, simply re-using areas previously visited in the game, with simple goals that usually amount to nothing more complex than “kill the boss of this area” or “find this item”. I know they’re there to add replayability, or to add to the portability of the game, but they’re boring and repetitive and the fact of the matter is that I’d rather not have them at all, length of the game be damned. I know they’re present to add to the length of the game, but length is not the same as quality. If I had my choice, I’d prefer not to be presented with material that I don’t actually enjoy in any real sense, but feel obligated to try completing anyway thanks to the persistent obsessive-compulsive tendencies ingrained in me through years of RPG-playing. I’ll play a short game, gladly, as long as every bit of it is actually good.

Thankfully, the second way Square Enix chose to expand the game was through simply adding characters and events to the story that were not mentioned the first time around. This is the sort of thing that would normally worry me; it’s rare that tampering with the history of an established story works out well. Often, this process can open up as many plot holes (if not more) as it attempts to close, but in this case it actually works, and for reasons that make sense.

It helps to remember that the person explaining most of this background in the original Final Fantasy VII is Cloud. And Cloud, as I mentioned above, is not the most reliable of narrators. He gives us the events from his perspective, but even when you account for his depressing tendency to alter his own memories so that he did all the things Zack was responsible for, there's a lot that gets left out. This is because he wasn’t there for many of the pivotal events which Zack witnessed.

So the story we thought we knew changes somewhat, now that we see it through Zack’s eyes. When Cloud related these events to us, for instance, we were led to believe Sephiroth deduced on his own that he was not in fact human, but the result of a fantastically unethical series of experiments designed to create a superhuman warrior based on alien DNA. In Crisis Core, Genesis appears before Sephiroth to deliver this crushing revelation. Of course, Genesis and Angeal were both in a position to know, by the end. Genesis has embraced the inherent monstrosity of his nature. Angeal fought it, as does Sephiroth for a time.

And this revision of the continuity merges pretty seamlessly with the original tale. The events of Crisis Core are depicted differently here than they are in the main body of Final Fantasy VII not because the scenario writers are lazy or incompetent, but because Cloud, who related these events the first time around, wasn’t there to tell us for sure how Sephiroth found out about his origins. He wasn’t inside the Mako reactor at Nibelheim when the horrible truth came crashing down. In fact, for most of the revelatory moments of Crisis Core’s story, he was absent. He told us what he knew, and filled in the blanks as best he could. There is no reason to believe he ever even crossed paths with Genesis or Angeal, so of course he would be oblivious to the impact they had on Zack’s life, and therefore his as well.

Obviously this was not entirely by design. I’m comfortably certain nobody at Square Enix thought, way back in 1997 when they were still Squaresoft, that they could leave these plot hooks in place on purpose to craft a sequel ten years later. But they capitalized on the natural gaps in the backstory in an impressively skillful way.

But perhaps one of the greatest things that sticks out in my mind about Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII is that it is a tragedy. This is rare in video games. Embedded in the very nature of anything that we call a game is the drive to win. This has been true since the very first video games were created; it has only been with the rise of the notion of games being a form of narrative that a non-victorious “victory” could even be considered, and very few games do it even now.

Of course, we know that Crisis Core is a tragedy going in. If you’re playing Crisis Core, the odds are good that you’ve played Final Fantasy VII. And if that’s the case, you know how all of this has to play out in the end. It’s a little heartbreaking to see Zack make friends, goof around, have fun and fall in love. You start rooting for him because, damn it, he’s just a likable person.

It’s even more heartbreaking watching him get in over his head.

And he is in over his head, make no mistake; that's part of the tragedy. There’s no question that he’s strong, determined and highly skilled. But pitted against the likes of Sephiroth, well… Let’s just say that – as Final Fantasy VII fans know full well – Sephiroth wasn’t beaten in Zack’s era by main strength, but because he underestimated the rage and determination of a regular rank and file fighter he had every reason to believe was out of commission.

In the end, what surprises me about Crisis Core is how I find myself reacting to it. I know the story of Final Fantasy VII fairly well. I know what happens to Zack, and I know that although Square Enix is happy to add as many events as you can think of to the story to flesh it out, they can’t really change the ending. And yet I keep finding myself wishing, as the game heads into its final chapters, as Sephiroth descends into madness and as Zack and Cloud make their final journey to Midgar, that events would play out in a different way.

And that is a mark of good storytelling.

The Time Ys Now

This is how I heard of Ys:

In the summer of 1998, between my junior and senior year in high school, I became interested in console emulation. Someone had loaded a then-popular NES emulator called Nesticle onto the school’s network, along with a ROM of Contra, and either hid it skillfully enough that the faculty could not find and delete it, or else was very persistent about reinstalling it if it did manage to get deleted. It wasn’t long after this that I had a version of Nesticle on my parents' computer, running all sorts of Nintendo games I’d never had the means to own.

At some point, it occurred to me to wonder about the possibility of other console systems being emulated. It turns out that the console systems that hadn’t been emulated (or in the process of being created) comprised a pretty short list, even in those days. So I started looking for games for the TurboGrafx-16, because I owned the system, but had come by it secondhand, and had very, very few genuinely decent games for it. I’m not sure why I was so interested in it, to be honest. The only possible explanation I can come up with today is that it interested me to see what a system would be like, what sorts of games it would have, when its makers weren’t involved in the increasingly desperate pissing contest between Nintendo and Sega that had dominated the 16-bit era. Also, my friend Josh was willing to sell it to me, along with five games, for about forty dollars. This was a deal I was not prepared to turn down.

So anyway, I was behind the computer late one night (my usual habit in those days was to be up until the small hours of the morning playing games or looking things up on the internet, so it was probably at least one o’clock in the morning, and very likely much later) looking for sites that might host downloadable TurboGrafx-16 ROMs. And I kept hearing mention of this game called Ys, or maybe Y’s; nobody seemed to be able to spell it consistently. The general opinion seemed to be that Ys and its sequel were the sorts of games that justified owning the system.

I couldn’t find download links for any of the Ys games, and it puzzled me until I learned why: the games being referred to specifically were for the TurboDuo, a CD-based add-on system for the TurboGrafx-16. Prior to this, I hadn’t been aware such a thing existed. At the time, the idea of downloading a CD’s worth of data was laughable. This was AOL dial-up, five hours per month (after which hourly charges kicked in), in an era when five hours seemed entirely sufficient for a person’s internet needs.

I know, I know — I’m old. Kids, lawn, etc.

But I was hooked, anyway. The idea of owning Ys, in some form, any form, had infected me somehow. The sheer elusiveness of the thing made it desirable. My curiosity made me want to learn more. The more I learned, the more I wanted it. Ys became my holy grail. (A couple of years later, Panzer Dragoon Saga would do this to me also).

Fun facts about Ys that I learned during this weird obsessive phase include:

1. Ys I and Ys II were originally computer games, released on a fairly popular Japanese PC (I don’t remember which model).

2. The soundtrack to the original games was composed by Yuzo Koshiro, possibly one of the first game music composers to reach any real level of fame and recognition as such.

3. The TurboDuo games I had originally read about were simply the first widespread release of the games in the U.S. (a PC version of the first game had been released Stateside, but does not seem to have done well).

4. Ys I and Ys II are almost always presented together. Whenever a new version of the first is announced, the second is guaranteed to follow.

5. The games feature an odd control scheme in which there is no attack button.

6. Ys I and Ys II may be the most remade and ported games in the history of the video gaming. Go on, see for yourself.

7. The games have basically nothing in common with the legendary lost city which shares the name.

8. The music for the games is also pretty great. I discovered this for myself when I bought a CD titled The Very Best of Ys at the local comic book store, back when they carried anime and video game soundtracks, anime and manga.

9. There was pretty much no other incentive to go to said comic book store.

A few years after this (somewhere around the summer of 2003), there were rumors of the PS2 version (itself an adaptation of the late-90s Ys I & II Eternal PC remakes) being brought to the U.S. I remember this distinctly, because I had downloaded the trailer, and was watching it obsessively on my first laptop before said laptop broke down utterly due to a relatively minor issue (the hard drive was physically broken).

A couple of years after I left the Army, I eventually managed to procure copies of the PC versions, Ys I & II Complete. Then I just had to wait for the English translation patch for Ys II to be completed (since the games are originally in Japanese, and this particular version never saw an official release in the U.S.

As unnecessary as it probably sounds to talk about all of that, it’s an integral part of my experience with these games. For the longest time, Ys was not a game to me. It was an experience, an idea. I listened to the music, I watched the anime that was based on it, I soaked up as much media as I could, but the game itself, the core object upon which all of these other things were founded, was absent. And so every time I sit down to play the game now, there’s a little bit of that allure of the unattainable still left. When you spend so long wanting a thing, even if that want is not overpowering, finally having that thing becomes an odd experience. There is a part of you that has difficulty processing the fact of that ownership, and is paranoid that the object may vanish.

So, what are these Ys games like?

Well, superficially, Ys resembles The Legend of Zelda. But where any given Zelda is about half action game and half adventure game, Ys is half action game, half role-playing game. The Legend of Zelda typically has you seeking out tools which serve the purposes of either allowing you to more thoroughly navigate the game’s world, allowing you more varied combat options, or both. You are presented with puzzles, which require the intelligent application of your tools to solve – this is the adventure game element, which lends a layer of depth to the otherwise fairly mundane walking-around-and-killing-enemies sort of game you’d have without it.

Ys is more like an RPG. The “obstacles” are strong enemies in maze-like dungeons, and the usual solution to these problems is to gain experience points and level up enough to meet the challenge. There are periodically items to be obtained, but rather than tools, these items are most often simply plot coupons, single-use items designed to allow passage through specific barriers. The game may slightly expand your skill set, but overall, what is asked of you as a player is mainly to become more competent with that skill set, and to become stronger.

This is not a bad thing. It is, though, something that makes Ys different from The Legend of Zelda, which it is often compared to.

Our hero is the wandering youth Adol Christin. Adol is an adventurer, traveling the world to see new and interesting things. Ys I deals with his journey in the land of Esteria, which was once the site of an ancient but advanced and enlightened civilization, called Ys. But the ancient land of Ys is no more; it is nothing but a legend in Esteria. Where it once stood there is now only a crater, and at the rim of that crater stands the Shrine of Solomon and Darm Tower, the latter of which is said to be the abode of myriad demonic creatures.

Esteria is surrounded by a storm barrier through which no ships have been known to pass, but Adol is a determined sort, and figures he can make it through. And, though he does encounter the storm barrier, and his ship is wrecked, he manages despite the odds to wash ashore, half-drowned but alive. From here he explores the land, and finds that Esteria seems to be on the edge of collapse, with monsters roaming the countryside at will, and most people scared to leave their settlements. Cities and towns are heavily fortified or protected by magic, and the monsters responsible for the danger seem to be continuously pouring out of Darm Tower. And so Adol makes his way there to face the unknown evil that has cast its shadow across the land.

By itself, Ys I would be disappointing. It’s good, but short. Now, I like short games – I felt that Ico was just right in terms of length, as the older I get, and the more responsibilities I have, the more I appreciate a game that can give me a quality experience without demanding too much of my ever-shrinking free time. But Ys I can be beaten in five hours, possibly less. There are only three towns (the earlier versions only had two), and three dungeons. To be fair, the final dungeon is Darm Tower, and it quite literally takes up the latter half of the game. But still, the game is tremendously short. This may be part of why Ys I and Ys II are almost always presented as a set.

See, Ys II picks up literally moments after Ys I ends. After a climactic final battle at the top of Darm Tower, Adol is sent flying through the sky, to land in the ancient land of Ys, which has been floating through the sky for centuries. There, he must find the source of the evil that menaces both Ys and the world below, and try to set right the wrongs of the distant past.

Ys II is a much longer and more varied game, and expands Adol’s skill set to include a handful of magic spells, though some of these are of limited usefulness.

I sometimes wonder if Ys I and Ys II weren’t originally designed to be one game, then cut at some point in development. The early Playstation RPGs Arc the Lad and Arc the Lad II experienced something similar to this. Supposedly, the original Arc the Lad was meant to be a launch title for the Playstation, but the proposed design for the game was far too ambitious to be completed in time. Rather than compromise, the development team simply placed an end on the game at a certain point, and continued making the rest of it as a sequel. Ys I and Ys II feel much the same, considering the two essentially tell a single story between them.

Now, I can’t deny that this two-part story is somewhat simple, even cliché at points. But it’s just deep enough to feel appropriately urgent, and not much time is spent expositing to the player. There’s just enough background to make the world feel real and interesting, enough story to make you want to keep going, and not so much of either that they really interfere with the flow of the game.

There are some curious design choices present, though. And these seem to remain constant not just in the various remakes of Ys I and Ys II, but also in the wider series.

Perhaps the most famous of these is the lack of an attack button. While not all of the entries in the series have this “feature” – in fact, only Ys I, Ys II and both versions of Ys IV do – it has become one of the more memorable aspects of the first two games. Instead of pressing a button to attack, Adol simply rams into enemies. The key is how this ramming is carried out. A direct collision harms Adol just as much as it harms the enemy, if not more, and it’s easy to get yourself killed in a hurry if you’re not paying attention. The proper ramming technique is to collide with your enemies in an off-center fashion. This deals plenty of damage to them, while Adol takes none. The easiest way to achieve this is by using diagonal maneuvers, though early versions of the games only allowed for four-directional movements.

At first, this combat system seems irredeemably stupid. Even when I was obsessing over the games, I worried that this was going to be a deal-breaker. But no – it works. Once I got the hang of it, I wondered why I ever thought it would bother me. In a way, it’s actually kind of nice; certainly it’s efficient. Grinding for an experience level or two is a lot less objectionable when there’s so little real work involved in the task.

Another odd design quirk is that you can usually only have one item (aside from equipment like weapons, armor and the like) ready for use at a time, and when you’re in a boss battle, you cannot change it this item. You can pause, but your menu options are unavailable. Also, many of the most desirable items, such as healing potions, can only be carried one at a time. If you already have one in your inventory, you can’t pick up a second, no matter how much sense it would make to have multiples. If the game was less well balanced, this would bother me considerably. As it is, it’s probably just my RPG player’s instincts kicking in, demanding I have as many of a healing or restorative item as it is possible to carry, just in case.

I do also need to take a moment to comment on the music. Ys, as a series, has probably some of the most consistently high-quality music I have ever heard in a video game. The style swings back and forth from orchestral to hard guitar rock and back again, and points in between, and there are few soundtracks I’ve been more keen to own than the Ys soundtracks.

As far as actually finding the games, well, that’s gotten a lot less difficult recently. A few years ago, Nintendo released the TurboDuo versions of the games on their Virtual Console. More recently still, Atlus brought out the Nintendo DS versions of the games in the form of Legacy of Ys, though this version is sort of the ugly one out of the lot. It uses scaled-down two-dimensional sprite graphics for the characters and enemies, and awkward, blocky 3D graphics for the landscapes. It's not bad, just visually awkward.

Even better, XSEED localized Ys I & II Chronicles, the PSP version of the original two games, for the U.S. early in 2011. Based on the Ys I & II Eternal versions from the late 1990s, this is probably the definitive version of the two early games. XSEED also seems to have a sense of humor when it came to advertising the games, too.

Like He-Man, but with better animation and less clothing

For several years, I had heard Ralph Bakshi’s name thrown around in reference to American animation, but had never seen any of his work. I was intrigued by descriptions of the work, which ranged from “adult, in the sense of possessing sophistication and intelligence,” to “adult, in the sense that it is at war with the Disney notion of how animation should be done and who it should be done for, and in fact tackles subjects and themes Disney would probably prefer to forget even exist”. He also created a doomed animated adaptation of the first half of Lord of the Rings, which, now that I think about it, may be how I heard of him in the first place.

I’ve been hesitant to explore any of Bakshi’s works. This is mostly owing to the reading I’ve done about him and the animation he has produced. The idea I get, reading about him, is that the quality of his output seems to be about as irregular as the ECG readout of a heart arrhythmia patient. At the same time, I’ve been fascinated by the skill he puts into his animation. So, finally, I broke down and watched Fire and Ice.

I don’t know why I chose this movie specifically, except perhaps that I knew if I picked up his version of Lord of the Rings, I would be incapable of giving it a fair chance. I would be disappointed from the word go. And there’s a part of me that is somewhat attracted to sword-and-sorcery, or “low” fantasy; it’s why I own copies of all the original Kull and Conan stories. And God knows there are times when Fire and Ice feels like a lost Robert E. Howard story.

Apparently, this movie was a collaboration between Bakshi and fantasy artist Frank Frazetta. If you don’t know who Frazetta is, just imagine every generic fantasy painting you’ve ever seen where the woman is wearing a chainmail bikini and the man is wearing nothing more than a loincloth and a helmet, and brandishing his muscles as much as his sword or axe. If the painting you’re thinking of wasn’t created by Frazetta, then it was created by someone who was inspired by him.

The story of Fire and Ice opens with a woman narrating, in the finest William Shatner style, the central dilemma. There was an evil sorceress named Juliana who had a son, Nekron, and she tutored him in all of her dark arts. They live far to the north, in a place called Icepeak, and from there they are using their dark magic to push a massive glacier ever southward, with the end goal of covering the world in ice and then ruling it.

Nekron seems to be satisfied with alternately lounging or brooding on his throne, moving the glacier occasionally and calling it a day, but his mother has somewhat grander designs. Under the guise of sending an envoy to King Jarol of Firekeep (who appears to be the only leader left in the world capable enough or willing enough to put up any useful resistance to Nekron) in order negotiate a truce, she has her minions kidnap his daughter Teegra.

Teegra’s curvaceous physique is drawn with loving detail. Anyone could make her costume; all you need is some string, a single handkerchief and a pair of scissors — and you’ll have some of the handkerchief left over when you’re done, believe me. It would seem sexist, except the men are just as scantily clad, and just as much attention is paid to the muscles of our heroes as is paid to the ample bosom and well-rounded hips of our heroine. It’s equal-opportunity objectification, is what I’m saying.

Teegra, however, is actually more intelligent and less useless than the average bikini-clad fantasy princess, in that she has both the wits and the drive to escape her captors on multiple occasions. Sure, she’s a damsel who quite frequently finds herself in distress (at one point, she briefly winds up in the clutches of a lesbian sorceress), but thankfully she believes that her options for dealing with said distress should involve more than “wait for rescue”.

Our hero, though, is Larn, a tall, scarcely clad warrior from a village recently decimated by Nekron and his sub-human minions (no, really, they’re seriously called sub-humans). He manages to escape the destruction of his village and is heading south when he runs into Teegra in an ancient and abandoned temple complex. The two spend an indeterminate period of time there together, presumably falling in love, until an unfortunate accident causes Larn to be separated from Teegra and nearly eaten by what seems to be a freshwater kraken. Teegra, mourning his apparent loss, is recaptured by the sub-humans and eventually carried off to Nekron and his mother.

Larn follows her, always just a few steps behind, and falls in with the mysterious warrior Darkwolf, who looks for all the world like some terrifying cross between Conan the barbarian and the goddamned Batman. Darkwolf seems to have devoted his life to the wholesale slaughter of Nekron’s minions (and, ideally, Nekron himself), and it is obliquely hinted that he may be something other than strictly human.

The rest of the movie concerns itself with Larn’s attempts to rescue Teegra, Teegra’s attempts to escape Nekron, and Darkwolf's habit of murdering every sub-human he happens across.

The movie has little in the way of plot. Most of the events of the story are simply random tribulations that occur as the characters are on the way to some other goal or objective. It’s mostly entertaining to watch, but serves no purpose in terms of actually telling us anything about the story or characters. As odd as it is to say about a movie that clocks in at just under an hour and a half, most of Fire and Ice is fluff.

Granted, it is gorgeously animated fluff. Bakshi employed a technique called rotoscoping, which is sort of the hand-drawn equivalent to motion-capture in three-dimensional CG animation like that seen in Avatar or 2007’s Beowulf. Basically, Bakshi filmed live actors performing all the action in the movie, and then had his animators draw over it to create some of the most fluid, realistic animation you will ever see.

The action, then, winds up being fairly realistic, and oddly subdued at points. Early on, when Larn is attempting to escape through the trees from his sub-human pursuers, the chase is not the sort of high-speed pursuit you might expect. Rather than dazzle the audience with a speedy chase, Bakshi gives us a much more deliberately paced escape which heightens Larn’s growing sense of worry and alarm as his pursuers, who seem far more nimble, close in.

Likewise, the fighting is usually quick and the moves employed by the characters are sharp and utilitarian. The only long, drawn-out duel is between Larn and Nekron, and it manages to be a tense affair mainly because of how obvious it is that Nekron is toying with Larn.

Where the movie falls apart is with its characters, who are barely developed, if at all. Nekron is a completely stereotypical megalomaniacal sorcerer with (mostly justified) supreme confidence in his powers and the inevitability of his conquest. Except for when he strips down and takes up a sword to spar with Larn, he never deviates from this one-note presentation. Larn himself is never much more than a resourceful barbarian whose primary motivation is to retrieve his love interest, and Teegra is just as bad. In fact, no one in this cast undergoes any actual character development.

Hell, there’s not even much in the way of dialogue. This is mostly because the mere handful of named characters are often alone, wandering the wilderness with only the violent sub-humans to interact with. And by “interact with,” I mean “slaughter”. The sub-humans certainly don’t talk. They sort of hoot and mutter and gibber indistinctly. Occasionally they yell. But there is no real dialogue for these characters, and in fact, half the time their vocalizations don’t even seem to quite match up to the on-screen actions. Given their dark skin and vaguely ape-like features, there are some unfortunate implications here.

Is Fire and Ice good? It’s hard to say. It goes nowhere, but it provides an acceptably enjoyable ride getting there. The plot seems to have no real logical problems or plot holes, or other similar troubles, but it’s also dead simple. If you aim low and hit your target, that isn’t skill so much as it is taking the easy way out. The animation is, again, stunning. But the lack of character development means Fire and Ice isn’t something I’ll be going back to very much. There’s nothing to dissect, nothing even to think about after the credits roll.

Revisiting the Reunion

People use the phrase love-hate relationship a lot—I do too—but it was a long time before I ever really understood what it meant to love something but also hate it at the same time. I usually feel a single way about a thing, or if the feeling is mixed, it usually isn’t a mix of polar opposites. But here we are with Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. It’s not so much that I love it and hate it both at once, but that there are things about it, taken separately, that I love and hate (very little falls in between) and so when the whole is taken together, I can’t determine an overall positive or negative feeling. It is a completely null value, nearly impossible to judge.

This may have something to do with why I haven’t watched it in nearly five years.

The last time I can distinctly recall watching this movie would be the night before my friend Steve and I drove to Otakon in 2006. So, you know. Kind of a while.

I watched it again tonight (along with the short OVA Last Order: Final Fantasy VII) because I’ve been just generally in a Final Fantasy VII frame of mind lately, I’m not sure I want to tackle a 40-odd hour game right now, but I did have at least a couple of hours to kill. The movie doesn’t seem to take a couple of hours, but it is in fact nearly that long. It probably seems less so because it’s really so much eye-candy, with the plot (such as it is) packed into the beginning and the best parts of the action comprising pretty much the final half.

It’s not heavy viewing, is what I’m saying.

I love Advent Children because it is a return to a world and a group of people who I spent a lot of time with. The thing about a role-playing game (a lot of games do this, but role-playing games are best at it because they are longer and you have more control over things) is that you get close to the characters. This doesn’t happen the way it does in a movie, or in a book, where you are shown the characters. It happens in only the way that video games can allow, by letting you be the people in question. This is a fundamentally deeper level of involvement in a narrative. Regardless of the level of skill with which it is handled, the potential is greater.

Of course, we as players don’t really control the plot of the game (and Final Fantasy VII has at least one moment that uses this fact pretty brilliantly, to good narrative effect). In a narrative of as grand a design (in intent if not in actual outcome) as Final Fantasy VII’s, there is no altering the story, or the dialogue; we do not control how the characters develop. But we do provide the will, the motive force, that keeps them going. We are what takes them from one event to the next, one crisis to the next, and on to the ultimate resolution. Occasionally we are asked to be the mind for the characters, solving their problems. There is only one solution, but we are the ones who have to help them find it. This tends to skew our thoughts in favor of the characters, because the characters are in fact, at least in part, us.

I say this so that you will understand why I loved these characters so much, despite the fact that, viewed objectively, the plot and character development of the game falls pretty squarely into the “Could Definitely Use Some Work” category.

The creators of this movie even appear to acknowledge that they are trading on this feeling, considering they open Advent Children with these lines:

“To those who loved this world, and knew friendly company within. This Reunion is for you.”

And I have to tell you, that trading on our familiarity, our nostalgia for this movie? It works. There is a scene toward the end of the movie, where one by one the party from the game comes together again to join the fight. I get pretty choked up by it every time I watch it. You see, I am a tremendous nerd.

So this is the initial positive: a fond return to a known setting and well-loved characters, with whom I already have a deep connection.

This helps soften the blow of the major negative of the movie which, though it has a few different manifestations, is nevertheless at its heart one overarching problem. Namely, that this movie is dumb.

So very, very fucking dumb.

Now, normally I don’t demand that every movie be an aggressively mind-expanding experience, full of deep wisdom and profound insights into the nature and inner workings of life, the universe and everything. That’s nice, don’t get me wrong, and always to be lauded and applauded. But sometimes when I’m hungry, I'm just in the mood for dessert, you know?

One thing I constantly gripe about regarding this movie is the way they completely undo all the character development the hero went through in the original game, all so they can do it over again for the movie. My girlfriend rolls her eyes every time I talk about this, but she’s never actually played the game. For her, the movie is just eye-candy. And that’s fine, really. To each their own, and all. But it’s a serious problem to me.

It’s not as if this is the sequel to another movie or something. It’s the sequel to a role-playing game, one that can easily take up 40 hours of your life (or more) if you’re devoted to finding every last mystical doodad and whatsit. The hero’s character is dissected in pretty excruciating detail throughout this process, and the resolution to his personal issues is honestly (if memory serves; it has been about twelve or thirteen years now) pretty well done, and pretty solidly resolved. There isn’t a lot of reason to think he would continue having these problems, or that these old mental and emotional wounds would reopen. If there is a reason, none is given by the movie. Ever. We just see Cloud being cold and withdrawn and mopey again, and the only thing we’re ever told about this is that the losses he (and therefore we) experienced throughout the course of the original game’s narrative, the burden of knowing there were people he couldn’t save, weigh on him. Except this was, again, all part of what Cloud had to resolve once he confronted the truth about who he really was toward the latter half of the original game (it’s too long and complicated to explain here).

Part of me doesn’t understand why they would do this. But then, another part of me does. Cloud Strife is a character in Final Fantasy VII, which is not just an RPG. It is the RPG that made RPGs a popular and profitable genre to the West, at least as far as console gamers were concerned, and it was one of the games that helped to forward the notion that games could be storytelling media (there were others before this, but they didn't enjoy Final Fantasy VII's level of market penetration). And so of course when Square Enix decided that, rather than throw their full efforts into a new creative endeavor (said decision likely being partly the result of Final Fantasy XII’s torturous development), they could easily and more profitably revisit previous properties, it suddenly becomes clear exactly why they would do this. There are reasons for Cloud’s character development to be completely undone, it turns out. Millions and millions of reasons, if by reasons you mean dollars.

There is one other problem with the movie, which is that it’s a bit lazy in spots. It pays lip service to the notion of filling in all the newcomers on the story via a large exposition dump. It basically runs as follows:

There was once a powerful warrior named Sephiroth who realized that his existence was the result of a science experiment of the very maddest sort, that he was not in fact strictly human, and that the being from which he was partly derived (again, it’s…complicated. Or at least convoluted) was a space-faring entity that nearly destroyed the world. Feeling wronged by the nature of the very experiment that created him, he decided to follow in the footsteps of the creature that was his genesis and try to destroy the world, too. A group of people who (quite understandably, I think) took issue with this course of action banded together to stop him. Their leader, Cloud, had lost a number of friends and family at Sephiroth’s hands both in the backstory and in the course of the game, and had to recover from the queen bitch of all identity crises in order to get his act together to wipe out the threat that Sephiroth posed.

That’s actually probably clearer and more concise than the way Advent Children gives it to us, really. And that’s actually not so bad. The problem is that despite this, to really get the movie, you have to be pretty familiar with the game. For instance, the church where the disease Geostigma is finally cured is the church where the character Aerith from the game grew her flowers, and some of her healing presence remains there. But the movie never tells you who she is, why some part of her would remain in that church, why she would really be instrumental in healing this particular disease, or any of those other niggling little details. I don’t particularly mind this way of handling the story, considering how unrepentantly for-the-fans this movie makes itself out to be. But then why even bother with the recap at the beginning of the movie at all? If we can remember all the tinier details of the game’s world and setting, surely we can keep the more basic outline of events straight without help.

It’s just half-assed. The time and effort and money spent rendering those scenes might have been better spent explaining to us why Cloud suffered such a major reversion of character.

The last thing I feel obligated to mention is the action scenes. There are a lot of them (they seem to comprise more than half of the movie altogether), and the choreography is quite simply… something. Advent Children has its characters flying all over the place, being tossed several hundred, if not thousands of feet into the air, taking abuse that would kill an average human dozens of times over, cutting motorcycles in half (while airborne, mind you, and also upside down) with swords so large that an actual human being probably could not wield them in any useful way, cutting pieces of buildings apart with said swords… It really has to be seen to be understood. And I’m divided on this. Part of me has trouble reconciling this sort of thing with any serious narrative (and Advent Children, despite appearances, seems very earnest about at least wanting to be a serious narrative). That part of me just wants to stand there and point at the screen and go “Look at this shit. LOOK. At. This. Shit. It is ridiculous.” And then the other part of me just sits there with a big grin on his face, capable of only one vocalization: “WOOOOOOOOO!” Like it was a concert, or some kind of stadium event.

So there you have it, I guess. Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is big and stupid and epic and ridiculous. It’s kind of like a Dragonforce song that way.

The Best Is Yet to Come

This all began because I got an itch to start playing the Metal Gear Solid games, and wound up playing through the whole series backward. If that seems like an odd way to do it, that’s because it is.

I’d like to tell you that I had some good, thoughtful reason for doing it this way. I’d like to say that I played the games in reverse order so that I could work my way down through all the progressive layers of bells and whistles (and bullshit), paring down all the additions made to the gameplay over the course of the series in order to arrive at some conclusion regarding the true essence of the games…or, you know, whatever. The fact is that this is not the case at all.
I started playing the fourth game, largely because it was the only one I hadn’t completed at least once previously. When that was done, I decided to go back to the third game, because I was in the mood for more Metal Gear Solid, and it was (and probably still is) my favorite in the series. When that was finished, I still wasn’t ready to be done with the series as a whole, so I progressed to the second game, and from there to the first. From there, I went on to Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, because my nature demanded I complete things, and because I was able to buy it on the cheap at eBay.

It did not become clear to me until midway through my time with the third game that I would be doing write-ups of the series for my blog. I already had it in mind to go through the whole series—or rather, I had an idea that I would wind up doing so (I don’t really plan these things)—and it occurred to me that I like these games enough and talk about them enough that it would be only natural to do blog entries on them.

So, here we are. I will try to make my write-ups for these games as accessible as possible. Whether that means I am leaving out information, or explaining everything so that everyone understands every important nuance, is a decision I haven’t yet made.

I suppose we’ll all find out together.

In the meantime, I’m going to write a little bit about how I got interested in this series of games in the first place.

I first ran across Metal Gear Solid on Christmas day, 1998, because nothing says “holiday cheer” like Tactical Espionage Action. I got a Playstation from my parents, and the demo disc that came with it included a playable demo of the game. The dialogue was still all in Japanese, but as an anime fan, that was hardly any kind of deterrent.

What was a deterrent was the control scheme. Prior to this, I had owned an 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. The controller (as most of you likely know) featured a directional pad, two face buttons, a Start button and a Select button. Pretty pedestrian, really, even though my mother still—still!—pines for the ancient arcade-style joystick with two buttons featured by the Atari 7800, which we owned for what felt like much longer to my child-self than five or six years.

(In the history of bad console design decisions, the Atari 7800 features one of what might be the very worst. The Pause button was located, not anywhere on the controller, where it could be easily accessed in case you needed to pause the game suddenly to get a drink or go to the bathroom or whatever, where it would have made some kind of sense, but on the console itself. So to pause the game, you had to put down the controller, get up, and walk over to the console. Trying to beat your high score in Centipede? You might want to think about unplugging the phone first.)

From this humble 8-bit start, I was required to accustom myself to a directional pad, four face buttons, a Start button, a Select button, four shoulder buttons, and two analog sticks. I felt like I was upgrading form a go-kart to a Ferrari. And make no mistake, Metal Gear Solid uses all of those things, except for the right analog stick.

But there was more to my initial distaste than the feeling which must go through the mind of a nine-year-old all alone behind the wheel of a moving vehicle who knows just enough to understand that the steering wheel turns it and one of those pedals down there makes it go: specifically, “What the hell am I doing?” There was also the fact that the primary focus of the game is stealth. Now, most games encourage the player to confront and destroy his opponents. Even kid-friendly games—any installment of Super Mario Bros., for instance—have enemies whose primary intention is killing the player. It may be hard to take all those big, goofy-looking Goombas and Koopa Troopas seriously, but trust me on this: they come at you with death in their eyes and violence in their hearts, and they are out to kill you. I was used to walking right up to my enemies and dispatching them with clean efficiency. The main challenges up to this point had always been finding the right way to do so. The right order to tackle the enemies in, the right technique to use, the right combination of moves and the character’s abilities… Metal Gear Solid says “Nah, fuck all that,” and gets down to the grim business of brutally disabusing you of all such notions in minutes. You spend much of your time in the game hiding, avoiding detection, and attacking only when there is no sure retribution. You can destroy all of your enemies, but what you can’t do is win in the sort of pitched firefight around which most other games are built. The odds are stacked astronomically against it. Sneak up behind them—snap their necks, beat them or choke them into unconsciousness, shoot them with your silenced pistol—dispatch them quietly. Oh, and watch out for cameras. And mines. And infrared laser-triggered traps. Be prepared for enemies to investigate signs of your presence—loud footfalls, trails of footprints in the snow, etc. I mean, the enemies in the first Metal Gear Solid aren’t smart by any stretch of the imagination, but they’ll do more than just walk in circles and shoot you if you cross their (bafflingly short) line of sight. They try, you know?

Anyway, I couldn’t handle playing the demo. It was just too much change too soon for my liking, and I was thankful that it ended as quickly as it did. I resolved to think no more about the game, no matter how many people told me it was pure entertainment distilled into the form of a game disc. They might be entertained, but I had tried it, and it didn’t agree with me.

I tried the demo for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty a couple of years later, when I was in the Army, and had basically the same reaction. The controller was second nature to me by this point, but it required some fairly awkward combinations of button presses to do all the things that were necessary. One of the many ways the sequel improved on its predecessor was to give the player more moves, more abilities, more things that he might potentially do…all with the same amount of buttons as before. If that sounds potentially confusing to you, well, it is. My experience was much the same as last time, and I decided that this was just a series of games that was not for me.

Then, in the spring or summer of 2002, I was playing a game called Headhunter. It was originally a Dreamcast game made in Europe, but had been ported to the Playstation2, probably in part because the Dreamcast market in the States had collapsed by the time the game could have made it here on its native system. It was sort of fun, as long as you didn’t expect much. It was simple in terms of gameplay, story and difficulty. I read on GameFAQs that it was supposed to be Sega’s answer to the Metal Gear Solid franchise. Others described it at Metal Gear Lite. Now, by this point, I had seen how shallow the gameplay in Headhunter was, and was in the mood for something a little more substantial—something that would require me to think a little more. Suddenly, Metal Gear Solid no longer seemed like an impossible task. The feeling was one very similar to the feeling I’d had many years back, on learning to swim for the first time. The deep end of the pool stopped being an object of fear, and started to look like a fun challenge. So I walked a couple of miles to the store to pick up both Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. I figured that if I actually spent real money on them, that would require me to invest time and patience into the process of figuring them out and truly understanding them. And in the end, if it still turned out that these games were very emphatically not for me, well, my income was largely expendable at the time. The truth was, I could spend that kind of money back then without really thinking about it.

And so, here I am today, telling you that this is one of my favorite series of all time. Sure, the storyline isn’t always very believable or even sensible a lot of the time, but so what? I’m probably over-simplifying it by putting it this way, but Metal Gear Solid, for me, is basically G.I. Joe for adults: It’s a military fantasy. More than that, it’s a hell of a lot of fun, and in the end, does it need to be anything else?

Over the Top and Far Away

I'm one of the only people I know who wasn't required to read Beowulf in high school. I did eventually read it in college, but I have to admit that it wasn't really an enjoyable experience. I wanted to like the book, but I spent so much time trying to determine what was being said that it was difficult to get a handle on what was happening. For that reason, then, most of my experience with the story is derived from movies made based on the tale.

This hasn't always been a good thing. Let me show you why.

The first Beowulf movie I ever saw - in fact, my first experience with the tale at all - was the 1999 movie Beowulf, starring Christopher Lambert.

This movie is some kind of re-imagining of the original legend, taking place in an odd industrial-fantasy world where Heorot is a castle that serves as some kind of military outpost, with Hrothgar ruling over it. He has a daughter by his dead wife, and is being menaced on a regular basis by a monster called Grendel whose motives and origins are unknown to his men.

Into this crisis comes Beowulf, a bounty hunter of considerable skill. Said skill is demonstrated early in the movie when he thrashes some soldiers around on his way to Heorot. Once there, he offers his services in slaying the monster. He is accepted, but plenty of Hrothgar's warriors seem to dislike him. There is some intrigue at the castle involving Hrothgar's daughter and her dead husband, and Beowulf's presence seems to open this old wound.

Meanwhile, Hrothgar's daughter takes an interest in Beowulf, which he takes some pains to stem. He is apparently part monster himself, and this gives him the strength and insight necessary to defeat Grendel. However, he can't handle the thought of his monstrous genes being passed on.

Eventually, it comes to light that Grendel is Hrothgar's son by a demon who has inhabited the castle and its grounds for time out of mind. This demon is understandably angered when Beowulf succeeds in killing Grendel, and decides to take her vengeance. Needless to say, she is thwarted by Beowulf. However, in the end, only he and Hrothgar's daughter remain alive, and so the two go riding into the sunset.

There are a lot of problems with this movie, foremost among them (for me) being the fact that Beowulf is meant to be seen as a sympathetic character, someone laboring under the curse of being half-monster. But there's little reason why this should seem to bother him. Aside from being solemn and withdrawn, there's really nothing unusual about Beowulf's appearance or behavior (considering his occupation) to mark him out as anything other than human. And while Christopher Lambert may be a competent action guy, I'm not convinced of his ability to act convincingly. That's really the central problem, here. We're supposed to sympathize with this character, but there's nothing to him. Beowulf is a man in a long black coat with a "cool" sword who kills monsters. He is as one-dimensional as the character in the original poem, which isn't a good thing.

Another specific problem I have with this movie has to do with Grendel's mother. She's meant to be a seductress, but she has all the subtlety (not to mention the fashion sense and looks) of a porn actress.

The fight scenes suffer from looking choreographed. By this, I mean that they don't look natural. The characters seem to simply be going through the motions of fighting, giving the appearance of combat without any of it actually feeling real

Generally, though, one of the bigger problems is the lack of a budget. The costumes and props look like... Well, they look like costumes and props, as opposed to clothes and weapons. The sets look like sets, and the effects are pretty unimpressive, even for 1999. Grendel is possibly the worst offender of the bunch, covered as he is with a cheap, fake-looking purple and brown blur effect which prevents the characters and the audience from getting a good look at him, which is probably just as well. If you look closely enough, you can tell that the Grendel costume, bad as it looks with the blur, would look even worse without it.

To contrast against the awful 1999 movie, we have 2005's Beowulf and Grendel, which walks a fine line between being a straight retelling of the original story while also attempting to be historically accurate.

Here is a picture of the Dark Ages as that time period undoubtedly was. The people live and work in the dirt, the mud and the rain. Everything is gritty and dirty-looking, the warriors' armor and equipment looks battered from regular use, and manners and mannerisms are crude by our standards.

In this variation, Grendel is portrayed as some sort of cryptid, the next-to-last of a dying species. He isn't human, but he's close enough to it to father a child on a human woman. His grudge against Hrothgar stems from the Danish king's murder of Grendel's father.

Beowulf, as in the legend, comes to the court of Hrothgar upon hearing of the attack, bound by honor to help the man who fostered him for part of his childhood. But he takes a more intelligent approach to this troll-hunt. He asks questions, trying to determine the monster's purpose, and eventually uncovers the reason for the animosity Grendel harbors toward Hrothgar. He pities Grendel, but at the same time cannot swerve from his course. Honor and obligation bind him.

This particular retelling of the tale adds a character named Selma, a witch and an outcast who lives at the edge of civilization, secretly the unwilling mother of Grendel's son. She also pities the monster, one outcast to another, and while she helps Beowulf, she does so unwillingly, and only because she can see no other course of action.

Considering the source material, it's surprising to find that Beowulf and Grendel is more character-driven, focused largely on the two title characters than on the action. Beowulf's battles with Grendel and Grendel's mother are fairly short and to the point.

Still, while it's an enjoyable movie, it isn't one I find myself wanting to watch often.

For one thing, it's jarring to hear the mix of accents - Scottish, American, British - in a group of characters who are, by and large, supposed to be culturally homogenous. And the way the script bounces back and forth between formal language and foul can induce a kind of mental whiplash.

More than that, though, there seems to be something that's just missing from the movie. I can't tell what it is, exactly, except to say that while Beowulf and Grendel seems to be perfectly competent on a technical level, it's missing something, maybe heart and soul. The result is a movie that falls just this side of mediocre. A quote on the front of the DVD case showed it being rated at three stars, which I think is probably just about right.

And then...

And then we have 2007's Beowulf. Let me quote Roger Ebert here, because I feel his words are appropriate.

"To say the movie is over the top assumes you can see the top from here."

It starts off with a noise complaint. Now, in our modern era, if the neighbors are partying a little too loudly, we might go over and knock on the door, and ask politely for them to keep it down, some of us have to work in the morning. And if things get really out of hand, we can call the police. But this being the dark ages, and Grendel being a monster (in fact, the ugliest creature on planet Earth), things are handled a bit differently.

Grendel's problem, quite aside from a lack of proper skin care, is that he has an extremely sensitive ear. So when Hrothgar's warriors are celebrating the construction of their new mead-hall, Heorot, with drunken, hedonistic debauchery and abandon, it wakes Grendel up at night and drives him into a rage.

His response is to knock down the mead-hall door and begin a furious rampage, tearing men limb from limb, stomping them to death, drinking their blood, throwing them across the hall like rag dolls. Barbaric as this may be, you have to admire its effectiveness. Hrothgar outlaws merry-making until the monster is killed.

Beowulf hears of this and immediately sets out from Geatland with his warriors. He owes Hrothgar a debt, but just as important, this is an opportunity for him to prove his greatness.

Beowulf is a hero of the old tradition. By that, I mean that he is a great man, but not necessarily a good one. He is obsessed with earning glory and honor for himself and his men (though most importantly himself). He does heroic deeds, not because they are right, and not because they must be done, but because they increase his fame and standing. Danger, the prospect of injury or death, serve only to excite him. They are not obstacles, but opportunities to prove his greatness to the world and expand his legend.

He is a maker of heroic boasts, and yet at the same time, there seems to be just a hint of truth in them. And certainly, he proves that he has the ability to back up said boasts when his men, through loud song and laughter in the mead-hall, lure Grendel back for another round.

He fights Grendel naked, on the logic that, since Grendel has no weapons or armor beyond what the gods gave him, neither should Beowulf, in their encounter.

Clearly, this is a man for whom grand gestures are a way of life.

Of course, all manner of steam, smoke, candles and sword hilts are deployed in order to hide Beowulf's package which, in keeping with the character himself, must surely be heroic.

The battle is epic, completely over the top, with much leaping and thrashing about, and in the end, Beowulf rips off Grendel's arm with a wooden door.

Understandably, this upsets Grendel's mother, a water demon who is nonetheless devoted to her children. For her revenge, she murders all of Beowulf's warriors while they sleep, except for Wiglaf, who was away. Beowulf is then tasked with finding and slaying Grendel's mother.

Here is the first major divergence from the original story. Beowulf's mother appears in the form of a beautiful, gold-skinned woman, and offers to make Beowulf a king of vast renown, a man who will be remembered thoughout the ages, if only he will give her a son, and return to her the dragon-shaped drinking horn he received as a gift for slaying Grendel.

Perhaps Beowulf senses that there will be more glory in store for him in the future, if he takes this offer. The deal is made: So long as the horn remains in her keeping, Beowulf will be unkillable, rising ever higher in fortune and glory.

Beowulf returns to Heorot, taking Grendel's head with him. He tells the story told in the original tale: How he fought Grendel's mother in an underwtater cavern, and how the sword Hrunting (given to him by Hrothgar's loyal lieutenant, Unferth) was lost in that battle, and why he must present Grendel's head, and not that of Grendel's mother, as proof of his exploits.

Hrothgar may be a man of foolish deeds, but he is not a fool. He knows the truth, and knows what truly occurred in the underground lair, for he himself was there. Grendel was his own son, sired on the demon Beowulf claims to have slain.

Knowing, now, that the curse has been continued, Hrothgar proclaims that, as he has no son of his own, Beowulf shall be heir to his treasure and his kingdom, even to his wife. So saying, he departs from the narrative, and the movie picks up, as the book does, many years later.

Beowulf has bargained for more, and yet less, than he realized. He did not know himself. He did not understand himself well enough to realize that it is not the accomplishment itself that drove him, but the challenge. And when the challenge is removed, the joy and the meaning were drained from his life. Thus we see the grey and grizzled Beowulf, still strong, but now for seemingly no purpose. He is a conqueror, a legend in his own time.

Eventually, the drinking horn that he surrendered to Grendel's mother finds its way back to him, and he realizes with horror that his pact with the demon is now broken. From there, the movie gives us a fanciful, characteristically over-the-top rendition of Beowulf's fight with the dragon, and ends more or less as the book does, with its hero's death marking the end of an age.

I like that this version of the story, of the three I described, has the sense to take the original tale to its ultimate conclusion. Too many movies are tempted to give the audience what it wants, a happy ending where the hero rides off into the sunset with the admiring love interest. Even the ostensibly "dark" and "edgy" Beowulf of 1999 does this.

Personally, I believe that audiences do want a happy ending (don't we all?), but I also believe that they can respect and appreciate being denied one, if the integrity of the story demands it. 2007's Beowulf demands it. With only one or two significant alterations of the original tale, it would have been a crime against the intent of the movie to present anything less than the proper ending.

Judging by how much I've gone on about the 2007 treatment, you can probably guess which one I think is best.

In the Shadow of the Valley Uncanny

Sometimes, Resident Evil confuses me.

I don't mean the story, of course. The story of any of the Resident Evil games is pretty simple, really. We are talking about a series of games based on George Romero's zombie movies (famously begun in Night of the Living Dead). There's not much plot to speak of. It's more of a premise, and the story is about the attempts of the various characters to survive (or not) given that premise. Not exactly fine art, you know? Not quite avant garde.

Yet somehow this series of games that is so clearly based inspired by, and full of homages to, Romero's body of work manages to make for some pretty awful movies.

I'll confess that I never saw more than the opening few minutes (not more than a half-hour, I'm sure) of the first American-made Resident Evil, but I didn't feel I needed to. It defied both the basic story (excuse me, "premise") of the games, and also the general feel of them. I stopped watching after that first half-hour because this seemed to have nothing to do with the games at all, aside from the name and the presence of zombies. Making a decent movie that was faithful to the spirit of the original games ought to have been easy, given its lineage, but apparently it wasn't easy enough.

So I haven't paid any attention to the movie series, and I certainly don't feel as though my life has been any poorer for it.

Then one day I saw a DVD on the shelf at Wal-Mart. Resident Evil: Degeneration. It looked like a CGI movie, and it had Leon Kennedy as the main character. Sure, it also had Claire Redfield from Resident Evil 2, but Leon was the one I was interested in. Not because he's a particularly deep or multi-layered character. He's not. But he is the hero of what is easily my favorite game in the series: Resident Evil 4. So I thought about it for a while, and I finally broke down and bought it last night. I felt the need for some mental junk food, and it was cheap. I figured, why not?

I have no real problem with bloodshed and violence. I don't really get into it the way I did when I was 13, and the best way to make anything better was to spill gallons of blood and have lots of explosions. It doesn't bother me, really, it just doesn't interest me much, either. So normally, I don't care much for horror movies.

Which is good, I guess, because Resident Evil: Degeneration isn't one.

What it is, then, gets sort of difficult to define. It's basically a generic ation movie, but with zombies. In that sense, it's faithful to the spirit of one of the games, at least: Resident Evil 4. Yes, I know Resident Evil 4 lacked zombies. Shut up.

There's no real horror in Degeneration, no real suspense. When the heroes walk down a corridor, guns at the ready, and all is quiet, you know that some zombies will be appearing shortly. It doesn't require you to have a good working knowledge of zombie movie structure. It's just logic. When the good guys have guns and are walking through dark, quiet hallways, something for them to shoot with those guns will be appearing presently.

But Degeneration goes further than this. It actively pulls the rug out from under the suspense early on, when Leon tells his comrades that the only way to kill the zombies is to shoot them in the head. Well, thanks, Leon. Now you've robbed us of that classic moment where people start shooting the zombies in the chest and limbs, and the zombies shrug it off and keep right on coming.

Maybe I should mention the plot, before we go too far.

The movie starts by explaining how Umbrella Corporation developed and accidentally released a virus that turned people into zombies, which caused an enormous scandal and required the U.S. Government to take care of the outbreak by launching a nuclear missile at Racoon City, where the outbreak occurred. Umbrella's stock bottomed out, the company collapsed, etc. Then a new company, called WilPharma, began working on the same viruses that Umbrella accidentally leaked. When WilPharma opens a new branch in Harvardville (not far from Racoon City, apparently), there is naturally protest. WilPharma's research into the T-virus (which is what causes the zombies) is also opposed by the organization TerraSave, which has been responsible for disseminating photos and footage of zombie outbreaks in India, where one of WilPharma's research centers is located.

One of TerraSave's members is Claire Redfield. She comes to Harvardville in advance of a Senator who is one of WilPharma's primary stockholders, and a spokesman for the company. For the remainder of this writing, I'll be referring to him as Senator Scumbag, because that's an apt description of his character, and also because I can't remember his name.

Anyway, the zombie outbreak begins early in the movie, at the airport not long after Senator Scumbag arrives. She, Scumbag and a handful of others are trapped in a room at the airport while the zombies run rampant. Eventually, the police S.R.T. (which stands for Special Response Team, or something similar) puts up a perimeter around the airport, and gets word that the White House is sending an operative.

The operative is Leon Kennedy, looking virtually unchanged from his appearance in Resident Evil 4. The only real differences are that he now wears a black jacket, and he looks more pissed off than he was before. He takes two S.R.T. members with him on his rescue mission into the airport, and escapes with a shocking minimum of casualties.

All the while, the zombies aren't so much menacing as they are gun fodder. They exist to be shot down and make the heroes look cool in the shooting. Then the plot thickens.

There was a moment about halfway through the movie that got my hopes up. After Leon rescues the airport crew (including Senator Scumbag, alas), WilPharma sends in a fleet of trucks with T-virus vaccines to administer to the victims, along with one of their ranking executives, named Frederick. Claire chews him out for a moment, demanding to know why WilPharma didn't send the vaccine in advance if they had it all this time, and Frederick calmly fires back that if not for TerraSave putting WilPharma in an adversarial position and screwing up their operations, they would have been able to send it in advance. Leon, with information straight from the White House, confirms this story.

For a moment, I thought this might be interesting after all. I couldn't think of a movie I'd ever seen that featured a generally benevolent corporation whose humanitarian efforts were hindered by a rabid protest organization. That might have been genuinely clever.

But no. That's not actually how it works out in the end with Degeneration, but I'll spare what few details remain. Suffice it to say that there is a typically Resident Evil unkillable monstrosity that menaces the characters at the end which must be beaten in an unorthodox way. There follows a series of escapes and some last-minute parkour by Leon (which was actually sort of fun to watch), and then it's more or less back to business as usual for the people of Harvardville, though of course there is a dark twist of the story at the very end (which is also very typical).

This entire movie looks like it was made with an Xbox 360: good, but still not terribly real. And it suffers from an ailment that afflicts many Japanese video game cutscenes, which is over-gesturing. Perhaps it's because the directors of these things fear (more or less rightly) that their CG doesn't have the necessary power to carry off all the communication that goes on by way of facial expression and natural body language, but there are several times characters make overly pronounced gesticulations in order to get the point across.

I think of this as Power Ranger Syndrome, because that's what the Power Rangers did when they were in uniform and talking (because their faces were obscured, you see). It sort of kills the immersion, because you realize pretty quickly that people do not make the sorts of gestures that some of the characters in this show make. Maybe Japanese people make that little arm-waving "whatever" gesture that the police captain makes toward the beginning, but nobody in America does that. And considering that this movie (like the games it is based on) is set in the American Midwest (the presence of mountains notwithstanding), you would think that the original makers would take things like that into consideration.

I'd like to take a minute to complain about the dialogue, also. It's pretty generic stuff, really, barely worth mentioning. Which is sort of the problem. The games got their reputation partly because of awful dialogue. The "Jill sandwich" and "Master of unlocking" lines have been a part of game-geek culture for a good long while now. I came into this expecting bad dialogue full of corny one-liners and stilted acting, and instead got dialogue built on a rock-solid foundation of generic mediocrity.

But what am I saying? This is Resident Evil, after all. Good, natural dialogue? Geographical accuracy? Cultural accuracy? Whatever am I going on about?

This is a movie about people shooting zombies and looking (more or less) cool doing it. It encourages you to turn your brain off. Practically requires it, really. And if you can manage that, you will be vaguely entertained. But it strikes me as an awfully low mark to shoot for, to be vaguely entertaining, and even then only to those who are actively trying not to think.