Reviews, Part I

Alrighty, this is a looooooooong overdue post. One of many, really. And unfortunately, this is not one that I've worked on before, so I'm going completely off memory. I will limit myself to three reviews for now: one TV show, one video game, and one book.

Avatar: The Last Airbender — I actually long avoided this kid's cartoon show, namely because I don't particularly care for anime. Then I discovered that the show was made by Americans, and I finally gave it a shot. (Note: I'm not anti-Japanese or anything, I just have not yet seen an anime that I enjoyed.) That was about a year ago, and I got into the second season before moving apartments (at which point I started having severe computer problems) and the school year starting. Thankfully, I was able to finish up the series recently, just in time for the live-action movie (which I haven't seen, but hear is awful according to fans and non-fans alike). Thank you, Netflix.

The overall story is simple enough. There are four elements—water, earth, fire, and air—and there are four peoples, each one having Benders who can control one of these elements. They do this as an extension of martial arts (so it looks even more awesome). The Avatar is the link between the physical and spiritual worlds, and can control all four elements; his/her job is to ensure balance in the world, and incarnates in each of the four peoples in their turns. The four peoples lived in relative peace, until one hundred years ago the Fire Nation attacked, wiped out the Air Nomads, and has been in a constant war with the Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes ever since. The Avatar was nowhere to be found until two kids from the Southern Water Tribe discovered Aang and his flying Sky Bison trapped in a block of ice. Now Aang, the Avatar and last of the Airbenders, must master the four elements and defeat the Fire Nation to restore balance to the world. Obviously, the Fire Nation would rather he not, and the exiled Prince Zuko relentlessly pursues the Avatar across the world in an effort to capture him.

I'm giving such a detailed outline of the show because it is, in a word, awesome. Rarely do TV shows, especially kids' shows, have such well-structured storytelling. I would have loved it if the series could have continued, but I'm more than glad they kept it to the three seasons (or books), each one covering Aang's efforts to master the other three elements. Not only is the plot fast-paced and engaging, the characters are incredibly entertaining. Each one of the main characters is an individual who grows and whose back story is elaborated upon throughout the series. My favorite character by far is Toph, the blind Earthbender girl who basically does all the work taking out bad guys once she joins the Aang Gang. Not only does she kick butt, she cracks one-liners like no other. Appa, the ten-ton flying bison, is likewise amazing (though, of course, he never speaks). The setting itself is fantastic. The world is beautiful, fashioned after East Asia, and filled with amazing creatures like flying bison and platypus-bears, all of which have six limbs. The creators did a most excellent job combining animals to create new and exotic hybrids. Seriously, this is one of my favorite shows now, one I intend on watching again.

Fable II — This is the sequel to one of my favorite games of all time. Sadly, it does not get anywhere near the glory of its predecessor. This seems to be the unfortunate tendency of Lionhead Studios. The exact same thing happened with their PC game Black & White and its sequel: they vastly improved on a couple aspects, but failed to maintain many of the things that made the original great. Here's the basics of the story. Five hundred years have passed since the events of the first game, the Heroes Guild has long ceased to be, and Heroes—once a supporting pillar of Albion's society—basically disappeared with it. You are a Hero, and possess the unique abilities that once made them great. You also have a canine sidekick (mine I named Chewy). Your quest is to find the Heroes of Strength, Will, and Skill in order to defeat Lord Lucien, who is rebuilding a magical structure from the Old Kingdom which will bring about the destruction of the world just as it did then (which would be powered, coincidentally, by the energies of those three Heroes). As in Fable (and Black & White), you are often given the choice between good and evil acts. Your appearance, and indeed the world around you, will change according to your decisions. The game takes place over several years, or rather it shows three distinct portions of your life, and the world will change between the jumps according to your choices. You can even get married and have kids.

Let's start with the good. The game is, all told, fun to play. I actually went through the game twice (namely because I got cheezed off at Final Fantasy XII), and I enjoyed it more the second time, when I knew what I was doing and what parts of the game to avoid. The graphics are beautiful and much of the music is lovely. These come together when the intense fight music is playing, and flourish moves are shown in slow motion as you smash enemies with your mighty war hammer. The areas are vast and open for exploration, rather than the relatively contained paths of the first game. And you have much greater freedom to explore them, with the abilities to jump fences, vault ledges, dive off of cliffs, and swim. As the story jumps ahead in time at a few points, you can even see the world change as a direct result of the choices you make, whether they be good or evil. Very cool concept, though both times I ended up playing as a good guy, so I haven't really taken advantage of that feature yet. Almost every building is available for purchase, a great improvement over the first Fable, which required you to kill the owner to get more than one building per town on the market. (My brother once made an evil character in the first game, got a whole bunch of bandits to follow him, slaughtered an entire town, then bought everything. The town repopulated itself and he had infinite money from the rent he collected there.) It also saves you the tedious task of picking up sacks of money from your rental homes. There are also plenty of sidequests. You can even take jobs as a blacksmith, a bounty hunter, and a few other things to make some money since the normal sidequests don't offer you any and enemies rarely drop anything.

The most important feature of all, of course, is that you can become a pirate!!!!! That alone made me insanely happy. The game gives you numerous sets of clothing, allowing you to mix and match articles, and you can dye them to suit your tastes as well. The clothing I settled on included parts from three different sets of clothes. By the end of the game, I had a pretty awesome pirate with blue dreadlocks (blue hair: the one thing that anime got right), a cutlass that refilled my health with every hit, and a booming blunderbuss which destroyed pretty much everything in one hit.

Now for the bad, which completely outweighs all the good mentioned above. Well, everything but the pirate factor. First major complaint: the game is too short and too easy. If they had at least given options for difficulty settings, they might have made up for the incredible brevity of the game. (My second run through was supposed to be a speed run, ignoring the sidequests completely, but I failed in that effort and in fact was more thorough in some respects.) Some of the more dreaded enemies from Fable make a reappearance, but they're all pansies. Some of them might be hard if you do an actual speed run and ignore everything, but that's it. The most difficult ones never show up. And thanks to the Ghoul Augmentation, which regenerates your life every time you hit an enemy, potions are completely unnecessary even if you allow enemies to hit you. Sadly, that's one of the few weapon augments that is even worth buying. (There was a similar augment in Fable, but it was not something you could easily purchase.) Of course, that's me complaining about how I made the game easier for myself. Unfortunately, going around without that augment doesn't really raise the difficulty at all. Enemies are often kind enough to take you on one at a time, and it doesn't take much to get to the one-hit kills. The ease of the game isn't even disguised with a long and engaging storyline. It hints at depth by building off some of the more intriguing ideas presented in the first game, but the plot suffers from extreme shallowness, all the real plot left behind in the first game. In Fable, you come to find out just how awesomely evil Jack of Blades is, his character being introduced and developed throughout the storyline. They did such a poor job building up Lord Lucien as a villain that I barely even noticed he was the main bad guy.Whereas the threat of the demonic immortal known as Jack of Blades was obvious, Lucien never struck me as a threat, and this dichotomy is no more clearer than in the endings to the two games. Jack of Blades turns into a bloody dragon that will eat your soul if you mess up too much, while all you have to do is walk up to Lord Lucien and hold the A button. Yeah, that's it. Then he'll talk for awhile, and you can shoot him at any point in his little tirade of poorly developed plot and meaning. One bullet, and he's not even attacking you. Sadly, there are a few earlier bosses (if they can be called such) which are equally difficult. I really wish they had brought back Jack of Blades; maybe they'll bring him back in Fable III, though the trailers I've seen for that game do not make it look particularly promising.

Anywho, back to the ranting on the horrors of Fable II. I guess the fighting was meant to be simplified from the first game. The new style—one button each for Strength, Skill, and Will—was acceptable, but you could do a lot more in the first game. Like fight barehanded. Now you have to have a weapon in hand. And there's no armor. At all. It's just clothes, which affect how aggressive or attractive villagers perceive you to be. (Sadly, when the people of Albion killed all the Heroes they could find, they must have gone ahead and done in all the attractive people, because there are none left by the era of Fable II.) The magic charging to reach stronger spells was probably the only thing I cared for in the fighting system, and even that was just okay. There was no magic power meter, so you can cast all the spells you want, willy-nilly. Not that there are many spells to learn, not that most of those spells are even worth learning. Granted, in the first game I was fairly dependent on a single spell. However, I had plenty of other viable options. That spell made a reappearance, possibly even stronger than before, and it's one of two spells I ever bother with actually using except occasionally when I feel like seeing the effects of another spell. The lack of variety is not unique to the Will abilities. Strength and Skill are also designed around learning abilities you start off with in the first Fable, because let's face it, they didn't have much for you to do in this game. Even the sidequests, plentiful though they may be, are incredibly lame. The bounty hunter jobs are simplistic and take less than a minute to complete, and for some reason always require you to go to some far off area instead of being a local problem. Not that traveling is ever a problem, because you can quick travel almost anywhere, even within areas. It saves you the necessity of traveling by foot, well, anywhere in the game, making the only reason to explore the vast and beautiful areas the hope that you might run across one of the items needed for the longer sidequests. Ultimately, the only job worth taking is early on as a blacksmith. It gives you a good amount of money quickly (unlike the equally tedious wood chopping and bar tending jobs), which you can then invest in real estate for a constant flow of money as you go on with the short and easy game. And while you can customize your character's look much more than before (except for tattoos, for some reason), you can't get the camera nearly as close, so you can't get quite as good a look at him/her as once upon a time. This rant could continue for a long while yet, but I'd rather move on to happier subjects.

The Outlaws of Sherwood by Robin McKinley — This is the first Robin Hood book I've ever read, and by default the best. Of course, I could also call it the worst, but that would be misleading. Along with Peter Pan, Robin Hood was one of my childhood heroes, so I jumped on this one when I heard about it. Robin Hood's is such an old tale that it has numerous variations, and I loved this one. This one casts Robin as a Saxon yeoman forced into outlawry when he accidentally kills a Norman in self-defense. It is quite clear that the author did plenty of research on the era to bring it to fuller life (though of course plenty of literary license is taken). The story is well-paced, and most importantly, it feels like the story of outlaws. They struggle just to keep alive in the unforgiving vastness of Sherwood Forest even as their legend grows among the people of Nottingham and its surrounds. The characters feel real, as much attention is put on the characters' thoughts and motivations. While no one can definitively say Robin Hood and his merry men were this way or that, Robin McKinley has certainly spun a good tale out of the older stories. Thankfully, she even includes major characters who are often omitted in other mainstream tellings, like Much the Miller. Excellent dialogue spices the narrative with fitting humor. Anything else I could say would unfortunately give much of the story away, so I fear I must leave it at that, though it certainly deserves as much space as Avatar.

Obviously, I could include many more books. So a quick overview. I enjoyed The Maze Runner by James Dashner. Some of the beginning is a little tedious, but all in all a good book. You can read it as a standalone, but it's actually the first of a trilogy, and the ending simply hits you with mysteries that were merely hinted at in the beginning, once the major questions of the book are solved. Myst: The Book of Ti'ana by Rand Miller and David Wingrove is a book I enjoyed as a teenager and reread on a whim. While it tells a decent story, I could easily rant about how awful the book is for almost as long as I did about Fable II. My favorite part by far was when the main villain's mute assistant is introduced (to give the villain some background), and then two pages later speaks to one of the protagonists. He never shows up again. Turn Coat by Jim Butcher is the eleventh book in The Dresden Files. While not my favorite in the series (I will be incredibly surprised and impressed if he ever tops Dead Beat), this is nonetheless a strong addition to a most excellent series. Outcasts by Tim McGuire is a western that I'm still enjoying. I really enjoy the differences between the perceptions of the viewpoint characters when they see the same thing, and over all it's just good storytelling. Having read some (or parts of) older westerns by Zane Grey and Louis L'Amore, I understand why a lot of people dismiss Westerns as a genre, but there are some really good authors out there still telling stories, and this is one of them. And if you read all this, I suckered you into even more reviews than originally advertised. Booyah.