Goichi Suda, founder of Grasshopper Manufacture and creator of the No More Heroes franchise, describes his creative philosophy as designing games with the spirit of punk. He grew up with the musical genre in much the same way he grew up with video games, and as such wants to avoid safe, conservative ideas and to instead try and push the boundaries with what games can be. Of all the games he had worked on prior, it is No More Heroes where this spirit stands out the most.
Booting up the remastered release of No More Heroes on PC earlier this summer, I found myself struck by that very do-it-yourself “punk” nature that was rebelliously birthed in the music scene in retaliation to the prog-rockers and Simon & Garfunkels of the time. If I were to summarize the game as succinctly and accurately as I could, it would be in comparison to Scott Pilgrim vs. The World’s opening performance of “Launchpad McQuack”. It doesn’t take a professional to recognize the unbalanced audio levels that cause each instrument and mic to blow out the amps and speakers, nor does it take much to observe the lack of sophistication in the song composition. Yet there is an undeniable rawness to it that defies the systematic, corporate cleanliness of what you’d typically hear on the radio. This is expression, and you cannot help but be caught up in the energized emotion of the performers strumming those chords and banging those drums with as much fervor as they can muster.
There was something of this spirit lost in No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, perhaps due to Suda51’s shift to “Executive Director”. What that means is uncertain, though Suda’s time away from the director’s chair following the first No More Heroes has been widely published. He was still contributing ideas to the many projects within Grasshopper Manufacture, but he was not in control of them. It is, perhaps, for this reason that Desperate Struggle feels less like a sequel and more like an imitation. Like the corporate moneymen that believed they could imitate Michael Bay’s style and achieve the same success, the sequel title feels like a superficial understanding of what made the original game work while failing to capture the same heart of its unpolished “Launchpad McQuack” of a game.
It’s been a couple of weeks now since I watched Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0: Thrice Upon a Time, the final entry in director and series creator Hideaki Anno’s “Rebuild” quadrology of films. A project over a decade in the making, there was a sense of finality to it not only for the films themselves, but the franchise as a whole. This is it. This is the end. It is a definitive conclusion, and as the credits began to roll I could not help but feel a wave of satisfied completion wash over me.
This feeling did not last. Days would pass by, and as I thought more and more about the film, I could not help but feel as if it was mishandled. I had spent so long wondering why Anno had changed directions so drastically with the third film, You Can (Not) Redo, that I had hoped this conclusion would answer those questions and provide a clear throughline. The final ten minutes of the film introduce changes to the entire continuity that serve no purpose and do nothing to develop the psychology of certain characters. Further research into the development of each film reveals that Anno had no grand vision at the start – at least, not one he adhered to throughout – and had effectively made it up as he went along.
Fans have been claiming that they “finally” got closure out of this film. I cannot imagine how, as the entire franchise became more convoluted and vague in the final hour. Perhaps what they really mean to say is “I finally got my happy ending”, forgetting the rage that erupted in the fandom in the actual happy ending of the television series. I’ve seen memes that refer to the original series and films as “depression” and this final film as “therapy”, and once again point to that original series ending. Even if the original End of Evangelion film left you feeling depressed due to the tone of its conclusion, there was always the manga with its more optimistic fusion of ideas from the film and original series.
Ultimately, I don’t think it is “closure” that viewers got from this final film. I simply think that many of them have been placated.
It would seem I have the memory of a goldfish. I also suffer the incessant desire to speak too openly about myself no matter how concretely I swear I will do no such thing. What can I say? I’m a Millennial, and in my foolish youth I discovered the Blurty blog platform. “Over-sharing” has long since been embedded in my thought processes as a habit. While I have broken free of the shackles of social media, it has not yet quenched the fire of spitting out my introspective thoughts and hand wringing over things. What things? Many things.
When this habit combines with the goldfish memory it turns into the inevitable sensation that I’m about to repeat myself. Digging into this past year’s archive of blog posts reveals that, yes, I’ve already verbalized my thoughts regarding the content of this blog,and would rather leave my waste of words and time regarding behavior on stream in the rubbish bin of memory. The older I get in years, the more I believe these sorts of posts should be left by the wayside. If they are to be discussed, it should be with trusted sources with whom I can bounce my thoughts towards in private.
Unfortunately there is something more therapeutic than therapy itself in writing things out. Perhaps because, in these moments, I am writing regarding the subject most occupying my mind. In fact, this is a subject that’s been flitting about my brain pan for over a year now, whispering a truth that I’ve long wanted to ignore. A single idea that threatens to shatter any sense of value attached to not only my hobby, but the time spent thinking about it.
The honest truth is that I don’t want to make YouTube videos anymore. Or rather, I don’t want to keep making full-blown deep-dive analytical videos of video games anymore.
Godzilla is one of those few non-video game properties that has managed to stick with me throughout my entire life. Since I discovered him around the age of five and onward, I’ve always felt a love of his big stompy feet and deadly radioactive flame breath. It was this love that led me to discover and see a live show for Kaiju Big Battel and a deep appreciation for Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim despite its mediocre characters and leaps of logic.
Never had I really explored kaiju cinema beyond Godzilla, however. Not in regards to the many Japanese properties, at least. I’d always been curious about Gamera, the colossal turtle whose filmography is mostly only known to kaiju enthusiasts. Godzilla had enough mainstream clout and recognition to get a poor Hollywood adaptation released in 1998, followed by a proper American recreation in 2014, but the odds of there ever being a blockbuster budgeted Westernization of Gamera has been slim-to-none. Unless you were a prominent viewer of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in the 90’s, or a child exposed heavily to the cheaper film fare licensed out to local UHF television stations, you were unlikely to ever come across the name “Gamera” outside of kaiju enthusiast circles. Scanning through Amazon Prime’s video library recently, however, I noticed quite the collection of the beast’s films available for streaming. Now was the time to expand my knowledge of massive monsters and see for myself if Gamera had what it took to stand beside one of the most iconic colossal creatures in cinematic history.
I’ve only watched the original Gamera, the Giant Monster, released in 1965, as well as its 30th anniversary reboot Gamera: Guardian of the Universe. Incomplete though it may be, I figured these two films would serve as a foundation for what would define the Gamera films in each generation’s origin. On a superficial level, neither film was as good or entertaining as select Godzilla films from those respective eras.
Nonetheless, I found each film quite fascinating in their own right.
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