4000 Episodes Reflection: The Key of Type-Moon

So, a couple of days ago my father sent me a link to a blog post about how modern dictionaries fail to live up to their full potential by one James Somers. It was a great read, so naturally I wanted to know if he was constantly that good, or if it was more of a one-off thing. Turns out, he's pretty consistent. One post in particular that stood out to me was about how people should write more, even if they never plan on showing it to anyone else. The next day, I happened to watch Julie and Julia, which is a movie about someone who decides to start a blog because she wants to be a writer. I think it's high time I updated this blog, don't you?

Actually, as a brief aside before I start explaining what a "Key of Type-Moon" is, let me just say that Jason Somers is, for lack of a better expression, everything I want to be when I grow up. He's a talented programmer (mostly web development, but I'll forgive him; somebody's got to do it), he has an excellent grasp of the English language, he writes articles for The Atlantic and TIME, and he just one day decided that he was going to learn how to fly an airplane... so he did. That's pretty much the coolest thing ever. Learning to fly has been a dream of mine for a long time, although I've never actually pursued it. I hope that one day I'll be as cool as he is. Or, better yet, as cool as I think he is.

Alright, back on topic. You know, I spend so much time watching anime, I could have sworn that more of my posts were about it. Apparently not; I haven't posted any anime related articles since January, when I hit the 3000 episodes watched mark. I just hit the 4000 watched mark, so I guess it's time to revisit the topic. On that note, 1000 episodes in 3/4 of a year? Goodness that's a lot...

I'm actually taking a screenshot this time, so I can look back at my stats later.

In Japan, there's a genre of video games called visual novels. The best way to describe them is kind of like choose-your-own-adventure books, but with pictures and sound. Visual novels aren't very big in North America, although that's starting to change. The two best known visual novel developers are probably Key and Type-Moon. Key tends to write romances with a hint of the supernatural that will end up crushing your soul (Kanon, Air, Clannad), while Type-Moon tends to write verbose action-adventures that wax philosophical (Kara no Kyoukai, Fate/Stay Night, Fate/Zero). Now, these two descriptions may not sound very similar, but that's mostly because they aren't similar; Key and Type-Moon stories are actually very different from each other. But even though their stories are almost nothing alike, there is one striking similarity between Key and Type-Moon properties: the anime adaptions.

First Person Indie Wanderfests

You know, I don't seem to post very often. This particular one I've actually been meaning to do for quite a while; I started back in mid-June. I even finished writing it a week ago, but I just have had trouble making the time to post it. I actually have some 15 posts in various stages of completion right now, but I just cant seem to get around to finishing any of them up. Ah well. If you're reading this, that means that this one actually got posted, so I suppose that's a win for me.

So there was a Steam sale recently, and I decided to take that opportunity to pick up a couple of games that I had been meaning to for a while: Gone Home and The Stanley Parable. Well, I actually picked up Gone Home during a Humble Store sale, but let's not worry about the details...

As you may be aware, I absolutely love story-driven games (see Alan Wake), and one of the places that you can find an abundance of stories is in the indie game sphere (see To the Moon). A while ago, I heard rumblings in the video games community about this game called Dear Esther, and decided that it was the exact sort of game that was right up my alley. I picked it up, gave it a playthrough, and enjoyed it for what it was. A little while later, I heard about a Source mod called The Stanley Parable, which seemed like it fit into the same general category, so I downloaded that and ended up enjoying it immensely.

Now, a year or so after finishing those games, I've been hearing about Gone Home, another similar game (which I've now played). I've decided to label this style of game as a First Person Indie Wanderfest, because this is basically what the whole game is like: it's from a first person perspective, and as you walk around the carefully crafted environments, a narrator talks based on where you are and what you're looking at. That's... really all there is to it. I figured that this would be a good time to give my thoughts of these games, going through them in the order that I played them.

Goodzilla?

As you may be aware, the new Godzilla movie came out this weekend. It made a lot of money, so you're probably aware. I went to see it as well, and I actually really enjoyed it. I used to watch the Godzilla: The Series cartoon back in the early 2000's (based on the movie that no one likes), and so I have a fair amount of nostalgia for the franchise. When I first heard that a new movie was being made, I was interested, but then I saw the first trailer, and suddenly I was excited. Now that I've seen it, I can say that yes, it was worth it. Godzilla is a legitimately good movie.

It was made by Legendary Pictures, a company that I just recently realised is one of my favourite movie studios. They're the ones who were behind superhero movies The Dark Knight and Man of Steel, as well as movies like Where the Wild Things Are and We Are Marshall. But most of their stuff is science-fiction or fantasy, like Watchmen, Inception, and Pacific Rim. Actually, on the topic of Pacific Rim, I thought it was quite similar to Godzilla in many ways (with giant monsters being the main way, of course). Obviously I liked Pacific Rim, but did I like it or Godzilla more? I think the answer is that Godzilla is a better movie, but I liked Pacific Rim more. Godzilla wasn't quite as over the top, but it was better acted and had a better script.

Anyway, immediately after getting out of the movie, I was struck with the realisation that Godzilla was a very human movie. Just as a warning, to discuss this idea farther, I'm going to get into some late-movie spoilers. I mean, it's a fairly straightforward plot with no real twists or turns, so spoilers aren't really that big of a deal, but if you're sensitive to that sort of thing (like I am), then you may want to read this after you have watched the movie. I mean, it's not that big of a deal, but this will probably not make a lot of sense if you haven't seen the movie, just because I'll be referring to specific events.

Caddo Crunch Saga: Ludum Jam

Well that was a busy weekend.

I just spent the past three days making a video game, and it turned out better than I was expecting. This past weekend was the Ludum Jam (or Ludum Dare if you follow some different rules), a video game making competition. The rules are pretty simple: you have 72 hours to make a video game based around a theme that they supply. You can work on a team, and pretty much anything goes. My roommate and I are both graduating this semester and we have officially finished classes, so we we figured "what the heck, why not?" and just went for it.

The Ender Quartet

So this year I gave up anime for lent, which was actually a lot harder than I expected. I apparently spend quite a bit of time watching anime normally, because I suddenly found that I had time to do some things that had been on my to do list for quite a while. One of these things was to read the books that I had received for Christmas, Xenocide and Children of the Mind, which are the last two books of the Ender Quartet. They had been sitting on my desk for months, and so I decided that it was time to knock that off the list.

For those of you who aren't familiar, the Ender Quartet was written by Orson Scott Card, and it consists of the books Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind. I had read Ender's Game for the first time a couple of years ago, and I enjoyed it enough that I gave my friend his copy back and I picked up my own, along with Speaker for the Dead and Ender's Shadow (a parallel version of the story that's not part of the Quartet). I read Speaker for the Dead last year, and it immediately became one of my favourite books (up there with The Silmarillion and The Stand). I had heard that the later books of the Quartet weren't quite as strong as the first ones, but I wanted to finish it anyways, so I got them for Christmas. It was totally worth it.