Category: reviews

Gotham

Laura Highcove

So at this point I’ve seen a decent number of episodes of Gotham (It’s seven). Gotham is, in case you didn’t know, the city where Batman does his Batman thing. In this TV series, which airs on Fox at Mondays at 8, is actually focusing on James Gordon just after Bruce Wayne’s parents are murdered, (spoilers!) so at least a decade or two before Bruce goes vigilante. The series follows Jim around as one of the only good cops in corrupt Gotham.

So far we’ve had a lot of ‘monster of the week’ episodes, with the mob boss/penguin storyline weaving its way through the background. At first the overacting nearly killed me. Perhaps it’s because Batman is such a well-known franchise that everyone wanted it to do well so bad that they tried too hard. I don’t know. It was just painful. Thankfully it has gotten better (depending on the character …Fish is still pretty bad.). I also thought the pacing of this show seemed off, but the most recent episode really pulled things together beautifully. That’s part of why I decided to write this review now. The show has proven itself to me to be smart and well written enough to stick with at least until the end of the season.

Now for the characters:

Jim is likable, and I think he is, for the most part, realistically written. You just feel bad for him because he wants to do good and is so far underwater. Every little win for him then feels that much bigger because of the odds.

His partner Harvey is the jaded cop who was once like Jim. His actor is one of the only ones I think has acted well from the beginning. I feel like he is a character, not an actor playing a character.

They also show off Bruce Wayne as a child. He annoyed me at first, but now that he’s further past his parent’s murder, he’s started showing the characteristics of the Bruce Wayne we know and love as Batman. He is, though, still just a child who lost his parents recently and they don’t forget that. I’m warming up to Alfred. He is another of the actors doing a good job; I just didn’t necessarily like the character to begin.

I am disgusted with Barbara. I’m not sure if it’s that the actress has no charisma with the other characters, if the character was written poorly, or it’s a combination of both. I wince whenever she’s on screen and am sort of upset that I know she’s the one that ends up with Jim, so there won’t be any losing her … and all of the scenes that she had with the female cop, Montoya, feel like they were just put in there to have a yaylesbiancouple to drum up some funsexualtension or something. It falls flat; the actresses have no chemistry with each other at all. Just. Yuck.

However, I feel like the Penguin is stealing the show. It is a hard feat to pull off a character being so utterly evil and yet entirely endearing at the same time. He’s the bad guy, he will stay a bad guy, and yet I find myself rooting for him. Perhaps I will change my tune a bit if?/when! he betrays Jim.

They’ve also thrown Selina Kyle in (not really doing much yet, but she saw the Waynes’ killer apparently, so I’m sure it will come up). Poison Ivy as a child was in like one episode. Edward Nygma is just an awkward, pathetic dweeb, but I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re going for. Oh, I also love that they have the three crime bosses vying for position. I mean Gotham is all about the crime. For a while I thought Falcone was going to get shoved to the side, but they reminded us why he is the most powerful man in Gotham.

Overall, this show is worth watching if you’re a fan of the world around Batman. If not, there’s very little there for you. I don’t think it’s so well written that it would be enjoyable without a preconceived relationship with the characters. Then I could be wrong. I had no attachment to the penguin before watching Gotham and now I love him.

Elantris by Brandon Sanderson

Laura Highcove

Elantris starts off in a world on the verge of a religious war. There are only two holdout countries and from those two countries we get the main characters who are signed up for political marriage; only the prince dies while the princess is on route.

Or at least everyone is told he died, because it’s a better idea than telling them he turned into one of the cursed creatures of Elantris. We follow the prince through the mysterious circumstances inside Elantris, which used to be a wonderful place filled with god-like creatures. On the outside, the princess, now a widow, tries to establish herself in the court with many of the prince’s old friends. She also has to pit herself against a powerful representative of the strongest religion in the world as he tries to convert everyone before a time limit.

In my opinion, the characters were believable and a lot of fun to follow. The mystery of Elantris kept me guessing, and I enjoyed finding out about it along the way. There were a few plot devices that were very obviously there only to be useful at the end, but those are forgivable, and there were plenty of others that managed to catch me by surprise.

One of the things I like about this book is the relationships/friendships between characters. Also, I feel like the author knows the ins and outs of his world such that he can play with it in a way that really makes the world feel real. I felt satisfied having read this book and would recommend it to others.

Frozen

Laura Highcove

So on Tuesday I walked into the back room of Fun N Games, now newly moved to University Mall, where we hold our weekly D&D session. Gloves immediately stood up, pointed at me, and said ‘You have to go see Frozen.’ Now if you know Gloves, you will know that this is very odd behavior for him, as he is the type of guy who is perfectly happy in his own opinions, but for the most part does not try to impart them on other people. Therefore, my husband and I knew that this sort of declaration warranted attention.

We proceeded to talk about how the commercials and advertising for the movie were horrible, or at least did not make me excited about going to see the movie, which is the point of advertising. At that moment of the conversation with Gloves, I knew two things: One: Frozen was based on ‘The Snow Queen’ fairy tale, and they had both an annoying snowman mascot AND another hoofed animal acting like a dog (A la Tangled) which is a pet peeve of mine, as I actually work with horses.

Then Blake brought up the fact that he had read a review that said the reviewer basically could not say anything about the movie, because it was all a spoiler. I thought about that for a moment. It’s a rather tall order. It also would explain why there was nothing other than joke scenes in the commercials, in addition to a line from the main!? character saying ‘That’s not a blizzard, that’s my sister’, which did not actually occur in the movie. Spoiler!?

After seeing the movie, I can understand why they decided that pretty much, the movie is a spoiler for the movie. I will now proceed to explain why I think the marketing was done the way it was, which is in fact spoiler. If you haven’t seen the movie, go patronize it with money. If you have, you have no worry of spoilers.

Reasons the commercials were horrible:

1) They did not want to show Anna in princess garb, that cut out a large portion of scenes at the beginning.
2) They wanted you to think Elsa was the villain and there are no real villainy scenes with Elsa, because she’s not a villain.
3) They couldn’t show the actual villain, because unlike most Disney movies, who the villain was is actually a surprise. And most of the rest of the time he’s on camera, he’s singing or with Anna in princess garb.

However, I was really happy with the way I feel they played with tropes in this movie. Elsa became a queen and then went rogue (not villain, but still rogue). The trope being Disney Queens are evil.

Also, I have a thing for fairy tail characters who know (to some extent) that they exist in a fairy tale world. (My top two favorite books ever are examples of this, ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ by Diana Wynne Jones and The Fairy Godmother by Mercades Lackey) When they say ‘a supreme act of love’ and everyone goes right to ‘true love’s kiss’. (It’s a theme in ABC (owned by Disney)’s Once Upon A Time, which is also wonderful, go see it.)

Then there is Anna, who is an action girl, ready to go out there and deal with life on her terms, then becomes a damsel in distress. Sadface. They rush her back to the castle only to find out her ‘true love’ Hans is the villain at which point we assume she needs Khristoff to save her … only then she sacrifices herself for Elsa, which causes her to save herself! A wonderful break from normal fairy taleing, even if it makes Khristoff a rather handsome ancillary character.

So both girls had wonderful character development, the snowman ended up being rather perfect, and now the Internets have someone to pair Jack Frost with. Plus, the ice palace was rather spectacular.

Thor: The Dark World

Laura Highcove

Last week when Thor: The Dark World came out, my husband and I took our date night out to see it. He, because it was a super hero movie, me because of Loki. Don’t judge me. The movie’s premise worked really good. There always needs to be some sort of explanation of why, when a world rending evil is lurking in a world where the Avengers exist, that the Avengers all (or part of at least) don’t just swoop in to save the day. This movie handled that by having the only proof of it happening unknown until things were really rocking, oh and having most of it take place in other worlds where mere humans can’t go.

Did I mention spoilers? I’m mentioning spoilers now. Open movie, cleaning up stuff from the last movie until new threat from unknown and ‘thought long gone’ source. Way to get Thor off his lazy, saving the nine worlds butt, and back to his ‘girlfriend. I guess the movie is technically named after him, so I accept that he must be part of the movie. But Loki! In Jail! With Books! >.> I am also super happy that they finally really showed what Frigg(a) could do.

Truthfully at the end of the movie I simply sat back and thought to myself ‘This movie gave me everything it was that I wanted, without even really knowing that I wanted it.’

Casual Vacancy

Laura Highcove

So this is the ‘other’ book written by JK Rowling. I wasn’t really interested in ever reading it. It wasn’t Harry Potter and it didn’t sound like a fantasy, so why bother? Then I heard from Morgan that it was apparently a really good book. She said that all of the characters are unlikable, and yet you want to keep reading anyway. That caught my interest, because if the characters are unlikable, then the story must be something amazing. So I downloaded it on my Kindle, and gave it a shot.

I saw immediately why it’s such a popular book. The woman is a wordsmith like I have rarely seen. I don’t remember this level of craft in the Harry Potter books, but perhaps she just stuck with a particular style throughout those and tried something new in this one. Reading her words was like sailing down a smooth, crystal blue river that is lined with the most luscious garden. Now the plot might be good too, I didn’t get far enough into it to really form an opinion.

That being said, I will not be finishing the book. I think I got about 30% into it (says my Kindle) and the unlikable characters are just too much for me. I don’t read to stare into the blackness of the human soul. Probably why I hated so much reading books for school; all they care about is blackness of souls. I read (and write) fantasy. I want my characters to be heroic on top of their humanity. I don’t want to be wishing I could punch every character in the nose through the pages of the book. I want to read to enjoy myself and root for the main characters. Heck, I even like my villains to be affable. But I certainly will be going back to it on occasion to review the art she made out of those words.

Harvest Moon: A Tale of Two Towns

Laura Highcove

So new Harvest Moon game. After Bazzar, which I put down mid summer and never picked back up again. This one is called Tale of Two Towns, and oddly enough there are two towns. You pick whether you want to live in the farming Japanese style town of Konohana or the animal raising Eurepean style town of Bluebell. I started in Bluebell and moved over to Konohana in the summer. I will be moving back to Bluebell in Spring 2.

Bluebell Pluses:
Townsfolk (I like them better)
Focus on animals (Like animals)
Lots of flowers (So happy I can plant flowers again)
The man I want to marry lives here (Yay Cam)
Beehives (Intrigued by keeping bees)

Bluebell Minuses:
The mayor isn’t as good looking as Konohana’s mayor
Make money slower with animals (Though money still comes really fast in this game.)

Konohana Pluses:
Cute bachelor who likes horses
Make money faster with crops

Konohana Minuses:
Townsfolk (Just don’t like them as much…maybe cause so many are old.)
I’m getting disillusioned by growing crops (More on this below)

So as you can tell I just like Bluebell better in general. And end game I will likely max out my Bluebell farm.

Game Pluses:
The horse and carriage that carries all of your inventory around is just handy and cool.
They kept the dogs and cats that turn your animals in and out, which is really nice once you get them trained up.
There are “request” boards which are like quests for townsfolk. You bring them items and they give you stuff and money, which helps with the general monotony of HM games between festivals.
In addition there is a cooking festival every week which has a rather long cut-scene, but also helps with monotony.
There are “furrows” that allow you to water multiple crops in one shot, even with the lowest level watering can.
You can get an umbrella, which doesn’t do anything, but is totally cool.

Game Minuses:
The furrows are rather hard to pull off. Like really hard. And when you mess up you don’t only have to start over, but first you have to hammer what you already did back down. This has seriously pissed me off on many occasions. (When you upgrade the hoe this problem goes away.)
The higher level requests (everything above the lowest level) ask for items it is impossible for me to get at this part of the game, so it kinda just makes you feel bad.
The shops not only have more than one day a week that they’re closed, but close at 5pm, AND if it rains all day they’re also closed. Not only that, but they have a random assortment of a limited amount of items per day, so it’s possible to not be able to get a something you need for a rather long period of time. I didn’t see tea tree seeds through winter or spring of my first to second year.

Pokemon Black (and white)

Laura Highcove

So being the pokemon fan that I am, along with the convenience of it coming out mere days before my birthday, I picked up Pokemon Black this past weekend. I started playing it. First impressions. Okay cool, we’re back to planning on going on a pokemon journey instead of having to save the professor and just accidentally picking up the starter. Eh, not bad that you have two childhood friends that pick up the pokemon you don’t choose and then show up in many story things as you go. Pretty bad that there are not many decent pokemon in the starting levels unless you want to use those god ugly monkeys. (Munna sucks btw, usually psychic types have some sort of redeeming features, but he’s slow AND has no defense…this’ll be my first game EVER going though without a psychic type.) Horrible that the ‘rival’ role is filled by a neurotic green haired thing who talks too much and ends up having a castle later. (OMG SPOILERS) Beyond horrible that there are different areas in black and white. The Black City as opposed to the White Forest. Sorry guys, it was bad enough you making some pokemon exclusive to a game pack color, but a whole area? BAD. BADBADBAD.

I’m warming up to some of the pokemon though, which I didn’t really think I’d do, but in general I just see every way it’s not as good as HeartGold/SoulSilver and it makes me cry. I haven’t picked it up in two days. I will get through it, but I’m not really sure what I have to look forward to.

Final Fantasy XIII

Laura Highcove

Been putting off this game until I was able to get done with *something* in my backlog of games. It does contain spoilers, which I’m warning you of even though we’re technically past the time limit for such bans.

I actually was really into looking into this game at the very beginning. Then when I only knew of two party members (Lightning and Snow) I kinda let it fall by the wayside so that I only saw the rest of the party members when I got the game. Was basically right about all of the first impressions of seeing those other characters, except for Fang, who I assumed was a caster and turned out to be a dragoon (or as close to it as she can without the class title).

Graphics are gorgeous, but then that’s to be expected. Graphics are always going to be amazing in games that have the budget.

Story so far is very angst ridden. I’m not sure they properly portrayed the fear of l’cie before you find out Serah is one. However, the pace at which you, the player, finds out what the heck fal’cie and l’cie and cei’th are is pretty good.

After picking up the manual, like above I though Fang was a caster and was wrong about that, but I knew Hope would be a little whiny brat, and he was but luckily he got over it and is now turning out to be pretty strong considering he can’t be more than 12 or 13. My first guess was that Cocoon was some sort of prison, but being ‘pets’ does make a lot more sense considering all three cities I’ve been to are a huge mall, a seaside resort, and an amusement park. I am looking forward to more clarification on the ‘factory’ as it were.

I do, however, understand the comments about the ‘tutorial’ of Cocoon which consists of having your party picked for you and almost entirely being limited to two people which is just a real pain. But then don’t most FF games pick your party for you a lot of the time? I think X and XII were more the exception.

My only complaint now is that the game has a lot of fun throwing mobs with ridiculous hit point counts at you. A lot of the fights, it seems, are meant to last 8 minutes. They don’t nearly give enough ‘experience’ for that.

However ‘auto-battle’ is pretty cool. While a lot of people complain that it’s playing the game for you, just think about how much slower the fights would be if you were 1) Controlling all three party members and 2) Inputting every attack all the time. The auto-battle allows the battles to move fast, look visually stunning, and actually allows for the game to be *harder* since the computer picks the correct spells and abilities such that it’s *expected* for you to play at very near optimally. The part you have to play is getting into the right roles at the right time and occasionally tell the game to use more aoe attacks…

Also, whoever said you can only control Lightning must have complained before getting to the point where making your own party is no longer grayed out. Logically, why would they bother to give everyone in the party a summon if you were only going to be playing as Lightning?

It also seems just annoying that Snow is the first sentinel AND gets the first summon and then you don’t get to play him for more than a fifth of the time. However, linked experience is teh bomb.

My party right now is Lightning (COM, RAV), Fang (SEN, SAB), and Hope (RAV, MED). I haven’t gotten into fully buffing my party very often just because it takes so long. Maybe when Hope gets his summon and can buff a little faster.

And for now I’ve hit what I assume to be the ‘final’ boss before heading down to Gran Pulse and he’s really rough so I have to level up a bit on mobs that take way too long to kill. Yay.