Infamous First Light (PS4)

Infamous First Light is more of a spin-off from Second Son, rather than a full fledged Infamous sequel. It’s set in the same world as Second Son and follows one of the supporting characters, Fetch. The story is a prequel, as it follows Fetch in prison who recounts her past with her brother Brent, in Seattle. The biggest flaw with the story is how it is simple. It’s a basic story of Brent being held hostage and Fetch forced to use her powers to help the kidnapper, while finding a way to free herself from this situation.

Fetch wields neon powers, and this allows for some stunning visual effects. If you have a HDR TV, then the game will look amazing. Even on a normal TV, it still looks impressive, even if the color palette is too drab. The controls and Fetch’s combat abilities will be familiar to anyone who’s played an Infamous game. Her default powers are being able to fire neon blasts from her hands and travel extremely fast by becoming a literal neon trail.

With the familiar open world of Seattle, there are a lot of collectibles scattered around. They are the same types of side activities as Second Son but less numerous. Completing these will give Fetch points to unlock additional powers. She’ll eventually be able to fire homing rockets, trap enemies in statis and being helplessly floating around, finisher moves and better parkour abilities. Travelling around the world is extremely fun with the addition of neon rings scattered around where if you rush through them, you’ll get a burst of speed. This is very addictive.

The game plays it safe and generic with everything. From the open world activities to the mission structure. Missions will task you from defeating waves of enemies to chasing down items. At times, it feels too safe, but thanks to the game’s polish, it manages to keep your attention. Fetch as a character is also likeable so even though the story is bland, you’re still invested right up to the final scene. That said, there are some good scenes towards the latter part of the story which handles the emotions that Fetch is feeling extremely well.

If you focus on the story, it’ll only take around three to four hours to complete, and that’s with a little bit of exploration on the side. As a DLC, this is not bad, as a standalone game, it’s slightly disappointing. However, the short length is also its strength as it keeps up the pacing. The finale was also surprising as you would have thought that by this point, the whole game is taking place in Seattle, but then it suddenly transports you to a brand new area that contrasts against the urban setting you’ll been playing through so far.

Once you finish the story there are still some content left. More abilities are unlocked and there’s the open world side activities to finish. The biggest piece of content though are the challenge arenas. You’ve been playing through some of them during the story but now you can complete them for high scores, or aiming for certain challenges. If you’re into this sort of content, it’s a lot of fun and plenty to keep you busy; if you’re not, then the game has nothing else to offer (although it doesn’t help that there’s only two modes and three maps).

Overall, Infamous First Light is a solid expansion to the Infamous series. It’s effectively the same as Second Son as far as gameplay and settings go, but this isn’t necessary a bad thing. The story, and the game itself, is short and sweet, allowing it to be much more focused than some other open world games. It has a good ending, tying nicely into the beginning of Second Son. The game is fun and worthwhile even as a standalone, as long the price is low (which it is).

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Sakura Quest (2017)

Sakura Quest is a 25 episode original anime. It has a normal but yet also weird premise. Yoshino is fresh out of college but is struggling to find work in Tokyo, this seems like a common problem. She doesn’t want to go back to the rural town that she grew up in, since getting out of there was the reason she went to Tokyo in the first place. Unfortunately for her, she ended up landing a job as the “queen” of a rural town anyway. Basically, she’s part of the PR effort as the spokesperson for the town in order to attract more tourists into Manoyama, and help revitalise the town.

In addition to her colleagues at the Tourism department, she’s joined by several other young townspeople: Shiro, Maki, Ririko and Sanae. Each has their own skills but there’s nothing too strange of spectacular about any of those characters. They eventually form the “ministers” that advise the queen and settle to think up of ways to revitalise Manoyama.

As an outsider, initially Yoshino goes out to learn what makes the town special and worth coming to. In the process, she finds out that there are people who are resistive or at least, happy with the way things are now and doesn’t need the town to change. Manoyama is a town steeped with traditions and other things that might seem boring to others, such as a locally grown vegetable that is a speciality, but these are also the people’s livelihoods.

To be honest, the setting and content is a bit boring. It’s realistic, without any ounce of fantasy but the writing also lacks drama or any sort of hook. It starts plot threads but then drops them and coupled with many of the events being bland and uninspired, it can be boring to watch. It slowly gets better halfway into the season, where a big event happens and initially, seeing the positive effects was heartwarming as you feel the same joy and satisfaction as the characters. However, for every plan that the characters hatch, no matter how farfetched, or even how good of an idea it is, there will be disadvantages. We see the negative consequences as this is not an idealistic world, and the characters much deal with it.

So in the end, the anime is a slow burn, especially with how Yoshino spends a lot of time uncovering more and more about the town. All of Manoyama’s rich history is tucked away with its popular and isn’t easy to discover. Learning about how a tradition came to be, even a mundane one, like the reason a certain of noodle is a staple of the local cuisine, is much more interesting than it sounds.

While all the characters mature, Yoshino is naturally the one that matures the most. She changes from an unemployed graduate that doesn’t think too far ahead to a responsible person. She cares for Manoyama and ends up even appreciating her own rural hometown. She now thinks about the consequences of her actions and is genuine in her efforts to revitalise the town.

The ending trends towards trying to make the view nostalgic for the past. The revival of Manoyama is a big long-term project, so you know it cannot be feasibly done by the end of the season, so you wonder how it is going to end. There’s some reconciliation and some drama. The ending is one of those bittersweet goodbyes and it’s done well when it basically summarises all of the bonds that Yoshino had created in her year in Manoyama. It also doesn’t try to wrap everything up, rather opting for just enough to give hope, even though things will continue to change.

Overall, Sakura Quest is an average anime. It’s different and unique in that it tackles a subject that isn’t done much in anime but unfortunately there’s a reason for that. The anime is filled with events that are too normal and bland to truly keep your interest. It gets better in the second half of the season, especially once Yoshino builds up her reputation and more of the population are supportive of her. As per usual for all PA Works anime, the art style looks great and clean looking, so there’s always a plus. It’s an anime that’s hard to recommend since it is quite niche.

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I Am Setsuna (PC)

I Am Setsuna is a JRPG developed by Tokyo RPG Factory, a subsidiary of Square Enix. It deliberately evokes traditional JRPG mechanics but with the quality-of-life features that modern day video games have. In this aspect, the game nails it with its tone, and it truly feels like an updated version of classic JRPGs from the late 1980s to early 1990s. While it’s 3D, the camera is fixed in a top down angle, and the character models are in chibi form (like what you’d expect from 3DS games).

The battle system is the classic Active Time Battle (ATB) system from the early Final Fantasy games. The best thing is that enemies are visible onscreen and getting close to one will trigger a battle. The battle takes place in the same area and that’s when you can see the ATB bar fill up for each character. Once it’s filled, that character can perform actions from attacks, techs and using items.

There are some twists to this formula, such as a secondary gauge depicted as an icon to the right of the character stats. It fills whenever your character waits, attacks or is attacked. Once that is full, you can trigger a “momentum” which adds an additional effect to that action that you’ve done. The most basic of these effects are additional damage to your attack or additional health when healing. While you can’t directly control your character’s movements during battles, the character and enemy positions does have an effect on attacks.

Techs are basically special attacks and magic rolled into one command. They required something called spritnites to be placed into slots for each of the characters in order to use that specific ability. Each character has limited slots, and specific spritnites can only be used by certain characters, so while this does allow some freedom, each character is still very much restricted to their default intended role. Related to this are combo attacks that can be performed by characters, they’re flashy and can be useful, but other times don’t do as much damage as basic attacks.

The story follows the protagonist, a warrior with the default name of Endir. There is a tradition in the land where a sacrifice takes a pilgrimage in order to ward off or weaken the monsters that roam the land. Endir is a mercenary and through his job, he encounters Setsuna, who is the sacrifice for this cycle and about to set off on her pilgrimage. From the very beginning, the game sets a sad and unavoidable fate for the characters. It gives off vibes from Final Fantasy X as that game has a similar premise.

The whole game takes place in a constant snowy world. This suits the bleak tone of the story but does mean that there is no significant change in scenery. Despite the simple graphics, with chibi character models, there are still some nice touches. Characters leave trails in the snow when they walk, and trees shake off their snow every so often. It’s small details like these that make the scenery a bit more interesting, including the world map which makes a return. When coupled with the excellent melancholy music, and it’s a perfect combination.

The game initially feels like it fulfils its promise of a classic JRPG with contemporary quality-of-life benefits. Therefore it is modern in some aspects but aged in others. For example, if you die, you’ll have to reload from the last save point as there is no auto-save. So hopefully you’ll be saving regularly because if you due to a powerful monster on the field, you may lose a lot of progress. Another are the layers and layers of menu which can be confusing, which is not helped by a text heavy tutorial that does a poor job of explaining the mechanics.

For most of the game, it doesn’t require you to grind if you fight all the monsters as you face them. Inactive party members gets a lower portion of the experience points, so while they don’t become completely useless, they will definitely fall behind. This dissuages you from using the new party members as they will most likely come in at a lower level than your current active party.

At around two-thirds of the way in, the game starts to hit you with a higher difficulty. It starts off with a super difficult boss which feels completely unfair. You’ll end up realising you’re not at a high enough level to take those hits, or you’re forced to use a defensive party, whom are probably underleveled as you haven’t been using those characters for a while. This boss hits extremely hard, hits multiple times for each attack, and to make it worse, it is so fast that it gets two turns for every one of your character’s. This ends up becoming a frustrating difficulty spike that feels completely out of place and helps ruin the pacing of the game thus far. However, this is only the beginning as some later bosses continue to evoke this, and it’s a baffling design decision.

Setsuna and Endir’s journey is filled with constant sad scenes. You’ll always meet a NPC or a new party member that has a sad backstory. It keeps the melancholy theme ongoing from the beginning right to the very end. The story doesn’t hold any surprises, it’s basically just pushing forward with the journey to reach the destination, but it does enough to keep you going. So while the game is linear in every aspect, if you are playing it in short bursts and forgot your objective, it can take a little bit to remember it because there’s no record of it. There’s not even a single line in the menu to remind you like in some other JRPGs.

The final dungeon can be tough with enemies that continue to rapidly spike up in difficulty, including the final few bosses. Thankfully, there is a period of freedom right before that where you can fully explore the world if you wish. This allows you to grind your party members up for higher levels and useful items to make the final stretch that much more manageable. That said, when you’re running through older dungeons again and are not able to reliably avoid battles, it can start to slowly grind your gears.

The ending is fine. Reflecting upon the entire game after watching it, you’ll come to the conclusion that the game’s story is filled with predictable moments. It still has its charms though but the samey dungeon design doesn’t help. The game takes around fifteen hours to complete, so it’s a nice short length without overstaying its welcome. There are a lot of sidequests and bonus boss battles unlocked after the ending so it’s still worthwhile to reload your save to explore that content.

Overall, I Am Setsuna is a nice throwback to the classic JRPGs of yore. It adds a lot of quality-of-life features that you’d expect of a game these days, but bafflingly retains a lot of other annoyances. The lack of auto-save and being forced to reload your last save upon dying is a major flaw. The game is beautiful music and it nails the melancholy theme in its design of the world and story, which helps to counter the repetitive environments and dungeons. In the end, I Am Setsuna is still a fun and worthwhile game to play and enjoy despite the obvious low budget.

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Toy Review: Transformers Generations Legacy Wild Rider (Deluxe)

Review:  #741
Name:  Wild Rider

Brand:  Transformers

Allegiance:  Decepticon

Line:  Generations - Legacy

Year of Release:  2022

Size Class:  Deluxe (Wave 2)

Mold Status:  new

VEHICLE MODE:

Wild Rider (two words, not one for this version) transforms into a sports car that takes cues from a Ferrari 308 GTB.

Unlike the Combiner Wars version, this one is much more inspired by his G1 appearance, so it retains the older styled vehicle.

Wild Rider is average size for a Deluxe, above is a comparison with TLK Bumblebee.

There are plenty of nice details here, from the red transparent windshield and windows, the painted rims and the red stripe across the vehicle.

The pair of guns peg on top.  It can either peg separately on each port, or you can plug the two guns together and then peg it on one port.

A good vehicle mode, the only way it could improve is probably if the guns could have stored underneath the vehicle out of sight.

TRANSFORMATION:

Wild Rider is very easy to transform.  The back splits in two and unfolds to form the legs.  The arms from the sides, and the hood along with the roof forms the backpack.  The hood does split to give him "wings" of sorts, but... the execution is not great.

ROBOT MODE:

Wild Rider's robot mode is pretty good, although he's a bit bland in the legs.  Similar to Dragstrip, he doesn't have any paint on his lower body.

Given that the design doesn't have many obvious car elements, this means that most of it ends up as backpack kibble.  Officially, in the instructions, the hood splits into three, giving him wings of sort, but makes it messier and more in the way.

The head sculpt is fine, the red used for his face is a nice rich red.

In terms of size, he's about average for a Deluxe here as well, above is a comparison against Siege Sideswipe.

If you are not a fan of the split hood, you can actually leave it fully intact, and this cleans it up considerably.  To be fair, the split hood isn't as bad in person as it looked in photos.

Articulation is fine, he has joints for his head, shoulders, elbows, waist, hips, knees and ankles.

He comes with a pair of guns as weapons.

He can hold the weapon in either hand, and they can can peg together to form a slightly bigger weapon at the cost of it looking sillier.

The guns can peg behind his legs for storage when not in use.

The hips are not balljoints, rather they are pinned, and this means that they suffer from the minor flaw shared with ratchet joints where the spacing is a tad bit too far apart, so that either Wild Rider is standing with legs completely straight, or they're in an A-pose that's too far apart to look natural.

Despite his hips, the robot mode is great and is a fine update for the character.

OVERALL:

Wild Rider is a simple but solid figure.  He doesn't have any compromises from being a combiner (helped by the fact that Motormaster does most of the heavy work for Menasor rather than the limbs).  The kibble on his back is kind of weird, and feels like a waste of budget to allow it to split like that when it doesn't look great, but can be otherwise easily ignored.

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My Hero Academia - Season 5 (2021)

The fifth season of My Hero Academia is 25 episodes long. It’s based upon the manga of the same name. As is customary, the season starts off with a first episode that eases you in. It reminds you of everyone in Class A of U.A., their quirks, and where they stand with each other. Soon enough, Bakugo’s continued hostile personality still makes you wonder how he managed to stay within the hero course, while Midoriya still somehow idolizes him. At least Bakugo becomes better as the season progresses as he shows that he cares, in his own way.

The first arc then covers an exercise between Class A and their rival Class B. Instead of a short brush over of the matches that you’d expect, it covers each clash between the teams in detail. This ends up spanning almost half the season. On the one hand, this gives some much needed spotlight on Class B and the powers that they have, as they were always out of the limelight thanks to Class A. While on the other hand, you’ll likely end up with at least some fatigue due to watching the same setup multiple times.

There is a further sense of repetition due to the season favoring flashbacks of scenes in previous seasons as a refresher on that character’s development. Or how it constantly reminds you of a character’s powers and name. The anime has always done this but feels more heavy handed than usual this time around. Still, seeing the two classes fight against each other in something with barely any rules or restraint is fun. Characters shows off new moves that they’ve thought up of that utilizes their quirks in imaginative ways. It’s the action that the series is known for, at its absolute best, reducing any need for thinking.

Despite is best efforts though, there are some quirks that are just too weird and unique, such that they will be disadvantaged in a lot of scenarios. It’s best not to think too hard on how some of the quirks work or how it came to be. When you have headphone jacks and machinery body parts, or being able to split up one’s body with the ability to float, then all realism is out the window.

Despite all the fun action, the first half of the season feels like it is one big setup for Midoriya and the reveal of some hidden elements of the One For All quirk. There are still a lot of mysteries but the quirk’s full abilities are starting to open up to him. You can see that once he masters them, he will become significantly overpowered, or at least have the potential to do so, without many drawbacks. But having half a season build up to this moment is somewhat pretentious.

There were some heavier episodes interspersed throughout that depict the current crisis of the rising of villains. These episodes are drier and duller in comparison but they are by no means bad. It lightly touches upon the other elements of being a hero, such one’s public image and how to portray oneself to be likeable to the public, just like someone in the show business. The anime still straddles the line between seriousness and casual, often swapping to a silly scene or gag when you don’t expect it. This takes some getting used to to get back into the groove of things.

The second half of the season is heavier with its theme and much darker. There are several tragic situations involving the supporting characters, revealing a new side to them. Ever since taking over All Might and becoming the No. 1 hero, we see the person behind Endeavor. He is completely different to the person we’ve seen before. It is explained that he is changing and wanting to reconcile with his family. It’s a huge change and difficult to swallow. He is more likeable but the significantly shift in personality makes it weird and off.

The writing in the last few episodes of the season is of a much higher quality. Instead of an excuse for a brawl, it focuses completely on the League of Villains on events that were happening concurrently with the first half of the season. It builds upon what was already revealed about each and every single member, from Togo to Twice to even Spinner. Most importantly, we get the full backstory of Shimura and it is intense. His tragicness, brought on by the nature of quirks within society as a whole, dwarfs everyone else’s tragic stories. In addition, watching through it the first time, you’ll think it’s crazy, violent, dark and overwhelming, and this is what makes it impressive.

As per usual, the season finale is only just the beginning by teasing the next arc. The arc in the second half of the season had a huge scope and something you did not think would be able to be resolved properly in the time remaining. That’s true but it closes it out at a good point, before giving us a breather as the final episode. At the end of it though, you come to reason that with all the jumping about in terms of the timeline, not much time has actually passed in -universe in the 25 episodes but it had still managed to cover so many significant events.

Overall, the fifth season of My Hero Academia was fantastic from start to finish. It had fun battles between characters that we’ve barely seen but were always present. It ends with one of the most serious and darkest arc yet, resulting in an intense second half. At this point, All Might as a hero is all by a small supporting character but seeing him view the students like a father, watching them grow, and accepting his mentor position now, is satisfying.

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