Sunday, August 30, 2020

Toy Review: Transformers Cyberverse Optimus Prime (Deluxe)


Review:  #584
Name:  Optimus Prime
Brand:  Transformers
Allegiance:  Autobot
Line:  Cyberverse
Year of Release:  2019
Size Class:  Deluxe (Wave 1)
Mold Status:  new

VEHICLE MODE:


Optimus transforms into truck, as you'd expect.  Based on his appearance in the Cyberverse cartoon, it is very stylized.


While he looks good from the front, the back is a bit disappointing with no effort made to try and at least disguise his shins from robot mode.  The gun also stores right behind the cab.


As a Deluxe, Optimus is smaller than normal, above is a comparison against TLK Bumblebee.


He also comes with an effect part, and to store this in truck mode, you plug it right at the back so it sticks out awkwardly.


Each figure in the Deluxe line comes with a piece of Maccadam, and Optimus comes with the right arm.


Despite the lazy design of the back, this is still a fairly good looking truck mode.

TRANSFORMATION:

While simple, it works well.  The cab windows stays at Optimus' chest but the bottom rotates to get the faux grill.  The arms fold out from the cab and the legs are the easiest, it just swings down from the back, then you flip the feet up.

ROBOT MODE:


Optimus' robot mode looks pretty good although his forearms are a tad bit too large and his shoulders set a bit too far back.


He doesn't have much kibble, most of it is under his forearms.


The headsculpt is stylized but still recognizable.


In terms of size, he's roughly the height of a Siege Deluxe.


The key gimmick, if you can call it that, for the Deluxe line is just the improved articulation compared to the Warrior size class.


He has joints for his head, shoulders, elbows, wrist, waist, hips and knees.  However, he has does hollow limbs and that can make him feel flimsy.


His chest windows can open up to reveal the Matrix.


In terms of accessories, Optimus comes with a gun, and two effect parts that combine to form a large effect.


Optimus can naturally hold the gun in either hand.


When not in use, it can store on his back.


The effect part is designed to peg into his Matrix for a blast effect.


Or if you want, and this looks better, you can attach the effect part onto this gun.


Lastly, you can even use the effect part as a club although he does hold it a bit loose.


A great looking robot mode in the end.

OVERALL:

If you want to get a Cyberverse version of Optimus Prime, then this figure is the one to get.  It's got two solid modes, but both have minor issues.  Despite that, he looks great and has plenty of play value.

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Saturday, August 29, 2020

Hidden Figures (2016)


Hidden Figures is a film set in the 1960s, during the space race in which America competed with Russia on the first man in space, and eventually, the first man on the moon.  However, the race is put into the background as it focuses more on the treatment of African-Americans during that period, and how three African-Americans stood out and contributed so much as NASA.  It can be confronting, and eye-opening, on how African-Americans, and woman, were treated during that period.  With separated bathrooms, facilities and the impossibility of a career, it can be painful to watch the unfairness that happened.  The film focuses more on Katherine Goble, who transfers to the Space Task Group that is responsible for the calculations of the orbits and landing points.  She faces high walls comprised of work colleagues who do not see her as equal, and trying to diminish her intellect.  There is Dorothy Vaughan who, despite performing the work of a supervisor, cannot actually be promoted to that title.  At the same time, she and her team is in danger of being made obsolete thanks to the introduction of computers.  Finally, Mary Jackson is overcoming the barriers involved to become an engineer, although her story has the least amount of focus put onto it.  Due to the subject matter, it can feel overpowering at times with its messages.  However, you feel that their success is well-deserved and hard fought.  Hidden Figures has a strong story that tackles a sensitive subject matter while at the same time, being an enjoyable film.

Friday, August 28, 2020

Book Review: Goblin Slayer Vol. 2


Review:  #928
Title:  Goblin Slayer Vol. 2
Series:  Goblin Slayer – 2nd volume
Author:  Kumo Kagyu
Comments:  The second outing of Goblin Slayer is every bit as good as the first.  Whereas the first volume was a compilation of multiple smaller standalone stories, volume 2 is a single arc that is more like a typical novel.  The party that had formed in the last volume has well and truly settled.  The members has a fantastic sense of comradeship, each characters’ personalities plays off well against each other.  Their abilities complement well and allow the party to face off a variety of situations.  Perhaps the most interesting part is how well Goblin Slayer adapts to his predicaments.  His ingenuity and plans that makes unorthodox use of items in order to slay all his enemies is unparalleled.  The party has learned to trust each other implicitly and able to anticipate the other’s moves.  Being Goblin Slayer, we can expect goblin slaying to be the main focus.  That isn’t to say that the author hasn’t included additional things.  We learn just a little bit more about the world, about Goblin Slayer himself, and also how dangerous goblins could be, despite being weak and cowardly when individually faced.  The fact that other monsters make an appearance keeps things fresh.  While there are times where it draws slightly lewd attention to the females, it’s subdued enough to not ruin the moment.
Rating:  7/10

Thursday, August 27, 2020

Toy Review: Transformers BotBots Nope Soap (Series 2)


Review:  #583
Name:  Nope Soap
Brand:  Transformers
Allegiance:  N/A
Line:  BotBots
Year of Release:  2019
Size Class:  BotBots (Series 2)
Mold Status:  redeco of Sergeant Scrubadub

ALTERNATE MODE:


Nope Soap transforms into... a bar of used soap.  It looks like it had been dropped onto the floor and neglected.


As a BotBot, Nope Soap is very small, above is a comparison against Legion Barricade.  This is a pretty cool alternate mode all in all and something completely unexpected.

TRANSFORMATION:

Transformation, like most of the BotBots, is very simple.  Flip the bar of soap over, then flip the top half back to free up the legs and pull out the arms.

ROBOT MODE:


Nope Soap's robot mode is equally as distressing as the alternate mode, with a worried face and lots of scuff marks.


There's a fair bit of kibble on the back as a byproduct of transformation but luckily, it doesn't affect the robot's balance.


The face is painted on and it has a worried look but it fits into the theme fairly well.


Nope Soap retains its small stature, above is a comparison against Legion Crosshairs.


Articulation is limited to only swinging the arms forward and back.  However, Nope Soap does look pretty cool.

OVERALL:

Nope Soap is a unique Transformer.  The bar of soap looks good, and the robot mode neatly ties back to the dirtied look too.

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Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Babylon (2019-2020)


Babylon is a 12 episode anime based upon the Japanese novel series.  The anime follows public prosecutor Seizaki Zen and begins with him investigating a pharmaceutical company.  It is suspected of colluding with various other organizations to fake test results in order to sell a new drug.  As he investigates, the investigation gets bigger in scope, eventually leading to a political scandal.


The anime is mostly set in a fictional city of Japan.  The city is a new experimental city called Shiniki, which is an autonomous region and has several advantages such as the reduction of red tape, allowing suggestions to speed through to become law and reality.  The investigation ends up touching on the current mayoral elections, and how several prominent figures are manipulating the election in the background.  Key to the case is a woman who appears and seemingly connected to how several people committing suicide who had shown no signs before then.  The more you learn about this character, the scarier she seems to be as she possesses an unnatural, almost supernatural, power.  The anime itself is rooted in reality until it goes off the deep end towards the end.


The extent of the woman’s atrocities is fully shown in a later episode.  Whereas what she had done before (and after) is evil enough, this one act was shocking.  It was disturbing enough to have a warning at the beginning of the episode.  As if having the ability to cause people to suicide isn’t bad enough, she has a sadistic streak and it is at this point that she crosses the line where she cannot be redeemed.  The way she explained her motivations makes it vaguer on how her actions benefited her.  The anime teases her abilities, building up anticipation of the point where we will understand her powers and her motivations.


The anime ends up becoming a chase of Seizaki against the villain.  It revolves around how a politician wanted to make suicide legal, and the side effects that this causes.  Now, that in and of itself is not that bad, but the politician somehow managed to cause the deaths of several people without actually physically intervening.  Seizaki is not afraid of try unorthodox approaches, even at the threat of his position.  However, as soon as he gets close, there is a twist in how the politician reacts.  The politician always seems to be one step ahead, having planned way in advance.


The pacing is glacial and it takes a few episodes before it starts to reveal a bit more hinting at how the plot will pan out.  The last third shuffle things around when suddenly Seizaki is not the focus anymore.  The pacing slows down even more until it tries to throw a few shock events.  Unfortunately, the payout is not worthwhile and the plot, while intriguing, becomes completely unfocused.  It warps from a thriller to one where it tries to go deep with a philosophical question but it fails hard.  It is completely uninteresting and feels too pretentious.  Whole episodes are wasted on pointless chatter that does not advance the plot.


The anime gradually gets worse and the ending is terrible.  It leaves so many plot threads hanging and there are so many unanswered questions.  At the end, considering the things that Seizaki had to witness and experience, and what he had to give up, it felt all his actions were pointless.  The last third of the anime felt so different and veered so far off track, it was like the writers gave up and filled it with pointless filler.  Characters introduced that had a major role that you would have expected to be important were totally dropped without rhyme or reason.  There’s no satisfaction provided from knowing the ultimate fate of the characters.


Overall, Babylon is a terrible anime.  The beginning holds promise but the writing quickly ended up turning the anime into a mess.  The plot was horribly mangled.  Characters were uninterested and villains were underdeveloped to the point that they were just one-dimensional characters who are evil because they are evil.  The ending was rubbish and the shift in tone to try to become a philosophical piece horribly backfired.  The only good thing about Babylon is the sharp clean artstyle.

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Tuesday, August 25, 2020

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC (PC)


The Legend of Heroes:  Trails in the Sky SC is the seventh game in the long running The Legend of Heroes series.  It is the second in the Trails in the Sky trilogy, the SC stands for “Second Chapter”.  It was originally released for the PC in 2006.  Due to delays in its translation of the huge amount of text in the game, the English release got delayed until 2015.  However, it still got a digital PSP release.


It is highly recommended that you have played the first Trails in the Sky game as this is a direct sequel.  The game begins straight after the previous game where Estelle and Joshua has split up.  Estelle then continues her Bracer training, all the while investigating the mysterious organization known as Ouroboros.  The story takes a long detour, as JRPGs often do.


Upon starting the game and moving the character for the first time, you will find that the default movement uses the mouse in a really awkward way.  It is recommended to change this straight away.  Using a controller is very natural too, even without remapping any of the controls. The game is in a top down view but the camera can be rotated in certain areas while fixed in others.  The graphics are okay.  Environmental textures and sprites can be a bit blurry at times while the text, character portraits, and towns are sharp when rendered at 1080p.


The battle system is turn based and there are a lot of facets to it.  The left side has the battle turn order to help you plan ahead.  With a maximum party size of four, characters can move on the battlefield in order to get into and out of attack range.  In addition to physical attacks, there are Arts which is similar to magic but takes one turn to cast and one turn to activate.  Crafts are the physical equivalent to Arts but launches immediately.  Chain Crafts allow you to team up with up to three other characters to execute a more powerful attack.  Chain Crafts are the only new addition compared to the first game.


Furthermore, dealing and taking damage will increase a bar for each character.  Once the bar hits 100, this will allow the character to disrupt the turn order at any time of your choosing and launch their ultimate move, called S-Crafts.  While each character can equip the typical combination of weaponry, armor and accessories, they can also equip Orbments.  Orbments play into the fictional orbal energy used in the game to power everything.  These will adjust your stats, usually with a net positive increase.  They also dictate the types of Arts that you can use, and whether you have access to the more powerful versions.


There is a large cast of playable characters.  It takes a while before you have full access so you’re forced to play with a smaller party instead during the earlier sections.  Once you get the full party size, the full strategic elements of the battle system comes into play as each character is proficient and deficient in certain areas.  Experience points are scaled so you can quickly level up your other characters if need be.  Therefore, you are never discouraged from trying out other characters since it’ll only take 2-3 battles before the underleveled characters catch up 10+ levels.  The game will make certain characters mandatory at certain points for story purposes too.


While Trails in the Sky SC begins as a more personal story, by the time you’ve finished one-third of the game, there are a lot more politics involving the precarious situation that the fictional country Liberl is in.  Continuing on from the first game, Liberl is pursuing peace between the neighboring Calvard and Erebonia.  It is a well done story and coupled with the amazing music, you will be completely engrossed with how everything pans out.


What the game keeps hammering on is how Ouroboros is such a overpowered enemy.  All their members, or Enforcers as they are known, easily dispatches our protagonists.  Their motives remain mysterious and it can feel frustrating when you are stopping on a small part of their plan without knowing what they are trying to build towards.


Estelle remains charming as a character and she is jointed by most of the familiar faces from the first game, as well as several new characters.  The characters are truly the game’s strengths, while the story is meaty and very easy to get involved in.  The character development doesn’t shine until you’re three quarters of the way through the game and then all the backstories start coming out.  As the motivations for each character are revealed, it dawns on you how much you care about these characters, and Liberl as a whole.  The scenes where Estelle and Joshua’s paths intersect were fantastic; it emphasizes their feelings and the messiness of their situation really well.


So while you could say that the game has a slow start, and really, it has a slow first three-quarters, the final two chapters were crazy in terms of plot development.  It hooks you in and refused to let go.  It is dramatic event after dramatic event.  The situation continues to escalate and gets worse, with tensions surrounding Liberl against Erebonia and Ouroboros.  Who knew sprites could be so expressive, or be able to deliver such exciting action sequences.


As the story is such a huge focus, the story to gameplay ratio heavily skews to the story at times.  There are 20 to 30 minutes of solid text cutscenes at the end of every chapter.  As a result, the game takes around 50-70 hours to complete but what a journey it would have been.  The time investment is totally worth it.  SC completes the story of Estelle and Joshua since Trails in the Sky the 3rd has different protagonists.  The ending was epic and while it doesn’t answer all the questions you had, it answered a lot of them and provided closure to many of each characters’ subplots.  The fate of the antagonist was a tad bit disappointing.  No matter what you thought of the earlier sections, the ending completely made the game.  It was just astounding at how it wraps things up.


As you near the end of the game, you kind of want to approach it slow because you don’t want to say goodbye to the world of Liberl and the characters.  That’s how powerful the impact that the game has on the player.  Despite all the positives of the game, it has its fair share of flaws.  There are plenty of optional sidequests that tie into the fact that Estelle is a Bracer, and she can climb up through the ranks by completing them.  Most of them are little more than fetch quests or hunt quests.  They make you trek through the same environments too many times.  Tying into this is that due to the game being a sequel, it reuses a huge chunk of the same environments and dungeons as the first game.


Dungeons have no maps and are designed to make the player get easily lost in them.  It is also inconsistent with how some dungeons will warp you out automatically once you have reached the end, while with others, you have to backtrack.  It is especially annoying in the longer optional dungeons since the monsters re-spawn as well.


The PC release includes a Turbo Mode where you can speed up the gameplay at the press of a button.  You can set the speed from 1.5x to 6x and is a separate rate for during exploration and during battles.  Turbo Mode is very handy as the battle animations in particular do seem to take a bit longer than one would hope.  This also makes backtracking easier to stomach.  It can still be grating, especially if you are going for 100% completion or the achievements where you wished that they could have implemented a fast travel system.  Using Turbo Mode can cause minor glitches such as not being able to exit the map.  These glitches are easily overcome by getting out of Turbo Mode and then going through the exit.


Overall, The Legend of Heroes:  Trails in the Sky SC is a wonderful game that clearly shows how much effort was put into it.  The amount of content is staggering and while it can be frustrating at times due to how much content is missable without a walkthrough, and the backtracking if you want to 100% the game, it is hard to fault considering how good it is.  When the credits finish and “Fin” shows up, you feel sad to say your goodbyes to the characters that you have spent almost 100 hours with over the course of the two games.  Trails in the Sky SC is highly recommended and is a fine JRPG that has aged remarkably well over the years.

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