Hawkeye (2021)

Hawkeye is a six episode show focusing on the more “normal” Avenger, Hawkeye. It is set after Avengers: Endgame and follows not only Clint Barton (aka Hawkeye), but also introduces Kate Bishop. The beginning on the season focuses mostly on Kate, with Clint only having a few scenes. Kate is a rich young girl but after seeing Hawkeye in action during the Battle of New York from the first Avengers movie, it had inspired her to take on martial arts and archery. She excels at both. Skipping back to the present day, Kate accidentally involves herself in the underground black market, coming across Ronin’s outfit.

Meanwhile, Clint is spending time in New York with his kids when the actions of Kate, wearing Ronin’s outfit, appears on the news. Given that Ronin is the dark past of Clint that he is trying to move on from, he has to tie up this loose end. Clint tracks down Kate and attempts to get back the Ronin outfit but of course, things are never that simple. Kate’s caught the attention of Ronin’s past enemies, who comes out in force to try and take “Ronin” down.

The plot quickly spirals out of control and becomes bigger than just Clint’s attempt to push Ronin away from everyone’s attention. The pacing is decent although it feels like the progress towards finding out the background of the situation, and the one behind it all, is slow. It kind of keeps looping back into a routine where Clint and Kate will face some bad guys, retreat and regroup, and then go at it again when they’ve got something a little bit extra.

Despite being the tagalong sidekick, Kate never feels like an annoying character. It helps that she’s not clueless considering she is from high society. The show spends time on her current family situation, where her mum is remarrying but there is something suspicious about her fiancé, and all these events seem to tie together. Given Kate is so much younger in age, she has a lot of quips. It naturally feels lighthearted as a result.

The show fleshes out Hawkeye, who had always seemed like an overlooked background character in the movies. In comparison with the other members of Avengers, Hawkeye has no special powers and he’s never had a solo movie, he’s just… there. This show portrays him in a very likeable manner and the chemistry before him and Kate helps push the show along. The various flashbacks though are okay at best. They’re required to give some context to the newly introduced characters but feels disjointed to the rest of the show.

Carrying on with the theme of the Phase Four TV shows, we seen some more mundane moments of what it’s like to be an Avenger. Clint is easily recognised by everyone, who mostly views him as a hero. He’s asked for photos at every opportunity and isn’t just another guy on the street. The show also has the usual high production values with heaps of explosions, combat scenes, car chases, the whole lot. There are flashy effects but sometimes the CGI is obvious and fake, making it distracting. There are a lot of scenes where it takes place at night or in dark areas, which isn’t ideal at times given it masks what’s happening onscreen.

Given the consistent pacing, it doesn’t build up to a huge finale, but it was still good. There is a huge battle but since the season was already well paced in terms of action sequences already, it’s not out of the ordinary. It aligns its Christmas theme with the final episode’s release date so that can be corny. Anyway, there are some neat references to other Marvel shows. It effectively resolves all of its plot arcs but not all are completed in a satisfying way. Some of them are underwhelming given all the focus it had, while others have the opposite problem where there wasn’t enough focus so it loses the impact.

Overall, Hawkeye is still a strong TV show. It still requires some knowledge of the MCU but works well enough as a standalone. The chemistry between Clint and Kate is one of the highlights. Exploring Hawkeye’s past was much more interesting that you would expect. The season is well paced, with plenty of good action and humor. It also helps that the show can feel more grounded compared to other MCU shows, where the CGI is not as in your face.

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Megadimension Neptunia VII (PS4)

Megadimension Neptunia VII is the first game in the Hyperdimension Neptunia series of JRPGs for the PS4. The title is pronounced “V-two”, given that it s a sequel to Victory on the PS3. Being the first game for the PS4, you would expect graphical improvements, and there are some, just not a lot. The game still has that low budget feel to it, even more so when you consider the amount of reused assets. At least the 2D character models and backgrounds look very nice.

The game play is familiar. The battle system is turn based. Characters can move around on the battlefield, positioning themselves given that attacks have a limited range, attacking an enemy’s back deals greater damage, and there are position requirements for certain special moves. Depending on the weapon a character has equipped, they can chain up to five hits in one go. Attacks are split into three types, Standard, Power and Rush. Power focuses on higher damage, Rush on the number of hits, and Standard is between the two. In addition to physical attacks, characters can use skills which require SP, and items.

The world map is a big 2D map, although now, there are routes between each dungeon or town. The routes are comprised of points and there is a chance that there will be a random encounter. This is a terrible change given that is becomes very annoying when you just want to get from point a to point b and you’re constantly stopped by these encounters, forcing you into the battle screen only to fight some weak enemy that you’ve out-leveled a long time ago.

Dungeons on the other hand are free-roam 3D areas. Unfortunately, the game reuses a lot of dungeons from previous games, so can feel stale in that aspect. There are still new dungeon designs, which can be confusing given that there’s only a mini-map that you cannot expand. Similarly, enemies are quickly recolored, which is disappointing. They roam the battlefield and getting into contact with one will start a battle on a separate screen. You can attempt to get the first turn by hitting them, but in another annoying chance, if the enemy touches you before your character finishes their attack on the field, all the enemies get first turn instead.

Further changes that make the game more annoying, and harder, is that the enemies usually either hit really hard, or outnumber your small party. While the maximum party size is four, you’ll rarely have that, so it sucks when two characters are fighting against five enemies. To make matters worse, leveling up does not automatically recover your health and SP. What this means is that you’ll rely heavily on items, or jumping in and out of dungeons to heal. The game is actually hard in this aspect, and forces you to spend SP just to quickly wipe out enemies before they wipe you.

Every dungeon and boss requires grinding, as you cannot get enough levels just by defeating all the enemies on the way. And you’re only able to save at save points in dungeons, so if you die, you’ll have to reload your last save. Even if you think your level is on par or slightly above, and that you easily dispatched the enemies and dungeon boss, the next story boss might be a difficulty spike and kill you in two hits. The game’s difficult is uneven this way, which can really sour the experience at times.

The story follows Neptune and her sister Nepgear as they are thrown into another dimension, the Zero Dimension. It’s a post-apocalyptic world and there, they meet Uzume, the only sole remaining human. This world is constantly being attacked by monsters, and with only one continent left in the world, Uzume is fighting to protect it, and its inhabitants. The story is filled with fourth-wall breaking dialogue, as well as random jokes and gags. Nothing is taken seriously and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Due to the decisions made during development, the game’s story is split into several sections. They’re each somewhat self-contained and as such, can feel truncated and isolated, with the whole game lacking cohesion. Sure, there are references and the events follow each other but they’re not closely linked. Combined with the fact that your party changes in each section, meaning that they start from a weak state every time, and it's not the best formula. As is customary for the series, there are a lot of cutscenes. When you’ve finished one, it’ll be another one, and you’ll chain four to five back to back.

In addition, there is tendency for your party to constantly change, even in the final section of the game. You’ll lose and gain party members, and while eventually you get a huge amount of playable characters, you don’t get to really train them up and spend a lot of time for most of them, which makes the game feel a bit more disjointed. Leveling up is also very slow, you gain pitiful amounts of experience points from normal enemies, so it can be very frustrating when you hit a powerful boss that you need to gain several levels for in order to overcome.

The game attempts to tie the various plot threads in the previous arcs into the third and final arc, and it succeeds, to a degree. It’s not a super clever or interesting way to do it, but at least it works somewhat. It’s doesn’t justify how the story was structured though because it was still a slog and mess to get to that point. The game has two endings, a normal ending and a true ending, where the latter has some requirements that are easily missable. It takes about 20 hours to get to an ending, and if you do the true ending in New Game Plus (where you get to basically carry over everything), by skipping all the cutscenes, you can get there within four hours.

The game is designed to be grindy and that’s basically all the postgame content. There are several optional dungeons. One of them is designed to be hard with no in-game map and containing some powerful bosses. While another takes inspiration from another game (a collaboration actually) and focuses on the platforming aspect, which isn’t the greatest idea given the terrible jumping physics of this game. There’s the usual Coliseum where you can fight opponents of escalating difficulty, and that’s it.

Overall, Megadimension Neptunia VII is an average JRPG. Despite being on “next gen” systems at the time of release, it wasn’t really that much better than the PS3 games. It retains that budget look given the liberal reuse of dungeons and enemies, making the latter parts of the game feel repetitive and too familiar. The weird difficulty spikes, amplified due to the way the game is broken into pieces, along with party restrictions, make it a frustrating and tedious game to play at times. It gets better at the end once you get all the characters together but even then, they’ll come in and out as the plot demands, doesn’t really quite tie the whole game together.

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What If…? – Season 1 (2021)

What If…? is a nine episode animated series in Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). T he unique spin on this show is that it showcases alternate timelines in the multiverse where events played out differently than the MCU movies. It is an animated show but doesn’t use traditional animation. Rather it is cel-shaded, giving it a 3D on 2D look. The animation is well done, fluid and looks fantastic. The characters are based on the likenesses of the actors and actresses from the live-action movies, and where possible, uses them as voice actors.

The show is framed such that The Watcher, who has access to the whole of the multiverse, observes it all and watches their “story”. He does not, and cannot, interfere. Each episode in the season tells a different scenario. As a result, it condenses each story into roughly 30 minutes and requires the viewer to have a good understanding of everything that has happened in the MCU. It gets right into it with no setup or introduction to the characters in each episode, as it expects you to already be familiar with the original scenario.

The scenarios are cool alternate realities compared to the main MCU timeline, with one major different leading to a different set of events. Based on that, there will be other familiar supporting characters that turn out and they might turn out very differently compared to the one that you know. It’s like an in-joke, especially when they themselves reference something that they are thinking of… that actually happened in the main MCU timeline. This also allows the show to bring back various characters, including villains that was a once-one in the MCU, reminding you how formidable and powerful they can be.

There are some alternate scenarios where it makes perfect sense, like having Agent Carter become Captain America instead of Steve Rogers. While others are a bit more out there, like having T’Challa become Star-Lord instead of Peter Quill, or having a zombie apocalypse. In all of these, the episode will effectively retell the story in a fast-paced manner, just to show the possibilities of what could happen. It integrates what we know about the characters into their new surroundings, so that it fits more naturally. However, sometimes in order to make the scenario work, it can feel kind of forced to put the characters into that given situation.

The show can be surprisingly violent, in ways that the movies couldn’t. There can be gushing blood, or characters unceremoniously killed in more gruesome ways. And speaking of deaths, giving that it is an alternate hypothetical story (or another universe in the multiverse), the show can afford to kill characters at the drop of a hat. It doesn’t matter if Ironman or Captain America dies, because it doesn’t affect the main story, only that episode’s story. So if it is worthwhile and is story relevant, then the show will not hesitate to do what is required, and this can give some shock factor in each episode.

Given that each episode is a self-contained story, the pacing can be fast, giving it a rushed feel to it. Some episodes are better than others. Some of the alternate scenarios have such potential that you’d wish that it was expanded more, or at the very least, given maybe another episode’s worth of time to be fleshed out and explored. The season also has a range of different styles. Some episodes are serious, while others are silly. All of them have interactions between characters that had rarely interacted before, and the results can be unexpected.

Despite the episodic nature of most of the season, it wraps it up in the final two episodes with a common thread. It does have a meta or fourth-wall breaking feel to it but suddenly, everything felt linked and had a reason. It ended up becoming an epic climactic finale that allowed the season to go out with a bang. The events and team up, resulted in a pseudo-Avengers styled story, in its own reimagined twist that’ll leave a smile to your face. It was a great finale to the season, giving it a proper purpose.

Overall, What If…? is a great show. The animated nature allowed it to be creative and freed from live-action constraints. Being able to use character designs that shares the likeness of their live-action counterparts, as well as most of the actors and actresses returning as voice actors, really helps sell the show. The high production values continue to show in the animation quality, and the fight scene alone in the final episode was impressive. While it can be episodic and largely self-contained, the finale linked it all together in a spectacular and satisfying way that will leave you excited and speechless.

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Toy Review: Transformers Generations Legacy Menasor

Review:  #760

Name:  Menasor

Brand:  Transformers

Allegiance:  Decepticon

Line:  Generations - Legacy

Year of Release:  N/A

Size Class:  N/A

Mold Status:  new

STUNTICONS:

Menasor is a combiner comprised of five Stunticons:  Motormaster, Breakdown, Dead End, Drag Strip and Wild Rider.

As a group, they look really good together, and the biggest benefit of the Legacy versions is that they are very G1 focused and inspired.

This is doubly true in robot mode, where even the aesthetics are more of an upgrade of the G1 versions rather than a reimagination like many previous Generations toys.

It's a shame that the engineering of the Deluxes are so similar.  Breakdown and Wild Rider are basically the same mold, while Dead End and Drag Strip share a lot of the engineering design, even if they are a completely different mold.

TRANSFORMATION:

The unique aspect of this version is that is uses the G1 cartoon episodes where Menasor's combiner form was more of a giant robot with the rest of the Stunticons hanging off its limbs, rather than becoming the limbs itself.  Therefore, you have Drag Strip and Dead End in vehicle modes which peg onto the arms.  There is a tab underneath that then allows the pair to separate into halves so that Menasor retains his arm articulation.  On the other hand, Breakdown and Wild Rider are also in their vehicle forms and pegs solider into the back of each leg, which folds the panels forward to cover up the shins.

MENASOR:

This is definitely a unique Menasor for sure, and one that hasn't really been tried before.  

It's a good attempt but the biggest negative are the legs, since Breakdown and Wild Rider form the back of the legs, they are hidden from the front, which makes Menasor seem less like a combiner.  It also means that he lacks the color variety that you usually associate with combiners since both his shins are unpainted grey.  One thing to note is that you can only swap Breakdown and Wild Rider around, otherwise, every other Stunticon cannot be swapped around or between an arm and a leg.

The head sculpt is good, and is on a swivel so he can look from side to side.

As expected, Menasor is a big figure, given that Motormaster (being the base) is a Commander sized figure.  Above is a comparison against a Leader sized figure.

Unfortunately, not all pieces are used in this mode.  There's the gun turret, and then all of the guns from the individual Stunticons.  It's a shame that the designer didn't manage to allow them to combine into a bigger gun or something.  At least you can kind of plug them to the base of the turret so it won't get lost as easily.

Articulation is very good here, given that the Stunticons just attach to the limbs and don't get in the way.  Menasor has ratchets for his shoulders, elbows, waist, hips, knees and ankles.

The individual Stunticons also attach very securely, which isn't necessarily always a given.  Each Stunticon has several points that pegs onto the limbs.

Naturally, being a combination of a Commander plus four Deluxe figures, he is hefty and can be a bit unwieldy at times.

It's unfortunate that Menasor doesn't have a good weapon.  He has the sword from Motormaster, but whereas it was too big for Motormaster, it's too small for Menasor.

Similarly for the turret, Menasor just towers over it so it looks somewhat ridiculous.

Nevertheless, this is an impressive robot mode and one that works much better than expected.

OVERALL:

Menasor is a good set.  It's pretty good that Motormaster himself can form a functional skeleton of Menasor, but having the rest of the Stunticons filling out the gaps, does make him feel much more whole and complete.  In his combined form, he is extremely solid and is something that you feel can still hold together even through play, which is doubly impressive.

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