Pacific Rim: The Black - Season 2 (2022)

Pacific Rim: The Black’s second and final season is seven episodes long. It follows brother and sister Taylor and Hayley, in Australia where kaiju roams free, and it is dangerous to live. The season follows straight from the previous season with the big revelation of the boy. He will naturally be the focus of this season, with Hayley being very attached to him. Taylor is understandably much more hesitant. A few arguments later and the boy requires their attention while they continue with their course down to Sydney, now also joined by Mei.

While this is set in the Pacific Rim world, the tone and content is different to the movies. Kaiju’s aren’t only huge hulking monsters anymore, and jaegers, the giant robots to combat the kaiju’s, only show up sparingly. Instead, it focuses on human drama, which is nowhere near as fun and interesting. It doesn’t help that the show introduces too many weird concepts, such as groups living in harmony with the kaiju or cults that lean too hard on superstition.

There are scenes where it shows the sheer number of kaiju roaming around the land now that it has fallen. It is a hopeless desolate land, and it is a surprise that anyone can survive there. On the flip side, this shows more about the nature of the kaiju and… sometimes, it feels as if it contradicts the origins shown from the movies. The movies show that the kaiju’s were created to invade Earth but now that they have succeeded in some areas, the kaiju’s have evolved to the point of just being like animals that roam and reproduce, like any other anime on Earth, albeit just gigantic in size.

Hayley’s attachment to the boy is the main driver of a lot of the events and actions of the characters. Yet it is one of the weaker aspects of the show. It’s irrational and Hayley is too distracted by the boy to even function properly. If it wasn’t for sheer luck and that they are the main characters, they would have perished from her mistakes a long time ago.

There are some jaeger vs kaiju moments but like the second movie, the movements of these gigantic bodies are too fast. It doesn’t have the same deliberate heavy feel of the first movie, where it gives them mass and momentum. Here, it feels like typical anime fights where everyone is too fast with moves that are unrealistic to pull off. The AI within the jaeger has developed its own personality where it can be sarcastic and snarky when it wants to be, and not in a great way.

The scope of the show is too limited. While it is supposed to tell a smaller scaled story focusing on the siblings, the fact that it involves the sisters, who seem to have some special power over the kaiju, sets the tone too far apart. We never truly get a full answer on the boy and his own connections with the kaiju. All that is focused on is that the siblings are trying to avoid death while traveling down to Sydney. Everything just feels reactive with barely any quality storytelling or plot along the way.

The plot and the season as a whole are rushed. With only seven episodes this season, and fourteen overall for the whole story, there wasn’t much time to flesh things out. The sisters are underdeveloped, as is the boy. Things happen out of control and even the big climactic fight at the season finale wasn’t very exciting. It lacked the scale, the grandeur, and the heaviness of the original movie which it used to capture your attention. This is just an anime that doesn’t have any physical limitations.

Overall, the second season of Pacific Rim: The Black is average. It doesn’t expand the world of Pacific Rim in any meaningful way. In fact, it ruins the canon as it added too many weird oddities into the world. The kaiju we see here aren’t the same kaiju’s we know. They’ve changed, but not for the better. Focusing only on one jaeger and a pair of siblings as they struggle to make it across Australia turned out to be a lot more boring and limited than it sounded.

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Toy Review: Transformers Generations Legacy United Cybertron Hot Shot (Deluxe)

Review:  #798

Name:  Hot Shot

Brand:  Transformers

Allegiance:  Autobot

Line:  Generations - Legacy: United

Year of Release:  2024

Size Class:  Deluxe (Wave 3)

Mold Status:  new

VEHICLE MODE:

This time based on his Cybertron appearance, Hot Shot transforms into a slick blue sports car.

This is a nice vehicle from the front and sides.  It's letdown by the back due to the gaps left from his transformation.

One pleasant surprise is how big Hot Shot is.  He is bigger and chunkier than your average Deluxe.  We haven't had this for a while now.

He comes with a transparent gun for robot mode, and a Cyber Key.  The Cyber Key is tiny, much tinier than the originals.

While the Cyber Key can plug into the back, it is non-functional.  You need to flip out the wings yourself as they are on a hinge.

The yellow gun can peg on top to complete the look.

Despite the messy rear, this is a fantastic vehicle mode that's rock solid to hold and play.

TRANSFORMATION:

You can tell why Hot Shot is so big, it's because his engineering is simple, they had the budget for extra plastic.  This is not a bad thing, and the same goes for the fact that the transformation scheme is a basic upgrade of his original Cybertron toy.  The back splits into two and extends to form the legs.  While the front splits in half and forms his arms along with the sides of the vehicle.  The roof rotates to form his back and you can reveal his head.

ROBOT MODE:

Just like the transformation, Hot Shot's robot mode is accurate to his original right down to all the awkward kibble placement.

In particular, the windshield hands off his back, and the car's side panels are on his forearms.  Interestingly enough, those panels are attached on via 5mm pegs, so you can actually pull them off if you wish.

The head sculpt is fine, it's not particularly noteworthy.

His size will surprise you, as he is tall.  Thanks to his chunkiness, Hot Shot feels bigger than nearly all Deluxes, and is almost par with Voyagers.  That said, he doesn't have the same mass as Voyagers, but he doesn't feel like a hollow floppy mess either.  It's perfect.

From the side, you can tell that he's pretty much the car standing up, again, a simple transformation is not a bad thing.

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

In terms of proportions, his arms are a bit long, and the swivels and hinges are not combined but rather separate, so can feel off.

He can hold the gun in either hand, and when not in use, it will peg in the same place as in car mode, but this time on his back.

There aren't too many flaws not already mentioned, although as a personal opinion, the wings on his back are a tad small so it can be hard to see thanks to his large shoulderpads.

This is a really faithful update to the character.

OVERALL:

Hot Shot is a fantastic figure and one that you should get.  It is a great upgrade to the original toy.  While his engineering is simplistic and heavily inspired by the original, it gave it the chance to be produced bigger and more solidly built than a lot of Deluxes, especially ones from the movies.  This is Transformers fun distilled to its core.

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Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention (Vita)

Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention is a SRPG with a focus on leveling and grinding. There is a story mode, which takes place in the Netherworld and follows Mao, the son of the Demon Overlord. For a petty reason, he wants to defeat his father and as such, he must take on the class of a Hero. It’s a contradiction given that demonic traits are the complete opposites of heroic traits, but the story is mostly made for laughs anyway. It has a lot of self-aware references, puns, and humor. While it can get too much at times, it generally works and is enjoyable.

Mao is technically a student at the Evil Academy but like a true demon honor student, he doesn’t attend class. He has a rival, Raspberyl, as well as the hero who accidentally stumbled upon this place, Almaz. Together, they are dragged by Mao along his quest to defeat his father. The story isn’t spectacular as it easily gets distracted, which is to be expected. The whole story is voice acted, which is impressive.

The main gameplay is the battles, where it takes place over grid-based maps set in an isometric view. The isometric view means it can be annoying to see properly at times. The overly sensitive back touchpad option to change the camera zoom makes it annoying as you will accidentally trigger it time and time again. The game has a ton of playable characters, although apart from a few story characters, the rest of your party are generic characters. You can even create and train monsters, so the game and its mechanics are overwhelming for new players.

The battle system throws in a few additional things that sets itself apart from other SRPGs. Characters came move, attack, and use spells, that is normal and to be expected. However, they can also lift blocks in the environment, or other characters, and then throw them. This can be clunky as it is all menu-based but can be extremely useful in travelling a little bit further than what a character normally would be able to move. The other thing is that when you select a character to attack, it puts them in a queue. The action in the queue only gets activated when you decide to. This is important as it allows you to position characters to gain the advantage of a team-based attack before you can then revert and move them somewhere else after the attack is done.

Levels and equipment play an important role in the game. With so many characters that you can use in the game, it can be hard to level up properly and evenly amongst all of them. Therefore, you are forced to replay previous levels to quickly grind up their levels. This isn’t as bad as it sounds and can even be a satisfying process. A lot of power gain will come from better equipment and this is where the game doesn’t do a great job at its tutorial since it doesn’t explain how all those systems interact with each other.

Each character has a bunch of skills that they can learn. Characters hitting enemies will give them mana points which is used to learn new skills. These can be passive and active skills. With so many game mechanics, it’s only natural that some of them are easily forgotten and feel tacked on, and this is one of them. However, the many mechanics do give the player flexibility in how they want to approach the game. The story levels are somewhat easy enough to progress, with a little bit of grinding of course.

The unfortunate thing with your party consisting of so many generic characters that you have created is that you don’t have story attachment to them. Yet because story characters join relatively far into the game, you’ve probably already got your preferred team and it will be a chore to keep every character up to date in terms of levels and equipment. The game has some ridiculous difficulty spikes even during the story. Enemies often like to one or two shot your characters, which combined with overwhelming numbers, can make some levels unfair. This artificial difficulty to force you to grind holds the game back at such an early stage. At least once you hit a certain point towards the end of the story, you can quickly grind up levels for your characters and easily crush all enemies from then on.

The game’s graphics are so so. Since it is in an isometric view, the characters are represented by sprites. The story is told via visual novel styled cutscenes. The attacks during battles can be flashy but you might want to turn them off so that you don’t waste too much time during battles as these are long animations. Even if you turn animations off, you will see the attack animation the first time you’ve ever used it, so you won’t be missing anything. The game does the annoying thing of forcing you to manually save as you cannot quit a level without reloading. It’s an archaic practice and does nothing to add difficulty. If you lose during a level, at least you don’t completely lose your progress.

The story is surprisingly not too bad. It isn’t amazing or stellar, but it is enough to keep you invested in it. The characters slowly creep up on you in terms of how likeable they are, as you understand them more and more from their actions. The dialogue has a good balance of stupidness and funniness so that it works and doesn’t detract from the plot either. It plays into tropes and subverts them at times. For example, you know a character is suspicious and will betray you at one point, but then the game also knows this and will give you a surprise on top.

The story takes around 25 to 30 hours to complete, although this really depends on how much you grind to get through it. As mentioned, once you hit a certain point, it is trivial to grind up a ton of levels that makes the rest of the story levels a piece of cake. However, the postgame assumes that you have grinded like this, plus more. There is a lot to do in the postgame, from the DLC stories to the expectation that you are to grind to level 9999 and defeat the super boss. That is literally hundreds of additional hours, if you like this type of content.

For the DLC, you don’t have to grind *too* much. However, its levels can be painful to play. It was already present in the story where there will be special layouts in stages with certain tiles having special effects. It basically slows you down and you’re forced to advance in a certain way. You will get levels where it is impossible for your characters to hit back or advance, leading to a frustrating, annoying, and horrendous experience. The DLC is comprised of five additional stories, and they all take place after the main game. It takes around another six to eight hours to complete if you have sufficiently leveled characters. They are a little bit of extra fun with the characters before the postgame grind has barely any story.

Overall, Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention is a fun SRPG, even with the grinding aspect. It can be annoying if you wanted to play this as a typical SRPG for the story as there are difficulty spikes in every chapter. However, if you can spend a little bit of time grinding, then it is very satisfying when you level up and get better gear, to the point of easily passing through the level. The postgame content is crazy for the fact that it assumes you have grinded and will continue to grind. However, there is a lot of content here and even if you don’t play the postgame, the normal story is fun and worthwhile enough.

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Toy Review: Transformers Generations Legacy United Magmatron (Commander)

Review:  #797

Name:  Magmatron

Brand:  Transformers

Allegiance:  Predacon

Line:  Generations - Legacy: United

Year of Release:  2024

Size Class:  Commander

Mold Status:  new

PACKAGING:

As the Commander class release of 2024, Magmatron comes in a big box with a beautiful piece of artwork on the front.

The back are some stock photos and we see that Magmatron is a combiner of sorts.

SKYSAURUS:

Magmatron is a unique combiner in that he is the form of three members, but each member only has two modes, the beast mode, and the combined mode.

First up is Skysaurus, which transforms into a red flying prehistoric creature (apparently only Landsaurus is a dinosaur).  The red flying creature reminds you of Terrorsaur.

Skysaurus is the smallest of the lot, approximately Deluxe size (above is a comparison with a Voyager figure).

The mouth can open and close, and the head can tilt up and down.  The neck is all jointed at one piece, so it can feel a bit restrictive.

Articulation is similarly restrictive, the wings have multiple hinges, and the front claws are on balljoints.  The legs have hips, knees and ankle joints, but due to how top heavy the figure is, he'll easily fall over due to balancing issues.

The wings can open up and the wingspan can be quite impressive as a result.

Skysaurus is a fine figure, although he feels very small compared to other two, and the shade of red used is very reminiscent of the 1990s.

SEASAURUS:

Seasaurus transforms into a water based creature, and it reminds you immediately of the Loch Ness Monster, as it's that type of creature.

There are no robot bits here, which is impressive.  Although despite looking big, he is actually fairly hollow, and it's noticeable when you pick him up.

He is approximately the size of a Leader classed figure.

Similarly to Skysaurus, the mouth can open and close, revealing a row of sharp teeth and a pink mouth.

While the flippers can move a bit due to their balljoints, most of the articulation lie in its neck.  There are four major hinges and swivels plus the one on its head to give it a fantastic amount of motion.  However, you do need to fiddle around with the hinges to make it do what you want, and for it to look good.

An impressive looking figure and the highly articulated neck makes it very fun to play with.

LANDSAURUS:

The final member is Landsaurus and he is the core of the team, in more ways than one.  It is a dark blue T-Rex type creature.

Landsaurus is the only member with robot parts peeking through.  It's still hidden very well but when looking from behind, you can see the dark robot bits behind his legs.

Landsaurus is the biggest and heftiest member of the team, and it's where most of the engineering of the set went into.

The mouth can once again open and close, but not by a lot though.  One thing that's missing from all members is allowing the included fire effects pieces to attach, while the originals didn't have it, it would still be cool to have the trio breathing fire.

Articulation is limited.  The legs are not very flexible otherwise you'll start revealing the robot parts.  The tail can move from side to side, the head can also move a tiny big.  The two small front arms are on balljoints though.

A nice design, although the 1990s color scheme can make the figures feel dated or from an older era, as it is very faithful to the original.

TRANSFORMATION (TO MAGMASAURUS):

Transformation to Magmasaurus is more involved than you would expect.  Landsaurus is the easiest as you need to open up a panel on its back.  Then using Seasaurus, you need to split him in half and flip out the robot arms to act as legs.  Flip him back to front, attach it to Landsaurus and then peg the half back.  Finally, Skysaurus just attaches at the top.

MAGMASAURUS:

Magmasaurus looks.. ridiculous, and it is basically the three mashed together, and not in a great way.

However, this mode was in the original, and at least it rounds out the set by giving it a combined mode in both beast and robot mode.

Magamsaurus, being the combination of two roughly Leader sized figures and a Deluxe, and it is absolutely massive.

Having all three heads being able to point forward is a nice touch and gives it a chimera type beast kind of feel.

It's also surprisingly stable, as everything pegs and holds together strongly.  Articulation is bad though as you only really have the heads, the front arms of Landsaurus, and limited movement for the front and rear pair of legs.

There are some dedicated pegs for this mode and having something extra without compromising anything else is a bonus.

TRANSFORMATION (TO ROBOT MODE):

Starting with Landsaurus, it takes on most of the work as it forms the legs, torso and a shoulder pad.  The legs looks easy as it is the beast legs, but you need to straighten it, then flip out a few panels at the back of the legs to lock the pieces into place.  The underbelly of Landsaurus also separates and forms the hilt of the sword weapon.  The revealed underbelly then flips around to form the torso, while the head is the right shoulderpad.

Seasaurus also separates into two, the bottom half with the flippers is the shield.  The remaining half contains the robot arms, which are easy to rotate and swing out.  There are several pegs to connect it to Landsaurus, and as the finishing touch, you fold several panels onto the back and wrap the neck around to form the other shoulderpad.

Finally, Skysaurus is the easiest as you fold up the legs, fold down the beast head and reveal the robot head.  You then attach it to Landsaurus and complete the combined mode.

MAGMATRON:

Magmatron is the combined form of all three and it is a impressive looking robot mode.  You can immediately tell that it is a combination of three separate creatures thanks to the color scheme that while it clashes, also works well.

There is a ton of kibble though and most of it sticks out the back.  You have Landsaurus's tail, Seasaurus's panels, and Skysaurus's wings.

The head sculpt is good, and looks very organic.  While it can turn from side to side, Skysaurus's wings gets in the way and you have to fiddle around with them.

Magmatron is a big figure, and towers over even the older Leader figures.  He feels very solid and hefty in your hands.

As expected, there are a lot of really nice sculpted detailing.

He has giant heel spurs to help support his weight, there are never any issues with balancing.

Articulation is good, he has mostly ratchet joints, and they're complemented by tight hinges.

He has joints for his head, shoulders, elbows, wrists, fingers, waist, hips, knees and ankles.

You might have noticed the red blades on Skysaurus's wings, and they can detach to give Magmatron a pair of red blades, although they seem a little bit short for him.

There are some leftover pieces, half of Seasaurus forms the shield.  Part of Landsaurus forms the hilt of the sword, while the blade was hidden in the tail in beast mode.  Magmatron also comes with fire effects parts.

The shield attaches mostly via a 5mm port, and similarly he holds the sword using a 5mm port.

The only way you can use the fire effects is to plug it between the hilt and the blade.  It doesn't look that great, mainly because due to the soft plastics used, it sags.

A fantastic robot mode and of course, this is where all the focus and effort went into.

OVERALL:

Magmatron is another winner in the Commander class line.  It is a fantastic update to the original toy and that's what it is.  This is basically a refinement of the original design with modern engineering, and it works wonderfully here.

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