The Mad Redwood

The Apothecary Diaries is a manga series that is adapted from a light novel series, and which now has an anime adaptation of its own (which has just gotten its second season). There are three manga adaptations: the main one, a reinterpretation known as “Maomao’s Notes,” and another spinoff manga featuring a side character’s perspective. I hadn’t heard of any of these until a few days ago (as of writing), but decided to check the main manga out upon a friend’s recommendation. It was described to me like this: it’s the story of a young girl named Maomao who’s forced into a food-testing job in the inner courts of an ancient-China-adjacent fictional nation, who applies her expertise in medicine, herbs, and poisons to surviving court life. Also, there’s a prominent romance subplot with a beautiful eunuch.

Yes, that’s the title of the game. Already you can sense the vibe this game is trying to run with: it’s weird! It’s charming! It’s quirky! And it’s fun! It doesn’t want to take itself too seriously, ‘cos it’s chill like that! But what is it? I think it’s best described as “mostly-multiplayer Guitar Hero but with minigames, puzzles, and gimmicks.” I don’t like the word ‘gimmicks’ there, but I think it’s appropriate.

‘RPG’ stands for ‘rocket-propelled grenade.’ Wikipedia defines an RPG as a “shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon that launches rockets equipped with a shaped-charge explosive warhead.” A ‘shaped-charge’ is an explosive ‘charge’ shaped such that the destructive energy is focused in a particular desired way. In the RPG’s case, the goal is to penetrate thick metal armour, most likely on a tank (or a similar armoured vehicle). You’ll probably be familiar with the most famous RPG launcher: the RPG-7, which was originally designed by the USSR in the 1960s, but is still used today due to its simplicity, effectiveness, and hardiness. Oh, but as a side note, ‘RPG’ also stands for ‘role-playing game’ in video game terms.

Lost in Translation is sad. I don’t know what else to say, so that’s all for this week.

When writing fiction, characters are always tricky. Even in non-fiction, characters are tricky if you’re going for a creative angle on a real person. Much has been said about writing characters that are more than one-dimensional, ie. having layers and motivations. Creating such layers and motivations means that those layers and motivations will bleed into the plot of a story, and that’s crucial for a reader’s or audience’s engagement with said plot. Even if that plot is very engaging, you want equally engaging characters to go along with it.

Bangkok Dog is a martial arts film. Martial arts films are not known for their writing. They’re known — good ones, anyway — for tightly-choreographed action scenes that are shot in dynamic, interesting ways. You’ve got the John Wick franchise with its wide shots to show off the performers’ talent, putting all the incredible technique and prowess on full display. You’ve got the Ip Man franchise, for that classic Hong-Kong-martial-arts-film-feel with a modern twist, with decades of experience behind each film. Franchises aside, Jackie Chan is known for insane high-spectacle stunts in most, if not all, of his martial arts films.

Hanna isn't a movie I've heard much about, but it’s about a little girl who’s trained to be an assassin. I’d first gotten interested in Hanna when I found out that it was directed by the same guy who did Darkest Hour in 2017, which I’d really enjoyed. I’ve also been interested in the John Wick franchise for a while, which is about assassins, if you didn’t know. I also discovered — when looking at the Wikipedia page for Hanna — that it starred Saoirse Ronan, and I’ve wanted to watch something she’s in for some time, mostly because I like the name Saoirse. After reading the description of the plot of Hanna, I expected a movie about assassins in which young Saoirse Ronan trains all her life for a mission, and the movie shows that mission. It turned out to be not quite that. It also turned out to be absolutely bloody horrifying.

As you might be able to tell from the title of this post, this is going to be about endings. Naturally, spoilers ahead, but then River City Girls was released in 2019, and its sequel was released in 2022, and neither are very long games. This is a sort of recommendation post, with some caveats that will become clear along the way. What you need to know is that these are 2D side-scrolling beat-‘em-up games — a mouthful of a genre term to begin with — in a retro mould that’s highly sought after these days. These games were all the rage in the late ‘80s and throughout the ‘90s, with franchises like Double Dragon and Final Fight leading the charge. River City Girls is a revival of one of those retro series: the Kunio-kun franchise, except this time you play as the previous main characters’ girlfriends who are trying to save them, and who have to beat up a lot of people on the way. Misako and Kyoko have been playable in the series before, but this game took the series in a new sparkly direction with updated visuals, but with all the classic mechanics that fans love.

I usually don’t mess with mods because I like video games as crafted experiences. If some developers release a game a certain way, I like to consider the reasons for why that may be; perhaps they cut or added content for good reason. For instance, a cut minigame in GTA: San Andreas that was discovered still hidden in the game’s code led to a massive scandal, and also led to the game being outright banned in Australia. Probably, the developers of that game had been pleased with the decision to remove it. Probably also, though, they would’ve been more pleased if they’d removed it from the code entirely.

For the uninitiated, Watchmen is a comic about superheroes, but as they might appear in real life. That means criminal violence, drugs, trauma, fear about nuclear weapons (it’s set during the Cold War after all) and the lot of it. It’s grittier and darker than you’d have thought with most superhero stories, at least, as they might have first appeared. I’m sure plenty of people today would be familiar with superhero media, for better or worse, and might even be familiar with it as a medium through which all kinds of stories are told. Much like cartoons, or anime, or video games, or whatever other kinds of media that are associated with particular tropes, comic books are used to tell all kinds of stories. You can use whatever medium you want to tell whatever kind of story you want. Real Steel and Big Fish are both stories about fatherhood, and they’re clearly really different.

It was only about three years ago when I first heard the term ‘game sense.’ It was when I had started playing first-person shooters for the first time on PC, and I had started with the game Valorant, because it had just come out a year earlier, and a bunch of my friends were playing it. Having just bought a new gaming laptop at the time, and not having played many PC games before then, I decided to give Valorant a go. So this was my first introduction to online gaming culture, and all that entailed.

It’s difficult and potentially unhelpful to continue comparing the Soulsborne/Soulslike genre to FromSoftware games. Yes, FromSoftware pioneered this genre of third-person action role-playing games, characterised by their difficulty, emphasis on indirect storytelling, and enemy-respawning/checkpoint mechanics, but surely things can’t stay like this forever, right? If you’re unfamiliar, it doesn’t really matter, because all you need to know is that these games have a really strange legacy: they’re very challenging, frequently unforgiving, and have really strange lore. This kind of strangeness is very, very particular to FromSoftware, and often Soulslike games —games that have attempted to follow the FromSoftware formula — don’t really hit the mark when they try to emulate it, or just don’t try. And that’s fair enough; it’s a very esoteric kind of strangeness, and it’s a very distinct flavour that wouldn’t work for many games. So it’s perhaps for the best that, say, Fortnite doesn’t go down that route.