Bartimaeus

That really was terrible.

Following Vampire Hunter D (1983 1985) yesterday, we have Venus Wars (1989) today. Two colonies on Venus fighting for control of the planet, with our group of older teenagers/young adults being caught in between it all as their city is invaded and they have to decide what they want to do - hide, escape, or fight. I thought this reporter lady that came from off-planet was going to be our protagonist because it sure seemed that way for like the first fifteen minutes or so, but in retrospect, I don't think you can generally have a protagonist gleefully exclaim at the prospect of "total war"... ...while having their eyes light up like this and rightfully expect them to be the protagonist, but I sure was excited at the idea. No, instead, our protagonist is this stupid little prick: He's about as dumb and shooting-self-in-the-foot as you might expect. I'll never understand why young male protagonists have to be so consistently painful...and he's constantly antagonizing everybody else for no good reason, including his girlfriend, and I just...I don't get it, I really don't. To be fair to this movie, it's still pretty decent overall (leagues above something like Iczer One, for example) and it takes turns at focusing on different characters, but every scene involving him I was just praying that someone would blow his brains out or run him over or something. Anyways, if you want an 80s scifi-adventure-war movie with an absolute boatload of well-animated action, you could do a whole lot worse than Venus Wars. Not quite as good as the Crusher Joe stuff (helps that those characters are all good and pretty likeable), but still pretty solid. @Utena: Yeah, all the characters kind of suck (besides the shadowplay girls...and sort of Nanami for being loathsomely terrible but also an absolute lovable meme legend) and it makes it about impossible to enjoy when nothing particularly good ever really happens either, .

More or less the same - I beat BG2 a few years later (turns out BG1 was a little too hard at that age, big surprise) which was long before I ever beat BG1 (suffice to say, that bard chracter was not a success).

@LadyCrimson Beware that if a game has one of your excluded tags up to the fifteenth highest tag, it will be excluded. Even though I hate all of the following genres*... ...I still rarely have cases of games that get excluded that really shouldn't be because one of these tags is like the 13th or 14th ranked tag for a game that has it has a very minor element. Up to the tenth top tag is probably what I personally would set the system to... I had other excluded tags originally that I thought were good choices for myself, but they ended up being so disruptive that I ended up removing them, and decided to just go with an approach of basic genre tags that I literally will not ever play. *Well, besides maybe top-down shooter, but it's not a genre I particularly enjoy either and there are a billion top-down shooters that clog up Steam for no good reason, .

Not going to lie, I've felt a yearning to re-watch season 1...but for the time being, I must press forward with NEW things, so the backlog doesn't exponentially grow! ...The least I can do is finish the rest of Sakura first, . Ah, location scouting... Someone should've gone to animation school instead of film school, methinks, . Thankfully, a quick reverse image search reveals better versions of that Minako poster. And hey, speaking of older animation being better animation... Vampire Hunter D (1985).

Speedruns: Knowing that I'm going to delete the save file immediately after would make it no issue for me, . Tomoyo: I was going through my dropbox recently and discovered a few Sailor Moon gifs I had made way back when I first watched the first season. Really shoulda made more of these...and some from Sakura. Whoops, . ...The only one I have of Minako is of her crying. Double whoops! I'm just imagining Mike and Jay endlessly repeating "how embarrassing" right now, .

It's not the characters they depict I have so much an issue with, more purely the art style. I prefer something a little more...conceptual like IWD, I suppose, rather than a bunch of too realistic yet very silly-looking goofballs looking like they they're all playing dress-up/theater, which is what I see in the BG1 portraits, . But knowing that they're literally supposed to be basically just that (fantasized versions of the developers) helps me forgive it somewhat, . And of course, BG1's are way superior to the BG2 ones. One look at, say...Jaheira's face in BG1 compared to the absolute dumbfoundingly terrible direction they went for her in BG2 (or Viconia, or Anomen, or Aerie, or Edwin, or...) is enough to cement that.

My very first character in BG1 when I was literally about 6 years old was a bard. This was the portrait 6-year-old me selected: It was the first time, and the last time, that I ever played a bard. Ye' gods the BG1 portraits are...not very good (and yet, the BG2 portraits are even worse - IIRC, the BG1 portraits were actually predominantly designed after the developers and their friends and families, and I think it shows in the range of faces and the weird expressions, and so I actually appreciate that on some level even if the actual art style is still not quite to my taste - meanwhile, the BG2 portraits look like they were predominantly designed off of hilariously terrible-looking models looking as stupid as humanly possible).

I think Netflix sadly only goes up to 1.5x speed - not quite the same as mostly switching between 2x and 3x (and occasionally dipping down to 1x) like I was doing, . To be honest, I've employed the speed-up strategy in the past enough times that I have a certain tolerance at this point for everything being chipmunk-ified and basically turning a show into a speed-reading endurance test - trying to follow the dialogue while also trying to figure out what's happening in a scene and the story overall is an interesting and somewhat engaging mental challenge in of itself...but one I usually only reserve for shows that aren't really working for me to begin with, . And hey, it mostly worked...I ended up sort of being okay with the main characters that weren't Ryou (which is funnyc because he was the one character I sort of liked early on after I read your spoiler, but the whole "I am literally (spoiler)" was significantly less interesting and way more dumb in actual implementation than I expected it to be, so RIP him). A very small sense of dignity, perhaps? Plus I have other things I want to get to first! (e): Uh, the forum turned me manually writing "spoiler" (I must've put it in brackets?) into an actual spoiler and broke the second half of my post...but I fixed it now. Very cool. I still miss BBCode mode.

I can't articulate why, but you're so right about thief vs. rogue - I don't think I've ever been or wanted to be a "rogue" if it's an option in anything, but it's literally the complete opposite for "thief" (even if in the case of, say, the BG series, it's purely to serve as the base class before dual-classing into a mage, cleric, or fighter). That's weird that my perception of the two ideas is so radically different. (Also, yes, the questions were very bad...but I answered them unusually: long-distance, a sword, help the creature out, style for armor, and I don't know whom any of those characters are but Ciri seems like the most natural complement...and I got a druid? I had a between chaotic and true neutral thief-mage in mind, and I got a stinking druid instead!).

Well, my prediction would be that it'd be the more decent and less embarrassing version of Love Live! It's more or less lived up to that, . I just finished Devilman Crybaby. I see what majestic meant - this really got very dumb and very obvious in a hurry. Even though the show didn't really appeal to me at all before that, at least from a character and narrative standpoint it felt like it was going somewhere and it was more or less competent. But then Ryou's big press conference happened in like episode 7 and it felt like I was watching the disintegration of the show before my very eyes, and it got worse from there. I probably shoulda called it quits right then and there, but I was already so close to the end of an already very short show - whoops. Well, I was watching it at like 2x or 3x speed and was finishing each episode in like 8-10 minutes instead of 20+, so at least there's that. Probably would've enjoyed K-On more...............

Just think of it as commentary on the state of anime that other shows actually do it for real and subverting it! ...I have no idea if other shows before K-On did the same thing.

At least one of the characters had the logical solution here.

99% certain Pet Shop didn't appear in the OVA. Sorry pal, .

I don't know what this thing is except that he looks like a kinda freaky Kerberos (Cardcaptor) rip-off. Apparently it's something called Kon from Bleach. That's all I needed to find out to find out that I didn't need to find out any more, . Iggy was fine. I mean, he was a little weird himself, but intentionally so in typical bizarre JoJo style, so it's fine. In addition to that, the other thing that puts Madoka another step below for me was the fact that characters (especially Madoka herself) were like...being dictated to be borderline monotone? Combine that with the incredibly phony and artificial-sounding voices they were all using and it was all just very unpleasant and unnatural-sounding. Don't even remember that, to be honest. Just remember a lot of random cuts to what he was doing or expressions he was making smack-dab in the middle of scenes that were jarring in of themselves but even more so because he was being weird or uncomfortable.

Madoka's English is still another step below that, but yes, bordering on unwatchable from just that one English clip. And you can tell it's Viz's Usagi, but the voice direction is just...yeah. Voice direction in anime and especially English dubbing needs some heavy re-thinking... He's about as weird, uncomfortable, and inexplicable as most other characters. Bonus points that he's a stupid animal sidekick pet thing, which I generally have an irrational hatred for. Why not both?

Now that you mention it, there should've been a cloning episode in Sailor Moon... Wait, what? I thought they'd been fine outside of that weird episode with the teacher, . It'd be unfair to Dumbo, plus you don't want to create any unnecessary negative associations if you don't have to.

More Devilman Crybaby. So what I'm going to do is just start skipping the crap that I don't care about or just doesn't work for me. I don't need to see a lot of this to get the general idea. . . . Wow, and just like that, the show's suddenly over! Good times were had by all. I can't believe the thing thinged as much as it did - what a set of truly remarkable developments.

I kind of forgot about Juri. Juri's alright...but she's no crazypants Nanami, . Okay, actually, the shadow play girls is the best character in Utena. To be fair, it was my idea, and while I didn't love the show, I liked the first half of it well enough. The wheels just kind of started to fall after that when they started sacrificing literally just about everything for the weird message it was trying to convey. Skoop da Whoop would be my suggestion. And in the end, that's what matters. Job...okay-ly done, X, . No real comment re: James Bond - I don't really like either the old ones OR the new ones, so I avoid them, . Glad K-On is going a bit better (even with the weirder episode) than Love Live! I did semi-recommend it based off of nothing, after all!

Does not compute: you can't be the worst if you're the only likeable character. There's no rational OR irrational explanation as to why she's the only likeable character, but that's the way it is, .

I like how the attacks are so absurd and out of left field you have to have other characters pull you aside for a moment and explain them.

I thought for sure I was going to get Mari-ed again - I'll take Lord Dio any day of the week over her! If nothing else, her and this show did scar me for life from hearing the words "big brother" one too many times...

Music in shows like these always make me feel so old in soul. There's no reason that I should love the music of shows like Sailor Moon or Neon Genesis Evangelion and then hear their modern incarnations and think that it's the most boring, fraudulent garbage that has the complete opposite effect of what's intended. Even older stuff like Dragon Ball or Ranma, stuff that was made literally many years before I was even born, their music just...it works for me. Why? I don't know. Just another reason to add on the pile that most modern shows won't appeal to me while older stuff will, I suppose... So the show isn't quite right and doesn't seem to have any intended demographic and keeps shooting itself in the foot, but you liked it anyways, huh? It's janked, but it's your kind of jank! That ending does sound kind of hilarious, especially if people were totally split on their reasons for watching it - I'd much rather make the MORE ACTION people angry than the actual shoujo fans, so I guess it worked out, . I mostly watched the show in English, but I thought her Japanese VA was hilarious from what I heard of her too. ...I don't need to justify Nanami to you, she's absolutely imperfect in every way and that needs no justification! ...One character I wish I had heard more in Japanese was Anthy, who has such a flat and overall strange delivery of her lines in the English that she was immediately...not unlikable per se, but definitely uncomfortable.

No really, Nanami is the best. I mean, she is the absolute worst, but you should've seen my face light up every time she strutted into a scene in her perfectly Nanami way. Here's a character who knows how to ham it up and have some actual fun, unlike everyone else... I need to rewatch NGE (which I'll have the opportunity to do sometime within the next few months most likely), because I recall my initial impression of the ending of NGE and TEoE being actually pretty close to each other, but for completely different reasons. Since then, my opinion of TEoE has only progressively gotten higher, while I can barely remember NGE's ending because of...well, you know. So it'll be interesting to see how/if my opinion changes. #notmyshoujo