majestic

Look at you guys complaining about Kingmaker's Kingdom building minigame even though it went through several patches and now actually works. Back when I played we had to hike up a mountain backwards every time we wanted to go to school. No, actually, it was so broken you constantly had to edit the save game to fix the variable states for upgrades and promotions to work properly (and even then most of the craftsmen didn't show up for me). And it made the secret ending unavailable, what with that curse research counter not doing what it should (for me, my game was a mess of bugs). Tides of Numenera just had a handful of encounters, and almost all of them were optional. They realized that PS:T's combat elements hurt the game, but created weird interactive novel with stats and a whole caracter system that felt wasted by not doing any encounters, and said encounters were often cumbersome and slow. Not to mention buggy. Oh, and it was unecessarily verbose and overwritten. Still liked it better than Pillars of Eternity: The Quest for Balance. As for gameplay of the IE games, my experience was slightly different, but at that point I had some years of playing AD&D games under my belt. Having the manual for the game was nice because I finally got to read how all the stats are calculated and all, but I figured out how to, uhm, approach stats and magic in AD&D from games like Eye of the Beholder by careful observation and experimentation (it's not like I understood a lick of what was on the screen in Eye of the Beholder, I was nine or ten at the time). And boy was I happy that my characters ate without me having to click on food in Baldur's Gate. Worst mechanic ever, or maybe tied with money taking up inventory space or having weight. Or both.

I didn't expect either of you to actually watch it. There went my one chance to actually rickroll someone, and I wasted it. Well, no, showing someone the glory that were the early EAV music videos is not a waste. Be optimistic here. On topic, for a change: Sailor Moon Sailor Stars...

I think KP was refering to Torment: Tides of Numenera when he referred to IE derivatives here, not the original Planescape: Torment, which indeed had not so great gameplay, but which IE game had great gameplay? Or even good combat? I enjoyed the games, each for their own reasons, but it takes mods to make the combat fun. It is also the reason I rank the first IWD dead last. The game is actually helped by the Enhanced Edition insofar as you can pick a sorcerer to come along. It's not much more engaging to simply nuke the million enemies in the game with fireballs, but sure is a lot faster. It would be interesting to know how many players began BG1 without setting their CON score to their class' highest hitpoint bonus and ended up being killed by random lucky dice throw from Shank or Carbos.

Wait, you really watched the video? Heh. It's about sex tourism in Thailand, set against a backdrop of virtually every common (south)eastern asian stereotype. That's why the song is called Samurai even though it's story is set in Pattaya, you see random kanji popping up and people being pulled about on a rickshaw. The titular hero, an uptight and otherwise unremarkable person from a German speaking country flies to Thailand once per year to break through his inhibitions and is called her "Samurai" by his Thai prostitute Madame Butterfly* who is apparently young enough to be his daughter (ugh). The song ends with him flying home, with a little gift from the trip in the form of itchy balls. *Not sure if I neet to point out that Madame Butterfly was a geisha, not a prostitute. It's another common misconception about Japan that geishas are sex workers.

First things first, Weird Al is a genius. I love his music, and I enjoy parodies in general - more so than most comedy types, Kabarett aside. One of my favorite groups is EAV, which was an Austrian comedy group (they recently retired) that made everything from complete nonsense to scathing satire and social commentary. Musically they emulated whatever theme their songs required which, funny as they were, if you don't understand the lyrics, you might find offensive. Look at this video, it has the entire band in yellowface, seemingly making a mockery of the type of generic east-asian music that you'd maybe hear in any Faux-Chinese restaurant (at least in ours) and faking an indistinct asian German accent while singing (warning, not safe for work): It's a complete riot. Right. Well you know already that I'm really focused on vocalists, something that immensely limits what I can enjoy listening to, e.g. the Metallica albums I have are there simply for the sake of having them, I don't actively listen to Metallica, I can barely stand James Hetfield's singing at the best of times. Not sure why, but comedy music is an exception where the fun of the lyrics outweigh the vocalist if they're not at the top of their game. Weird Al can do both though. I was surprised to hear him rap (and that quite well even, I of course can't stand most rap) in White & Nerdy. Uhm, lost track of the point. Oh, right, well maybe you can get two or three episodes further somehow, that should make you immune to most of the more annoying Sailor Moon S spoilers you could potentially get from carelessly clicking around in this topic, or we can keep posting to a minimum for a bit.

Quoted for truth. If you don't know anything else, excellent tap water is a boon that you only really start to appreciate when you're someplace else where it is... well, terrible, and potentially dangerous.

As is "Willy use a billy...boy."

I don't remember you posting that the show is dumb, only that it is a complete meme in itself, and that's true (for the most part). But that's not exactly what I meant, mostly, that was about dismissing the flaws of SuperS' writing purely based on the "it's a stupid show about magic girls, who cares anyway?" excuse that is all too often employed to excuse terrible writing and bad creative decisions - or at its worst, used by someone who never watched the show to dismiss it entirely out of hand based on the premise. You can find plenty of posts by, say, otherwise reasonable forum members here where they defended Star Wars: The Last Jedi or Rey's ridiculous character "arc" in The Force Awakens with: "You guys, really, it's a pew pew movie with laser swords to take your children to, just have fun!" as if that would excuse everything. It's not meant to be serious, so don't be seriously annoyed when it's no longer good? Yeah, sure. Perhaps I am too critical. When I watched Pr. Plinkett's Star Trek 2009 review, it was not what I expected. At all. This movie was a complete waste of my time, a flashy mockery of everything that Star Trek should be, even promoted as such ("This is not your daddy's Star Trek!"), and then Mike goes ahead and likes it and calls it his guilty pleasure. Jesus Christ Mike. Really? Then again he also somewhat liked Star Trek Beyond, the first movie I've seen in cinema where I actually contemplated leaving just after the opening scene. How I wish I had. Gah. Tripe, pure tripe. Watched any more, by the way? If you're afraid of KP reading the spoilers, just PM me. There's a German verison of Sailor Stars too. This was made primarily becaus the song shows up in the episodes (at the end). This is the opening credits sequence underscored by the German version. And hey, I liked our Sailor Moon intro. Eurodance is my guilty pleasure. Heh. Makes for fun visits though, when people browse my record collection. It's full of music that is mostly off the mainstream (except for some metal bands that topped the charts, almost everyone knows Metallica or Iron Maiden, after all, and... psst, don't tell anyone that, but I also have Nickelback and Creed albums* ) and the reactions to finding Venga Boys, Aqua and E-Rotic in between are hilarious. *I feel the need to defend myself by pointing out that I had both before they became the mainstream smash hits that they ended up being. I was contemplating burning their albums on the altar of forced counterculture around the same time I was originally watching Sailor Moon, but I ended up not doing it. I still like listening to Creed's Higher. It's a great track, regardless of... other people's opinion of the band. *nods sagely*

Oh, wow. Just started Sailor Stars. I never realized it had a different opening theme song in the original version. It's weird, they've changed it to a J-pop track. Intro contains no spoilers: And I've learned that there are two versions of the German dub: One where the Sailor Moon theme song always stayed the same (the German Eurodance track was so awesome is was adapted for the Netherlands, Croatia and Russia) and apparently one where the music was changed for each opening sequence for re-runs. I only ever heard the same track, and if someone would have told me that the German dub of Sailor Moon had more than one theme song I would have laughed at them. Huh, this is weird. I just checked, the updated versions are on YouTube as well, with people arguing back and forth that this was never the theme song. Huh. The hell, German TV stations, the hell? This is the first opening with the Eurodance track that I heard for the almost 200 episodes (there are 200 episodes, but I apparently missed some the first time around). edit: I totally love how the first Sailor Moon Sailor Stars episode pretends like SuperS never happened, except for one key detail* everything looks like it just picked up from the end of Sailor Moon S.

Hah. Maybe. Super^0 it is then, they did want to go back to the style of season 1 after all. That was mostly a preface for other readers, should there ever be any. Slim chance, I guess, but anyway. For some episodes I tried to look up reviews online, but there's preciously little to find for single episodes, and those that I did find focused on different things. Take that episode that simply makes up a friend Makoto never had before or never mentions again afterwards. Comments are usually up in arms about inventing a friend. To be honest, so am I. However, the actual problem of that episode is that the focus of it is squarely on that friend, instead of Makoto. Why waste all that time developing a character that is never seen again? This is a season spanning issue. Prior seasons of Sailor Moon used characters that appeared once as a means of getting the girls to interact with each other or their enemies, not as a way to waste ten minutes of a 20 minute episode. And then there are the people who react to these kind of episodes with "Sailor Moon is stupid anyway, who cares?" that make me angry. I care. And yes, the show is usually silly. That's fine. But it's not stupid. Or at least, up until SuperS, it wasn't. Oh, I get that the distinction is not an easy one to make. People confuse child like with childish all the time too. Yeah, probably not. I don't know a whole lot about Japanese, just enough to make the joke about future Usagi still writing letters in Hiragana funny. I was once interested in at least trying to pick up Japanese because I'm interested in how their grammar works because it is supposedly much easier than ours (at least when it comes to tenses), although that is not hard when it comes to German at least, German grammar is a complex mess (don't let people tell you otherwise just because it is easy enough to pick up German for casual conversation). I dropped the idea quickly enough.

セーラームーンSuperSリスト？ マジェスティックは評価を行います！ Sailor Moon SuperS list? majestic does ratings! Japanese provided by google translate. It's probably totally wrong and reads something totally different. Sailor Moon SuperS consists of thirty nine episodes, making it the third longest season after Sailor Moon and Sailor Moon R. Questionable creative decisions and the thematic premise of the material this is loosely adapted from aside, there are some episodes that were quite good, some that were okay, but also - and I think that is a first for the run of Sailor Moon up until that point - episodes that are actually terrible. Or at least they were for me. This list is written under the premise that: An episode can be extremely hilarious but still bad because everyone acts like they have been replaced by alien shapeshifters Ignoring character development in Sailor Moon S is annoying even if it makes for fun scenes Usagi and Chibi-Usa being immature and/or fighting over Mamoru is a joke that cannot carry more than half of the 39 episodes by itself You can are enough for fictional, drawn characters to feel bad for the victims of the dream mirror rape scenes, because these scenes are really, really uncomfortable to watch if you do The last point is not a character judgement in general. I know that there are people who cannot identify at all with drawn characters or non-human characters like robots in films for instance (Jay Bauman is someone like that, and doubt that he's a sociopath incapable of understanding emotional distress in others). If you're not bothered by the first three then you might have a good deal of fun. The anime tried to go back to its focus on the super silly from Sailor Moon rather than trying to keep a good balance of fun, thematic exploration, character pieces and serious mode episodes like they did in Sailor Moon S. Every now and then you get the feeling that parts of these episodes were drawn and made based on the early manga chapters but for some reason shuffled back to almost the end of the season run. It adds to the immensely disjointed feeling this season gives when watching. Some of the themes and scenes were maybe made before the show was re-tooled into aping the first season more than building on what happened before. This would also explain where these complete filler episodes come from where seemingly nothing happens at all, filled with random characters that show up once, where Usagi and Chibi-Usa are only there because they need to defeat a monster, and no other main character appears. The presence of this very clear sexual assault theme in the first part of the Dead Moon arc speaks for this, in my opinion. This is really, really out of place in the otherwise childlike fun feeling the episodes are supposed to (and do!) transport. This was probably meant as the underlying thematic exploration for at least a part of the season, but it falls completely flat because nothing happens with it. That the season's enemies aren't nearly as fun, interesting and, ahem, loveable as the Death Busters from Sailor Moon S, even if the Amazoness Quartet comes close, isn't that much of a problem. Following the Professor and his weird bunch of assistants was a tough act to follow even if everyone brought their A-game for Sailor Moon SuperS. The Amazoness Quartet are just children that were given immense magical power by the Dead Moon. Their dialogue, mannerisms and actions all perfectly reflect this (unlike, say, the mannerisms of a certain creepy horse). They're childlike, innocent at times, but utterly creepy in a good way. In other words, they're exactly what would happen in real life if you'd give four immature young girls the magical power to do whatever they want (and prevent them from ever growing up). Now, for the list, with some annotations perhaps. Just FYI, I started writing this post yesterday. That took a while. Well, I did some other stuff in between, but this was the longest I've spent writing on a forum since 2003's Iraq war discussions on YYOP back on the IPLY forums.

I can do that. I wouldn't have made any more write ups anyway, these were just to accentuate my... irritation with what I was seeing.

The manga features a whole bunch of them. Like Ceres. Well now that that's out of the way, have a look at the title of the next episode. It's all spoilery and you're immediately going to see it anyway once you start watching.

Doorknobder was great, yeah. It is done. I'm done. Done with SuperS, I mean. I knew from before that the anime didn't manage to follow up Sailor Moon S all that well, but like I said, it was a year in between the airing of S and SuperS, and being happy to see the girls again and go on adventures with them outweighed the dip in quality entertainment. Watching the seasons back to back made really obvious: Nothing in SuperS is as good as in S, except the animation. The show sure never looked as good before. That much is noticable right from the start with the new intro, which is actually fantastic, if you ignore the bit where all the girls and Pegasus go skinny dipping in his dreamlake. In hindsight, that should have been the first indicator that something's going to be seriously wrong. Next up, after I get some sleep and work done, perhaps an episode guide on how to skip most of the Amazon Trio while still seeing the better episodes. This is going to be an awful lot of work though, so it might take a while. Let me know if you plan on watching the entire run anyway (I would recommend that, if only for the sheer alienation you feel), then I won't bother.

Uh, wishful thinking or typo, or are you really connected directly to the BCIX?

But you haven't seen SuperS or Sailor Stars yet. Don't take my irritation for gospel here. However, on a whole, even though you're not done with S yet, you can already appreciate how that must have been a really tough act to follow (and in my opinion, it didn't quite work). edit: S was also really strong thematically, with some excellent writing in the serious mode episodes (and even in those that were silly). Everything has a decent set up, and a payoff, it's not on the nose but still noticable and it generally practises a good amount of showing, not simply telling.

That is a good idea.

I wonder if there's any way to watch these Sailor Moon musicals. Not going to lie, I'm not a big fan of musical theatre, but from the images alone they look bad enough to be really entertaining. Like that live action show that looks like it had a ten dollar budget. Heh. They also already got enough of a talk down from fans and the mangaka involved when changing Rei's personality. Deviating that much with the entire backstory wouldn probably not have been accepted at all. But that's really just a minor quibble, the show's really good as it is when it depicts the problems and rigors of daily life with its signature combination of humor, commentary and complete ridiculousness while giving you a good character piece every now and then. Plus I think it is really at its best when it just depicts everyone interacting. Generally Sailor Moon S does a decent job with getting more interesting monsters (but not more interesting battles, but that's not what Sailor Moon is about). Ideally they're a minor culmination at the end, like in that episode with the Japanese tea ceremony (Usagi being completely oblivious to her own culture is also hilarious, the things she does... like blowing her nose in public, showing affection for Mamoru and even fighting with Chibi-Usa over him for everyone to see).

Yeah, pretty much Nemesis where the Black Moon Clan lived, although the hypothezised Nemesis is a brown dwarf.

For a while I entertained the notion that Mamoru is secretly Usagi's sugar-pup (disturbing as that may seem), and in all the episode where she complains she has no more spending money beause her allowance is gone is simply because, uhm, she already spent it all on frivolous pursuits. But that doesn't work at all, she beings the show with not having enough money to buy discount jewelry, let alone being able to afford a college hunk for fun.

There's one thing I've always wondered about Sailor Moon. It's not really a deal breaker (because who cares, it's Sailor Moon) but the only one who has an explanation for having these kinds of funds is Ami with her mother, who as a doctor would certainly have the financial resources. The properties they all seem to own in the Juuban district of Tokyo are worth hundreds of millions of Yen (per piece!). How come Rei* is the only one of them that goes to a private school, while from everything we have seen she should be the poorest of them (with her grandfather having a Shinto shrine, and those commonly are supported by charity and the selling of a trinket or two)? *Well manga Rei's father is a successful politician who abandoned her when she was little, presumably he pays for the tuition, I guess. Oh, and @Bartimaeus, welcome to the KaineParker signature quote club.

Double spoilered the interesting parts, you can probably guess that you're not too far away from the reveal anyway. Just don't click or come back and read this post in handful of episodes. Actually, no, don't read this. I just deleted everything.

Ideally, the state would rent you a bootstrap, then you can pull yourself up and pay back with interest.

Man... the envy is real. Episodes 20, 21 and 22 are kind of a three parter. 20 is kind of contained in terms of an "ending", but they're related. 21 is also probably the best serious mode episode in the entire run of the show (and still occasionally fun - like once or twice).