Anime Sickos Newsletter Presents: Tom's Reviews
Here's what I think about some stuff I heard/played
Hey Sicko fans. No news in this newsletter. Just reviews. Without further ado:
TOM’S MUSIC CORNER
I can’t stop listening to PLOSIVS. They just put out their debut self-titled album a few weeks ago. This band is developed in a lab to make me go nuts. It’s really not fair.
OK so the deal with PLOSIVS is that it’s Pinback and Hot Snakes but at the same time. The serious explanation of that is that it’s a new band featuring guitarist John Reis of Hot Snakes and singer/guitarist Rob Crow from Pinback. But that only tells half the story. The other half is that PLOSIVS is Pinback and Hot Snakes at the same time.
Hot Snakes is I think the solid-est band of all time. I could not pull out a Hot Snakes track that is gonna blow your mind. There is no riff, no hook, no solo, that’s going to make your jaw drop and say WOW. I don’t think they have ever done anything that has not been done 10,000 times before. There is no twist to Hot Snakes. There’s no gimmick. It’s: what if there was a tight fuckin four piece making lean, killer punk records that never were bad. Well, it sounds like it would kick ass, right? Turns out yes. Hot Snakes scores a solid A to A- in pretty much every category. No A+ anywhere, but the bands who do have A-pluses also have a handful of Bs and Cs. Hot Snakes has no such weak spots. The solid-est band in existence. The highest batting average out there. A band so locked-in, so confident, so strong on all fundamentals that you can’t help but shake your head in awe. Perhaps the funniest thing of all time is how Hot Snakes put out a live album and it sounds fucking indistinguishable from the studio records. SOLID!
John Reis (aka “Speedo” aka “Swami”) plays guitar for Hot Snakes, but also Drive Like Jehu, a much more experimental-type band. DLJ also has the co-guitarist and singer from Hot Snakes in it. DLJ is the kind of band that makes boys talk about time signatures. Reis was also the frontman of Rocket From the Crypt, a band that kicks ass. This was big time party punk. The band had a saxophone and trumpet player. John Reis sang lead in this one and he is a party dude. One time I was listening to RFTC in college and my awful roommate who I hated said “are you listening to Smashmouth?” I wanted to both die and be killed. Anyway. All of this is to say: I have listened to many many hours of John Reis play guitar. He never rips an epic solo. He never takes your breath away. But man. No fucker has put in the work like him. Solid. Solid. Solid. Never fails. Always delivers. A king.
Pinback is a nerd band. It’s two guys, Rob Crow and Zach Smith (bass). There is no permanent drummer (a lot of songs just have a drum machine). You might say, Tom, those guys don’t sound like nerds to me. Well what if I told you their real names were Robertdale Rulon Crow Jr. and Armistead Burwell Smith IV. Pinback is nerd music for wimps and I love it. Smith’s bass is so wild, he is playing like full chords on the bass a lot of the time. I didn’t know this until I saw them live once and I could not believe how many songs he was just strummin’ on that thing for. There were so many times when I was like, wait, you’re telling me that part is a bass? I thought it was just the guitar sounding funny! Anyway, Pinback does NOT have big muscular punk riffs. They are a nerd band.
One funny thing about Pinback is that one time when my wife was just my GF (not only that—this is just when we started dating) she was at my house and I was cooking dinner for us. When I cook dinner I put on a record. I was like, what is a record that will not scare the hoes? A lot of my records were of very harsh and challenging music. This is an insane thing to do—as I leave my 20s behind I have taken action to fix this. What was I thinking?
In any case, I put on Information Retrieved by Pinback. IMO this is one of their weaker efforts but it’s the only vinyl Pinback record I’ve come across. Now by this point in our relationship I had already come to the understanding that the dinner-cooking record is a “for boys pleasure only” type thing. I am not one of those guys who is like, “now let me educate you on the finer points of post-punk.” I am assuming she is gonna tune the music out and be on her phone or just chat or something. However a Christmas miracle occurred. The record’s first (and best) song Proceed to Memory so intrigued my wife-to-be that later that week she texted me asking what that record I put on was. This is what we call “the jackpot for boys.” As a result Pinback has a very special place in my heart.
So, what does this all mean for PLOSIVS? I’ve talked a lot about a bunch of bands that aren’t them. Isn’t this a review of their record? Shouldn’t I have something to say about it? Well, I do, it’s just I have already said it: PLOSIVS is Hot Snakes and Pinback at the same time. I don’t think I can get any clearer or make my recommendation any stronger.
BEHIND THE SCENES
TOM’S FINAL FANTASY UPDATE
So I played Final Fantasy X, the one where one of your party members is a huge racist who kills monsters by hurling a volleyball at them (volleyball does more damage than sword).
There’s a lot to like about this game. Very streamlined and goes down smooth. For all the expected awkwardness from an RPG story from 2000 (voice acting that has to do contortions to fit into the cutscene animations, weird pacing, confusing lore), it’s pretty solidly one of the best and most genuinely affecting plots in the series so far.
I love that they drop the ATB bars and instead just show you the turn order in every fight. Agility actually feels like a useful stat because you can straight up see how many more turns the fast characters are getting just by scrolling down the turn order. It also does what every RPG with more party members than party slots should be required to do: let you swap party members in and out at any time during combat with no cost. Love it.
Those who know are aware that leveling up in FFX involves moving around “the sphere grid,” a huge annoying web of nodes that sucks ass. Leveling up gives no benefits in itself other than the ability to move your guys around on the sphere grid and activate the nodes that are next to them. In theory this allows you to customize the characters’ builds. If you think a character could use some white magic spells, you can take them on a little detour down that area of the grid.
Here’s the problem: everyone is on a pretty obvious “correct route” that gives them stats and abilities that map pretty much directly onto the classic FF job class that they obviously are based on how they fuckin look and act. So, what I’m gonna do, is just do that. You can choose to use an “expert grid,” I’m not sure how this one works but apparently it lets you do a lot more min/maxing than the normal grid.
Here’s the problem with THAT: like all Final Fantasy games this one is baby easy. These are huge blockbuster titles and they want you to win. There is absolutely no need to min/max because just following the obviously intended sphere grid path makes you so strong by the end that all bosses are totally trivial to beat. This is my gripe any time someone criticizes a FF game for not having enough customization. They say FFIV is bad because you can’t customize the characters’ builds. Why would I want that. The only thing that would do is make an easy game into an extremely easy game!
However, the game seems to recognize this and includes an honestly impressive amount of optional challenges including a set of superbosses that are insanely stronger than anything you’ll encounter in the main story.
Here’s the problem with THAT: the optional challenges are torqued the fuck up way beyond the realm of reason. The difficulty gulf between the actual game and the optional bosses is dummy immense. The easiest optional superboss attacks your party first with a laser that does 9999 damage to everyone and kills them instantly. The prep work required to stand a chance against these bosses represents literally dozens of hours. I will simply never do this.
FFX also does the hilarious move of forgetting to make the Black Mage character useful at all. This happens in FFIX too. Vivi the Black Mage is one of the best characters in the game (hell, the series) in narrative terms, but actually using him in battle is a fool’s move. FFX’s black mage, Lulu, starts out pretty strong. However, you soon learn how to make weapons infused with elemental power, making her no longer the only character able to reliably exploit elemental weaknesses, the only useful thing she can do. Then, later on, you get special sphere items that let any party member learn black magic spells. You use these on your white mage Yuna. Now she knows both healing spells and offense spells AND summons, and her magic stats are higher than Lulu. Lulu is now useless.
ALSO, the limit breaks in this game are once again only triggered when you decide. I love FFIX but it is simply insane that the limit breaks just pop off by themselves as soon as they’re fully charged. I do not think I ever once had a limit break occur at a helpful time even once in my playthrough of IX.
Ahh, this is a rambling mess of a review. I guess it fits the subject matter. Overall, though? Gotta say I loved this one. I tried to boot up X-2 but the Steam version doesn’t work on the Steam Deck. Oh well.
TOM’S FINAL FANTASY UPDATE: BONUS ROUND
I replayed Chrono Trigger on the DS. On Anime Sickos our go-to whenever we need a shorthand for “the best game” we say Chrono Trigger.
We also just put out an ep saying the DS is a console so good that it should be issued to all citizens for free in perpetuity. I decided to check if these assumptions turned out to be true. Short version: very yes. God damn, this game is so good. It’s incredible.
Some background: Chrono Trigger is a miracle game. We got FF creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii working on THE SAME GAME with Takashi Tokita and Yoshinori Kitase directing, plus music by Yasunori Mitsuda and art by Akira Toriyama. If you don’t know who these Japanese people are, I guess a decent comparison would be if there was a supergroup with members of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the 1992 USA Men’s Olympic Basketball team, and somehow they were not only good but better than the original bands.
It’s hard to explain in a short newsletter review how cozy and comfortable this game feels. The art, the sprites, the music...ten minutes in and I was like Oh ok...I love this...It is as good as I remember...
Obviously the main gimmick (as suggested by the title, time travel) kicks ass and allows for a bunch of fun time based puzzles (I love when people tell me you can make a Sun Stone by putting a Moon Stone in the sun...but it only works if you leave it there for 65 million years....so who could possibly do that...Me, bitch!!!) but what really makes this game the prime rib of the genre are all the little genius moves that add up to far more than the sum of their parts.
Case in point: battles are rarely random—you see the enemies on the map and battle begins when you touch them. When battle begins we don’t fade to the “battle view,” we just start fighting. So smooth! So quick! I love it!
Further: everyone has unique animations for critical hits. You see the critical hit animation come out and you go “hell yeah” before you even see the huge numbie.
FURTHER: the ranged characters have unique animations for melee strikes against enemies who are right next to them
FURTHER: as suggested above, because we do not cut to a “battle view” for combat with heroes and enemies standing in two opposing rows, enemies appear all around you and can move across the battlefield. A fun gimmick, to be sure, but because this is the best game ever, it actually matters—different abilities have different areas of effect and can have drastically different utility based on how the enemies are positioned.
FURTHER: This game has ATB bars like Final Fantasy where you have to wait for a character’s bar to fill before they can take another turn. I mentioned that the ATB bars in FF9 are fucked up because they do not pause when an attack animation is playing. Every attack animation takes 100 years in FFIX, so every time anyone takes an action, there’s enough time for even the slowest character’s bar to fill completely, totally defeating the purpose of the system. I said on the show, if there was a mod that just paused the ATB bars during attack animations the game would be so much better—but then I hedged saying, well, I dunno, perhaps there would be gameplay implications I’m not seeing. Well folks: in Chrono Trigger the bars pause during attack animations and the gameplay implication is that it’s way fun.
God, it’s all so good. Like, consider: all games with turn based combat have to deal with the inherent issue that this shit is just picking options off a spreadsheet. At the end of the day the player is going to just pick the strongest move off the list every time. This is boring. Thus a good JRPG must hide this boring truth with funny gimmicks. A bad game, like the fucking One Piece RPG from last year, will barely hide this truth at all. That game really is just “Pick the Strongest Move Every Turn: The Game.” Chrono Trigger, however, has the most jingling-keys ass gimmick I’ve ever seen (non-derogatory): the double/triple techniques baby!!!
It’s one thing to just have each party member pick their strongest move but it’s another entirely to have two (or three!) party members take their turn at the same time and combine their abilities into a wacky new ability! What if the fire mage and the ice mage made a special burn/freeze bomb that was stronger than using the fire spell and ice spell separately? Not only does it keep the ape brain buzzing with novelty, but it actively incentivizes using all combinations of party members (all of whom are great and charming) so you can see all the ways they interact with each other. This is so fun...the animations are so cool...because the game already made you like the characters via the story/writing/art, when they work together you go “ah! My little friends! Stronger as a team! Yes!!”
Another thing: this game is short as hell (non-derogatory)! The pace is so snappy, you never feel like you’re spinning your wheels or wading through filler. I did all the sidequests and took the game at a leisurely pace and was done within 20 hours. And the DS port, with the maps and menus on the bottom screen? Forget about it! The height of luxury! It’s like the JRPG equivalent of getting taken to a gourmet restaurant and someone else pays!
TOM REVIEWS THE CASE OF THE GOLDEN IDOL
If you know me you know I’m a Dinnhead—I’m talking about The Return of the Obra Dinn, the exceptional puzzle/mystery game by Lucas Pope. When my wife and I finished playing that game, we both were like, wowow. Whatta game...but I want more! Too bad there aren’t a bunch of Dinnlikes around for us to play! Fast forward a few years, and friends, what providence: The Case of the Golden Idol is a Dinnlike.
If you didn’t play The Return of the Obra Dinn let me explain. In that game, you work for boat insurance. A boat (the Obra Dinn) comes into port years after it was assumed destroyed. It has no passengers. Naturally folks assume: the passengers died. But insurance goes: we don’t know that. We need to prove they died or else we won’t do the insurance.
So they sent your character, Erin Esurance, to the Obra Dinn to prove they died. You, notably, have a magic death pocketwatch that when you stand on the spot where someone died, it allows you to listen to the last few seconds of audio before they died and then walk around a 3D diorama of the moment of their death. This is standard stuff when you work at insurance. Your job as insurance is to fill in the blanks for the following sentence for every passenger on the Obra Dinn’s manifest: “[NAME] was [PAST TENSE VERB] by [NAME/THING].” So like, “Mr Example was shot by Mr. Demonstration.”
If this doesn’t sound incredible to you then fuck off. Anyway, The Case of the Golden Idol is a dang Dinnlike. In this game, you are not insurance. You’re not really anyone. Notably there are zero narrative consequences for “solving” any of the scenarios. You are basically a person playing a mystery puzzle video game. In each of the twelve scenarios, you are given an omniscient view of a single moment frozen in time. These start off small but eventually expand into multi-building tableaus where multiple things are all happening at once. You might say, well how is it possible that I, the detective, am able to be everywhere at once and read all the private notes in everyone’s pockets? Well, it’s not possible and you’re not a detective. All the murderers get away with it in this game, because you aren’t a character and thus can’t arrest them or tell people about the murders or anything. This sounds like it could be frustrating but it is not, because as a result the twelve cases form a dope overarching narrative that is so goddamn fun to unravel.
So how do you actually play? When you first start a scenario you are delighted by the lightly animated pixel-art diorama scene in front of you and start clicking around.
Clicking on people shows you a sentence of speech and what they got in their pockets. Clicking on books and posters shows you what’s written on them, etc etc. As you click around you build a little inventory of words—names, verbs, places, objects, etc etc. Each scenario has about twice as many words to find than you’ll actually use, so a lot of these turn out to be red herrings. Once you have enough words, you switch over to “Thinking” mode—this is where the fun happens.
Thinking mode presents you with 2-5 little puzzles you gotta solve using the words you’ve gathered. Every case has a big paragraph explaining the particulars of the main crime— “[MURDERER NAME] wanted [MOTIVE] so he [PAST TENSE VERB] [VICTIM NAME] with a [MURDER WEAPON] in [MURDER LOCATION],” you get it. You slot the words into the blanks.
What makes The Case of the Golden Idol so good is the other lil puzzles thinking mode gives you. These start out simple: name all the people in the scene. Who was each place setting for at this table. Who was so-and-so writing to, etc. As the cases get more complex, these start to be the most fun bits out of the whole thing. Solving the central murder, whatever, that’s not so hard. But unraveling all the political and supernatural machinations surrounding it? Well that’s fun, and by forcing the player to become so familiar with it, the plot developments in the next scenario are going to hit all the harder.
You may be thinking, wait, if all you do is plug words from a finite bank into a couple of slots, isn’t that pretty easy? Can’t you just brute force it? Well, yes to both. I actually didn’t mind that it was easy. It’s engaging enough to get your brain moving but always easy enough to go down smooth. About a third of the way through I said to my wife “this is just jigsaw puzzle” and she was like, “I was just about to say that!” To be clear this is non-derogatory. We love jigsaw puzzle. In the game’s defense, the few times we did brute force a solution, I checked the evidence over again and immediately realized how to come to that conclusion the normal way.
Another thing making the game easy is that the little pixel art dioramas have all clickable parts highlighted. This pretty much takes exploration out of the equation. However I don’t think I would recommend turning this feature off because then you have the old point-n-click adventure game issue where you can’t progress until you click the one specific pixel the game wants you to look at. Oh well. Can’t be helped.
One thing I have not mentioned is that the pixel art is so good. Some people don’t like it because it is ugly. This is true. Everyone’s faces are grotesque and unpleasant. But I don’t think I need to waste my time explaining why this is not a bad thing. If you can’t imagine why a grotesque art style could be appealing, why are you listening to Anime Sickos?
All in all: if The Case of the Golden Idol is the kind of thing we can expect in the Dinnlike genre, we puzzheads are gonna be eating good in the times to come. If you like mystery shit you owe it to yourselves to throw a few bucks and a couple of hours into this thing.
Played and beat Chrono Trigger for the first time last week, thanks to my recently modded DS. I've been playing JRPGs for basically all my life, which makes me an idiot, and even more so for not having played the game before. Somehow, it met or even surpassed the incredible high expectations after years of random people on the internet telling me that it's the best videogame of all time. Now, onto Dragon Quest V!
I’m not a gamer, but I always enjoy learning about games from the Anime Sickos. Thanks again for everything!