Hey folks!
As you may be aware, Anime Sickos has been working on a Secret Project since April of last year. You may be wondering why it has taken so long. Did unforeseen issues come up? Did you hit big snags? Did you have to take long breaks from it? Turns out: no. The entire process has been chugging along about as fast as possible the entire time. This is just how long this shit takes. When you see, you will understand.
And you will see soon. I do not have a date for release yet but I am very confident that the Secret Project will be secret no more in late June to early July. I am so, so proud of this thing and could not be happier with how it is coming together. If you are a sicko fan I think you will love this.
So, what is the Secret Project? Well I still want to keep part of that a secret, but I will tell you what I can:
It is an audio drama.
It is set in the same universe as our previous audio dramas “The Tragical History of Modesty City” and “Sicko Shock.” You may wish to re-listen to them soon to refresh your memory. However, it should stand on its own without knowledge of those two.
It is the most ambitious and impressive thing we have ever done (in my opinion!)
It features original art from six incredible artists and three pieces of original music by Anime Sickos theme composer Chuck Rios.
When the release date is finalized, we will also schedule a live premiere on Twitch the day before it is released, same as with “The Tragical History of Modesty City.” When this occurs, we will drop the secrecy and advertise the Secret Project as what it truly is.
I really hope you all like this thing. I have put so much of myself into this project. A lot of hours and a lot of love. And I think it has paid off. I really hope you agree. I know I have been teasing this for ages, but trust me: next time you hear from us, this thing will be ready to release.
TOM REVIEWS LIVE A LIVE
As part of my quest to make up for a wasted youth where I played almost no JRPGs, I have recently played the 2022 HD remake of the 1994 SNES RPG Live A Live. I have heard for years, oh Live A Live is a real classic. A real gamer’s game. This is one for the real heads. Ahh it’s too bad it wasn’t released in the West in its day. Well, what luck that Square Enix put out an honestly luxurious remake that is now easily accessible to all! (I am not joking about it being lavish—say what you will about the HD-2D style but this remake did not spare any expenses).
Live A Live was the directorial debut of Takashi Tokita. If you don’t know who that is, just know his assignment immediately after this was to be co-director of Chrono Trigger. Fair to say that this game is an important part of gaming history. So, what’s it’s like?
To talk about Live A Live is to talk about its structure. Especially for the time, the overall shape of the experience is so unlike most RPGs that you really can’t discuss the game without first defining how it’s presented. Unlike your standard JRPG where your hero goes on an epic novel-length quest for 20-50 hours, Live A Live is a short story collection—you begin the game on a chapter select screen where you are offered seven protagonists: A stupid caveman asshole from caveman times, an elderly martial arts shifu from Imperial China, a ninja from Tokugawa times, an old west cowboy, a modern day martial arts guy, a psychic Gohan from the near future, and a robot with a backwards hat from spaceship times.
You may notice these characters are very different from each other and exist in wildly different time periods. It is not clear at first why this is what the game is. You have to assume there is going to be something that brings these people together eventually, but what? Hard to think of what would naturally lead a farting caveman who I hate to meet a little backwards hat robot from spaceship.
Each of the chapters runs from 30 minutes to about 2 hours, each telling its own story of how the protagonist eventually defeats the malign influence of a being whose name is some variation of “Odio.” While the battle system (I’ll get to that) is the same in every chapter, there is a pretty surprising amount of variety between these chapters.
The caveman level which I hate notably has no dialogue as talking had not been invented yet. The chapter ends with the caveman having sex and nutting for the first time, and that sucks.
The ninja’s mission is perhaps the first JRPG stealth level I’m aware of, as you infiltrate the bad guy’s labyrinthine castle. The stealth mechanics are kinda stupid and not fun (you can become invisible immediately at any time by hitting X, the only benefit to stealth is getting a special item for killing zero enemies I ended up not getting anyway, and if you are caught and begin a fight, you can always flee with no downside and a 100% success rate) but hey, it’s trying something.
The cowboy’s chapter is a single timed mission as you and a homie must find and prepare improvised traps over a single night in order to thin out the ranks of a bandit gang set to raid the town in the morning, killing the remainder in a climactic boss battle.
The modern day martial artist’s chapter is a fuckin Mega Man boss rush where you just choose out of a list of 6 kooky martial artists to fight against in a big tournament, learning their signature moves as they’re used on you.
The Gohan can read minds and pilot mechas with his psychic ability.
The backwards hat robot just kind of stands around as a bad 2001: A Space Odyssey fanfic happens in front of him before having one fight.
You may have picked up on the subtext above that not all of these chapters are created equal. The cowboy and martial artist’s chapters are quirky and unique with very unusual structures, but they’re over in half an hour. The shifu didn’t even get mentioned above, because there’s nothing to say. Even the most substantial chapters, like psychic Gohan’s, have the bare minimum amount of meat on the bone.
This sucks especially hard because the combat system has the makings of something truly great, but the game’s structure keeps it from ever really soaring. People make fun of JRPGs for their length but most of the time they need it! Menu-based combat only becomes interesting when you are consistently given a huge variety of different types of challenges to overcome with it. You need to be in a lot of odd combat scenarios that force you to actually plumb the depths of what your character is capable of and strategize with the tools at your disposal. Getting new gear or healing items—pretty much the only things JRPGs have to give the player as trinkets/rewards—only has impact when there is enough time for their presence to be felt. The chapters of Live A Live are so short that this never happens. Most of your options are used once, twice, or never. Overall the game is jaw-droppingly easy and thus combat rarely ever becomes interesting or exciting.
Which sucks because it has a ton of really interesting features that, on paper, would suggest an exciting, tactical experience.
First: battles occur on a big grid both you and the enemies move around on. Abilities all have different ranges making positioning a major concern. However, every time you move your character, time passes and enemies may be able to attack before you get to your intended location.
Second: The game uses a really interesting version of Active Time Battle bars. Usually, ATB bars fill up in real time and you can take an action when your bar is full. The bars usually don’t pause so you have to pick your moves fast or else the enemy’s bar will fill and you’ll get hit. In Live A Live, the bars do not fill up in real time—instead, when time would pass, it basically snaps to the next major action at which point everything pauses until you do something. What this means is there’s never any downtime in battles. We always begin a fight with someone having a full bar. If they move, everyone else’s bar will fill a tiny bit for each square moved. After they attack, time immediately starts and fast forwards until the next bar is filled and another turn can be taken. Thus, the combat has the snappy no-waiting pace of turn-based battles but with speed and positioning adding a strategic layer.
Third: There’s no cost to any of your moves. You don’t have mana or MP or anything like that. Moves are all free to use. The limiting factors are (as mentioned before) range, along with attack type (enemies can be resistant or weak to certain attack types, these are very generously shown to the player before decisions are finalized), and charge time. Stronger attacks require a second, red bar to fill before they are actually executed, and any enemy attack that moves your character will cause the attack to be interrupted, wasting a turn. This would be a super-fun brain busting mechanic to work around if any of the chapters had more than a handful of battles with very similar enemies. It is just too easy, too little is asked of you!
Fourth: You fully heal after every battle. This is so good. I love this. Nothing is less fun than having to pound eight Hi-Potions every two minutes when you’re going through a dungeon. Ostensibly this allows enemies to hit way harder since doing so doesn’t represent a strain on the player’s long-term resources. In a game like Live A Live with a combat system that prioritizes timing, spacing, and tactics—that is, the contours of a single, specific instance of battle—this seems like a no-brainer move. Again, we’re let down by the fact that there’s not a lot of actual scenarios where all these cool mechanics ever get to do what they suggest they’re designed for. It’s like having a bitching supercar but you can only drive to the grocery store down the way.
OK, spoilers past here. Obviously after the 7 chapters, you gotta have the characters actually meet up somehow. I was so hoping this was going to be cool and not dumb. It’s dumb.
So there is an eighth chapter in the Middle Ages where you play Final Fantasy. Turns out, the main guy in this one got tricked by villains and everyone ends up thinking he’s a traitor who killed the king. Turns out, his best bud secretly hated him and his fiancee actually was in love with the best bud. When he kills the bud, the fiancee Romeo and Juliets herself and our dude is left alone and hated by all. There were also some limp themes of like “a hero lives a dark life, for he sees clearly the weakness and selfishness of those begging to be saved.” It’s like, eh, sure. Anyway, the guy’s rage and hate is so powerful it transcends reality and pulls heroes from across time toward him so he can, I guess, prove that being a hero sucks ass.
Now here’s my problem: I hate the trope of “rage/hate/pain so strong it transcends time” because inevitably the situation that caused it doesn’t really seem bad enough to warrant all that. Like what happened to Middle Ages man isn’t fun. But I bet many millions of people have had it worse. Like yeah, he is despised and exiled and betrayed. But like. My man. Were you ever enslaved? There have been a lot of slaves over the years. I bet a bunch of slaves had shit like that happen to them, plus they were slaves. You ever been in a concentration camp? You’d probably beg to be in your position if you ever got put in one of those. You see what I’m getting at? Like, you do not strike me as being in a position that would warrant resentment so strong that echoes of your hate have infected all of existence.
So, that’s lame, and what’s lamer is that my big question—how do the protagonists all come together—gets answered with the laziest possible explanation: they all just show up. For such an ambitious structure it’s such a devastating disappointment to have this be what it was all leading to. I would be OK with lame chapters too short to develop any interesting gameplay if it was all in service of something cool. But it wasn’t.
To be fair, the final chapter does approach some of the fun the combat system suggests it’s capable of. It’s helped by the fact that you can finally make a full four-person party out of your favorite old protagonists (I picked the shifu, the Gohan, the modern-day martial artist, and cowboy). It’s fun remembering what all these suckers can do and building a well-rounded party with your favorite ones!
The issue again is—shit’s too easy! The only world with random encounters is the Middle Ages (it is basically a riff on Final Fantasy after all) and you have to do so much Middle Ages walking in the final chapter that you’ll end up leveling up your characters a crazy amount without trying. The Shifu ended up with a dragon attack that hit all enemies on screen for huge damage that had barely any charge time. The cowboy had a move that shot 15 bullets at an enemy. Each did 100-120 damage. About a third will miss. Please understand that this adds up to 999 damage every time. I beat the final boss with incredible ease on the first try.
The soundtrack by Yoko Shimomura is a major banger as advertised (boss theme “Megalomania” is one of the songs of all time). Only issue—not enough soundtrack! It’s an issue the game struggles with in all arenas—just too short, not enough room to stretch out! The songs are good but there are so few that they get repeated over and over til they wear out their welcome.
I keep having my mind return to Xenogears when I think about Live A Live. They are both truly weird, unique games that take wild stabs at ambitious goals and are both not really very good to actually play. The issue is like...Xenogears is like one of the best games ever? It is attempting to do something so obviously impossible, and the fact that it gets part of the way there, that you are able to somewhat see and experience the impossible thing they were going for, is a monumental achievement that, to me, far outweighs that the petty quibble that the game sucks ass.
Live A Live is reaching for something a lot less exciting. A chapter-based genre-mashup JRPG is novel but it’s easy to wrap your head around. It doesn’t read as “impossible.” It’s a good exercise for a hotshot young designer with a lot of potential who wants to hone his skills doing something out of the ordinary. But it’s not something I’m shocked exists at all the way I am with Xenogears. Therefore its flaws—though objectively not as bad as Xenogears’s flaws—stand out far more to me. I can forgive less.
In the end, I’m glad I played this for the historical perspective. But I have to say I was let down pretty hard. I bet in 1994 I wouldn’t have been so picky, but it just doesn’t hold up anymore. Whatever. You know what does hold up? Mother effing Chrono Trigger baybee. Maybe I should play Chrono Cross finally
TOM BECOMES A JAZZ GUY
So as you may remember I decided in February 2021 to become an adult piano student. By this I do not mean I play porno songs on the piano. I mean I am beginning my learning process as a grown up instead of as a child. Turns out, there’s a reason they make people do this shit when they’re little kids. It’s because by the time you are any good it’s been 15 years.
All of which is to say I still suck pretty major ass on this thing. I am way better than I was and can easily see the ways in which I have improved and gained new skills but like. Man oh man. This thing’s got mondo buttons. You gotta press them the right way otherwise teacher gets so mad.
Part of what I’ve been trying to do to improve is develop an ear and learn about theory. If you don’t know what that shit is, imagine that music (that thing you effortlessly love) was a puzzle with a jillion rules that are very complicated and also used funny jargon. My teacher says I need to develop the ability to look at a chord and intuitively know what it is and how to play it without having to look at each note one by one. Well I can’t do that shit folks. It’s so hard. I remember my teacher said something like “learning to play the correct notes is probably the easiest part of learning a piece” and I thought she was talking nonsense but it’s true.
Oh well. In order to help myself in this journey I have decided I have to become a brain genius. My method is to listen to jazz music and become extremely wise.
It is very funny to me that when jazz was new, the official opinion (white people’s opinion, let’s be honest) was that it was degenerate idiot music for fools, but now jazz is exclusively music for geniuses who know about modulating modes and pentatonic scales. I looked up “John Coltrane Giant Steps why is it good” and everything was like, “ah yes, the way he switches modes is revolutionary. Incredible key changes.” This is like music student shit. One person out of 10,000 is going to know what this is. Are you telling me they used to sell this on the mass market?
I sound like I am slamming jazz here. To be clear I am not. I just do not have the juice, mentally, to get what these guys are doing. If you asked me to write down what an eleventh chord was I could technically do it, but fuck if I can recognize one being played or know why the guy chose to do that.
I’ve listened to a ton of “da classics” lately and I definitely have derived enjoyment and pleasure out of them but I can’t escape the feeling that I’m only listening to become a genius. By which I mean like—I am not listening to this music because solely because I like it and want to. I have a constant awareness that this is for smarter guys and I’m not listening to it right. There is the ulterior motive here of trying to expand my musical consciousness rather than just listening because it’s good. This weighs on my mind as I listen and robs the experience of the all-encompassing effect some dumb idiot music like Titus Andronicus would have on me.
All of this is preamble to the group that has bucked this trend: Sons of Kemet is the first jazz act to which I go “Oh, ok. I see: this whips ass.” I do not need to be thinking about theory to get why this kicks ass. First off, they have two drummers. This is the best move and pays off every time it is attempted. When did Talking Heads really take off? When they started having a guy do bongos and shit in addition to the normal drummer. The Go! Team is unlistenable 00’s cringe shit in retrospect but I do have to give them huge respect for having two drummers, their best move.
A lot of jazz to me is like—how is this all the same song? How are all these solos related? I can’t fuckin tell. I can’t grasp the structure. With two drummers (and the percussion mixed a lot higher than the other jazz I’ve heard) the rhythm does such a strong job of giving each composition a solid foundation for its identity. Two drummers baby.
Also the bass is not a bass but a tuba. I don’t really have an informed opinion about this other than tubas are funny. When I did my piano recital this winter there was a guy there doing a solo tuba piece he composed itself. It was like 7 minutes long and sucked insane amounts of ass. It was so funny. Anyway, the tuba guy here is way better than that.
I am so prepared for people to roast me for being an ignorant guy and inform me there are actually tons of groups like Sons of Kemet and there’s nothing special about their records. Well here’s the twist: I actually like that. I actually want you to do that. I know I’m an ignorant guy and want to be fixed. Tell me about jazz records where you don’t have to have a degree from NASA to like it. Do it please