With today’s update, GameSpite Issue 6 is complete. Tell your friends! Share some links! This month’s contributors are responsible for a collection of some damn fine articles, and the majority of your “keep the site alive” donations are going to them in gratitude. Next month I’ll see about coming up with a more concrete approach to making certain everyone is rewarded for their trouble, but for now enjoy the final two articles for April:
The Laputa Effect: Part 1
Thank goodness for contributors; this is an article I’ve been intending to write for five years, since I first watched Castle in the Sky and realized with a start what a tremendous debt gaming owes to Hayao Miyazaki. And now, alexb has written it for me. What a champ.
Super Robot Taisen Original Generation
And because we just don’t give Atlus enough love in these here parts, MNicolai has picked up the slack to lavish affection on one of the company’s lesser-known releases. It’s almost a review! But not quite. And that is its charm.
No GameSpite update next week, because if all things go as planned I will have much bigger fish to fry. Thus Issue 7 begins May 11. Mark your calendars! Or, you know, just keep checking back from time to time. Whatever.
Compulsive nitpickery here- While he otherwise totally fits the bill of backstabbing-silver-haired-prettyboy-secret-mysterious-royal-jerk-working-for-the-evil-empire, Ramirez from Skies of Arcadia is most memorable for surprisingly NOT backstabbing his leader and getting a god complex. His whole deal is that he honestly believes the guy whose boots he’s licking is the most awesome guy in the world. The game in general has a nice habit of pulling away from some of the most firmly entrenched genre tropes at the last minute (and full on using most others, of course).
Yeah, but he was ostensibly an agent of the Valua empire. That’s the boss I was talking about. SoA was interesting in that it sort of broke Muska into two characters: Galcian and Ramirez. Galcian got the snappy clothes and the god complex. Ramirez got the secret past and insanity. But since I saw more of Muska in Ramirez and he was the only one who made it to the last act, I went with him.
Mark Hamill’s voice work on the dub is fantastic.
Hell, Mark Hamill’s fanfastic period.
I watched Laputa after seeing Alex’s rough draft of this piece, and I have to say that both the movie and the article are fantastic. Watching Laputa really felt like a live-action version of half of the JRPGs I’ve ever played, which made it 10x more enjoyable than I could have ever expected. I’ve yet to listen to the english dubs of any of my Miyazake films for pretentious reasons, but I’ll have to give this one a go.
Great stuff all around!
Mark Hamill is great, but James Van Der Beek (Pazu) and especially Anna Paquin (Sheeta) are not. Watch with caution!
In all fairness, though, Van der Beek and Paquin don’t do bad jobs; they’re just not as good as the rest of the cast. Personally, I thought they did OK, but Hamill (and Leachman as well as many others) were simply awesome. They really made the dub for me.
I thought the Laputa article was fantastic. I wish we had more articles that crossed genres like that.
I want to say something about the Super Robot Wars article, but it pretty much all comes down to “dang, I know all about the differences between the various Getters” and “hey, the plot might be pretty dumb if you hate anime cliches, but at least its easy to skip over and seriously, what did you expect?”, neither of which are very good.
So of course I said them anyway. Sigh.
SRW Original Generations? Hot. Now if they would just localize the PS2 version.
I’m guessing Grandia will make an appearance in the second part of the article. I can’t speak for Skies of Arcadia but the original Grandia is an amazingly blatant lift of Castle in the Sky even by the standards of JRPGs.
For those who haven’t really played it, there’s an entire area of Final Fantasy XI that is pretty much a straight copy of Laputa(http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Ru%27Aun_Gardens), right down to the magical golems guarding it.
Funny how Miyazaki actually ripped off himself with Laputa. For example, nearly all of the film’s major characters were xeroxed from his earlier Future Boy Conan series.
And thank you for reminding me why I hate Skies of Arcadia so much.
I wonder if they know that LaPuta means TheWhore in spanish :P
Swift did. Miyazaki almost certainly didn’t. But hell, they even mispronounced the name of their own company, so what can you expect?
I don’t care if it’s not quite a review, finally someone besides me and a guy on IRC got to play OG’s.
That said, I find myself having a hard time going back to OG1 after OG2’s dramatically better animations and enhanced battle systems, and OG2 feels almost as hard to go back to after SRW W- though admittedly there, one has the usual mass crossover plots and the other I can actually read.
CHESUTOOOOO
What impressed me about OG2 was how familiar it felt after playing OG1. I started a new game and there was the Altiesen and Weisritter and Huckbien and I knew exactly what my strategies would be and how to proceed. The jump to W was about as painless; I have zero language skills and was able to easily navigate the first few battles. If nothing else the OG games are a great tutorial for English speaking fans.
The visual upgrades get pretty drastic! As amazing as W looks, I can’t stop thinking about the upcoming SRWA remake. The small teases of SRWZ look stunning, like it might give Odin Sphere a run for it’s money as best looking sprite-based PS2 game.