天下制覇

I'll sure miss him, especially the way he… he… uh… help me out here.

For the interested, Eushully announced its next game. It's kind of a departure, appearing to be sort of like Heroes of Might and Magic, with being able to pick one of 6 different factions, each with their own protagonist (from not-Aladdin the sky pirate, to random angel doing it FOR THE ORPHANS, to fat old rapists, to demon clown girl who tosses defeated protagonists to the orc buffet) and the the goal being to conquer all the rest via resource collecting and building up armies… except that the little they describe of the actual battles involves the phrase "other than attack or retreat, automatically plays itself." Granted, there's some kind of spellcasting system to affect battles, but this already seems like a terrible, terrible idea, and that's on top of an entire game where I'm pretty sure after playing through and raping (or nice-raping in not-Aladdin's case) everyone as one protagonist, you're supposed to switch to another and rape them all again with someone else, including your previous avatar (or their genies/subordinates). I feel like this net they're casting may be a little… wide.

Impressions:

Well, this sure was an episode. If only it actually had the foundation there to make what happened in it actually work, so like much of this show, interesting idea, but the execution wasn't there. Probably most importantly Whose-His-Face dying, although the fact that they split him getting shot and him doing his heroic crap before fading out to the astral face of his girlfriend by 12 minutes of Maia/Nesta nonsense was going to be a problem regardless. If the episode was supposed to be his big send off, we probably should've either given him/them a bit more focus, both here and at any point in the previous 20 episodes, or not been so bloody bipolar about it. He's grievously wounded! But let's cut away. Oh, here he is again, merely a fleshwound. Can't stop his heroic spirit. Wait, nope, dead after all. If you want to be jarring, be jarring. If you want to put together a big fanfare, put together a big fanfare. But don't halfass both or you just end up full ass. Well, and there's also the stink of how they've already unmade everybody's loved ones once hanging over the whole thing.

And for the other half, we have Nesta and her dark robot pals basically stomping around the city, and/or possessing Maia to taunt people and/or induce vomiting. It still has the same problem that last week's 20 minutes of exposition only made worse. Why? Because Destiny. The world said so. Which is shorthand for "the writers couldn't think of any actual conflict so we're just going to say they have to overcome the natural order, which is apparently different from the current order." That's a problem. At the very least, some rule or goal needs to be set down to struggle for or achieve, even if it's something as Disney pithy as "true love's kiss," especially since we've already done the "learn to believe in yourself" schtick two or three times over here, and even that wouldn't cut it. Right now, Nesta is a mix between a petulant child throwing a tantrum about how things aren't how they're supposed to be, which is important because… because! and a surrogate for the writers themselves, there to inflict conflict, but completely unassailable because magic until magic.