foxinthestars (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
foxinthestars) wrote2010-02-24 02:25 pm
foxinthestars) wrote2010-02-24 02:25 pm
Curse and Comics
I have got to get myself off of watching video game playthroughs online; I'm just wasting too much time on it. The only one left that I can claim some reason to do it is Castlevania: Curse of Darkness, so I finally did start watching it.
I guess what I've heard said about it is bearing out, as far as one can tell by watching. The combat system does look like fun, but it's like they made the environments huge thinking that it would impart an epic feel, but it actually imparts a lot of time running down passages with nothing much happening.
Of course myself, I'm interested in the story, and so far I'm not warming up to it so much. Let's see, they started out by making the ending of CV3 retroactively suck (turns out "Dracula's Curse" refers to something that started, not ended, with Trevor & Co's quest), and so far Hector isn't a terribly likable hero. He shows up ranting about the dead girlfriend the player knows nothing about and REVENGE!, and his conversation with Isaac goes something like:
H: My old powers are horrible and evil and I will never ever use them!
I: You can't wreak bloody vengeance on me without them.
H: Oh. Well, okay I will then.
I: Did I mention I'm playing you like a violin with this whole revenge thing?
H: Fine, whatever, I'll take the bait.
This is how the game first starts, and it needs one or more prologue manga to render the respective motivations meaningful.
Speaking of the said manga, I've only read the first half of the Kou Sasakura one available from TokyoPop, and I'll just say one of the problems I had with it was also Hector's unlikability (when a nun and a young boy are menaced by a werewolf, he sits around on his ass for awhile before finally foisting responsibility for his actions onto the twelve-year-old. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen).
There's also the much shorter preorder manga by Ayami Kojima (translated at Vampire Killer), which does the job short and sweet and pretty effectively (though perhaps not so coherently), but not enough to make it all good, if anything could... (This game in general is also perhaps the worst moment of Castlevania putting the history of witch hunting through a sausage-grinder, but that ought to be par for the course, really...)
Each of those manga got me onto more general thoughts about comics and manga. The first one because, well... It's just kind of mediocre crud, from what I saw. Part of my "cranky old Japanophile" designation is that I do like J-Pop and manga and such, but I will readily acknowledge that if manga is less liable to Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crud") than American comics, it's not by a wide margin. On the manga shelves in bookstores, it's hard to find anything that looks good. Where I think the difference comes in is that with manga, the good 10% is a part of the mainstream where in American comics, the good 10% is apart from the mainstream. This almost makes it more of a pain from my end to find the good manga, because it's mixed in with all the rest as opposed to being uniquely "indie", but in terms of economics for the creators I'm sure it's more than worth it.
As for what the Kojima one got me thinking, well, I'm embarrassed to admit that when I read that Vampire Killer translation, I was reading the pages backward, being so used to reading manga right-to-left, and it took several pages before I realised I was doing it wrong. So it isn't as incoherent as it first seemed, but not so coherent that the mistake was immediately clear. In this case it's understandable, given the amount of story that was necessarily being done in a short space, but, well, awhile back talking about medium and disbelief, I remarked that comics can get away with a lot between panels, but a fairly common problem I have when reading comics is them trying to get away with too much, such that it starts to feel like just a jumble of images and text. For awhile I was a sucker for Koge-Donbo's cutesy style (I think I'm over it now), but those books seemed pretty prone to the problem. And it's not like I can't comprehend a story out of it, it just gets a subjective sort of whirlwind feeling that I don't like. I wonder what the difference really is that I'm feeling there...
I guess what I've heard said about it is bearing out, as far as one can tell by watching. The combat system does look like fun, but it's like they made the environments huge thinking that it would impart an epic feel, but it actually imparts a lot of time running down passages with nothing much happening.
Of course myself, I'm interested in the story, and so far I'm not warming up to it so much. Let's see, they started out by making the ending of CV3 retroactively suck (turns out "Dracula's Curse" refers to something that started, not ended, with Trevor & Co's quest), and so far Hector isn't a terribly likable hero. He shows up ranting about the dead girlfriend the player knows nothing about and REVENGE!, and his conversation with Isaac goes something like:
H: My old powers are horrible and evil and I will never ever use them!
I: You can't wreak bloody vengeance on me without them.
H: Oh. Well, okay I will then.
I: Did I mention I'm playing you like a violin with this whole revenge thing?
H: Fine, whatever, I'll take the bait.
This is how the game first starts, and it needs one or more prologue manga to render the respective motivations meaningful.
Speaking of the said manga, I've only read the first half of the Kou Sasakura one available from TokyoPop, and I'll just say one of the problems I had with it was also Hector's unlikability (when a nun and a young boy are menaced by a werewolf, he sits around on his ass for awhile before finally foisting responsibility for his actions onto the twelve-year-old. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen).
There's also the much shorter preorder manga by Ayami Kojima (translated at Vampire Killer), which does the job short and sweet and pretty effectively (though perhaps not so coherently), but not enough to make it all good, if anything could... (This game in general is also perhaps the worst moment of Castlevania putting the history of witch hunting through a sausage-grinder, but that ought to be par for the course, really...)
Each of those manga got me onto more general thoughts about comics and manga. The first one because, well... It's just kind of mediocre crud, from what I saw. Part of my "cranky old Japanophile" designation is that I do like J-Pop and manga and such, but I will readily acknowledge that if manga is less liable to Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crud") than American comics, it's not by a wide margin. On the manga shelves in bookstores, it's hard to find anything that looks good. Where I think the difference comes in is that with manga, the good 10% is a part of the mainstream where in American comics, the good 10% is apart from the mainstream. This almost makes it more of a pain from my end to find the good manga, because it's mixed in with all the rest as opposed to being uniquely "indie", but in terms of economics for the creators I'm sure it's more than worth it.
As for what the Kojima one got me thinking, well, I'm embarrassed to admit that when I read that Vampire Killer translation, I was reading the pages backward, being so used to reading manga right-to-left, and it took several pages before I realised I was doing it wrong. So it isn't as incoherent as it first seemed, but not so coherent that the mistake was immediately clear. In this case it's understandable, given the amount of story that was necessarily being done in a short space, but, well, awhile back talking about medium and disbelief, I remarked that comics can get away with a lot between panels, but a fairly common problem I have when reading comics is them trying to get away with too much, such that it starts to feel like just a jumble of images and text. For awhile I was a sucker for Koge-Donbo's cutesy style (I think I'm over it now), but those books seemed pretty prone to the problem. And it's not like I can't comprehend a story out of it, it just gets a subjective sort of whirlwind feeling that I don't like. I wonder what the difference really is that I'm feeling there...