Native Jovian

You know, I've been thinking about the whole indoctrination theory and trying to understand why it pisses me off. I think I figured it out. Basically, it's an in-universe excuse for shitty writing. A lot of the indoctrination theory rides on pointing out inconsistencies and plot holes in the ending. The indoctrination theory lets you say "there aren't actually any problems, because it's all in Shepard's head!". That's a more satisfying explanation than "the writing team completely fucked up the ending", which is why a lot of people seem to like it. I think it works as a decent way to explain the mess of the ending that we got -- but I don't think that it's what the writers intended. I think the intention was for everything to be taken at complete face value -- glaring plot holes, complete thematic reversals and all. There are plenty of holes in the indoctrination theory. If it's all going on in Shepard's head, what's he actually doing all that time? If the reapers were going to push to control Shepard, why wait to do it until after they'd just laser'd him in the face? If he's being indoctrinated, how is it possible to die (either killed by the lone marauder before entering the beam or by allowing TIM to shoot you)? If choosing the ending you choose is supposed to represent throwing off or succumbing to the indoctrination, then why is the cutscene the same for all three? But here's the thing -- presented with a choice of equally plot hole-ridden interpretations, a lot of people are going to prefer the one that's at least thematically consistent. Indoctrination is something that's been mentioned in the series, that's been talked about before, that we understand in terms of the Mass Effect universe. All the Catalyst "synthetics and organics must inevitably destroy one another!" crap is directly contracting a lot of the series, nevermind the out-of-nowhere "the reapers are actually under the control of something else" thing. So, I think the indoctrination theory is wrong, but it's still better than what we actually got. That's what pisses me off.

So... you're judging the quality of the dub based on a bunch of low-fidelity audio clips of the two main characters saying each other's names repeatedly out of context? Uh, okay.

True, but everything the Fire Nation had was powered by firebending. There's a pretty big difference between making a steam engine work by having a kung-fu wizard shoot fire at it all day and having a modern internal combustion engine that anyone can use.

They were a little heavy-handed with Korra's characterization (she's impulsive and stubborn, we get it) and I'm not sold on the setting (it went from pseudo-medieval with some isolated firebending-powered tech to early 20th century skyscrapers and Model Ts in 70 years?), but overall it was an interesting couple episodes. I don't have cable TV at the moment, but if they keep putting the episodes up online, I'll definitely keep watching. I forgot how trollish the Avatar writers are, though. "Hey, what happened to Zuko's mom, anyway?" "Well, it's an amazing story--" *immediately interrupted*.

Every part of this is true. What the hell does shitty dialogue have to do with the quality of the dub? You could have the best voice actors in the world, and having them scream each other's names at each other constantly would still be stupid. Besides, Richard Ian Cox is a pretty decent VA, despite the incredible unfortunateness of his name. Besides Inuyasha, he's done a bunch of Gundam stuff, and he was the main character in Zoids New Century. Anyone who has that much to do with giant robots kicking ass can't not be awesome.

In the best way possible. I think it was actually done by the same animation team that did Batman: The Animated Series.

Wait, what? What do you mean by "the current state of affairs" and why is it your fault? I haven't been paying much attention to TF2 recently.

Is it weird that watching that makes me want to watch the series, despite knowing literally nothing else about it? As far as OPs go, I've always been amused as hell by Big O's, just because it's so damn weird. Though as far as weird OPs (or anything else about it, honestly) go, it's hard to beat .I rather liked some of Gundam 00's OP/EDs, like (mostly because I generally prefer j-rock to j-pop). FLCL's ending I like for the same reason. (FLCL has a pretty good soundtrack in general.)

Ignoring the pointless dig at Bethesda, that's still a spurious argument. No one is complaining that they couldn't go completely off the rails and, say, decide to join Cerberus or deliberately allow yourself to be indoctrinated. The complaint is that the ending does not live up to the expectations set by the previous games in the series -- or even the earlier parts of the game. Mass Effect 1 allows you to make several major decisions that let you feel like you have control over the story, even if the actual changes are relatively small. Mass Effect 2 lets you make a ton of minor decisions that add up to actually having a fairly large effect on the way the game plays out (even if, again, the actual differences are relatively small). Mass Effect 3 continues this -- the changes from ME2 (eg, who lived and who died) are still present and still affect things, plus decisions you make in the game effect events later in the game (for example [spoiler: if Jack survived ME2 and you don't do the Grissom Academy mission in ME3, then Cerberus captures and indoctrinates her, and you have to fight her later on]). When you get to the ending, though, all of that gets tossed out the window. Literally the only thing that matters in the ending is if you got your effective military strength above a certain point, and the only difference it makes is that it opens another nigh-identical ending. So the complaint isn't that the ending is suddenly linear (the Mass Effect games always have been) or that people want the story to branch significantly (it never has). The complaint is that, unlike everything up until that point, none of your previous decisions make a difference. Hell, even the decision that you make in the ending itself doesn't make a whole lot of difference. That's what really bothered people -- that, in the end, all of your decisions, all of the accumulated personalization you did through the trilogy, meant precisely dick. The fact that the ending was shitty even beyond the betraying-the-audience's-expectations thing too didn't help at all, either. Re: Moomba [spoiler: why the hell would the people retaking Earth be screwed? They can't really leave the local cluster without the mass effect relays, but it's not like they're all just going to roll over and die. Even if you're talking about millions of people, Earth would still be able to support them. The destruction was supposedly limited to major population centers, so they should be able to rebuild and survive indefinitely. Hell, even the dextro races should be okay as long as you didn't kill off the quarians -- you can see liveships in their fleet when they're coming through the Charon relay, so they should be able to survive using that.]

So I just got around to finishing the game yesterday. I managed to avoid spoilers (though I knew there was controversy about the ending), so I went into it more-or-less fresh. My reaction was more "WTF?" than "RAGE!" but yeah. When the last half hour is the most disappointing part of a franchise consisting of three games that are each dozens of hours long, you done fucked up.

Mass Effect's actual gameplay has never really clicked with me, and the multiplayer distills this into pure controller-snapping frustration -- made all the worse by the fact that you can still see the potential behind all the crap. The game is a cover shooter, and the cover controls are bleh. It's difficult to make your character do what you want them to do. I constantly find myself ducking into cover when I want to run past something, standing around getting shot when I'm trying to duck into cover, doing a dive-roll (usually into the line of fire) when I'm trying to switch to a new piece of cover, etc. The weapons feel weak. Mass Effect has always been this way, but it's such an annoyance in multiplayer that it's worth mentioning again. I'm sorry, but when I shotgun a basic mook in the face from two inches away, they should die. An armored mook, or a mook with a riot shield, or a ninja-mook -- sure, they should be able to take more hits. But when the most basic enemy in the game takes two/three shotgun blasts or half a clip of SMG ammo to go down? Makes me feel like I'm using a popgun. The dying mechanic infuriates me. I get the idea of having a brief period where a teammate can revive you after you die, that's fine. But the fact that they expect you to do some literal button mashing to say alive longer -- unless an enemy happens to be nearby (which they will be, because they just killed you), in which case they'll just execute you anyway -- is stupid. It just means that it's not worth the bother of saving a teammate unless they happen to fall right at your feet. It's smarter to just finish off the enemies and bring them back for the next round than it is to risk getting yourself killed trying to save them, which renders the entire feature frustrating instead of entertaining. That said, I'm sure I'll eventually pick up ME3 anyway. Like I said, the gameplay has never been the major draw of the series in the first place. That's generally not how day-one DLC works. They don't create a whole game, snip out part of it, and then laugh maniacally as they sell you that snipped-out part for extra. Once the game goes gold (ie, "ready to sell, manufacture the discs and ship it out to stores") no changes can be made to the game, but you've still got a bunch of developers that you're paying to sit around. So you have them whip up something in the time between when the game goes gold and the actual release date, and drop that content as a day-one DLC.

Hoopy, you're way too hard on yourself. It's not like we're playing competitively or anything -- just relax and have fun. Re: server lag, I recall someone mentioning last night that they thought it was a configuration issue, because it's following us around even when we change physical servers. Has RED been having an issues, or is it just BLU?

That's only a problem if it's three shitty snipers. When it's me, NDUDE, and Lumpy, though, it's cool.

I ended up playing on a random pub server last night for a few rounds. I ended up singlehandedly depopulating the server by getting getting a the entire RED team to ragequit after I killed all five of them by myself with the huntsman, then got autobalanced to the RED, then doing the exact same thing to BLU. It makes me so very sad that there's no Strange Huntsman, because I could say that mine was literally server-clearing.

Oh, I was fully expecting the movie to be terrible, despite really hoping otherwise. I actually enjoyed Gundam 00's second season (despite the complete 180 it did compared to the first season), but I didn't expect the whole "dialoges to come" thing to lead anywhere good. Oh, I agree entirely. I hate it when people call something bad for not fitting in with the rest of its franchise (G Gundam gets some of this treatment, for example, and G Gundam is fucking awesome) -- but I thought the Gundam 00 movie sucked on its own merits in addition to jettisoning most of what I like most about Gundam. I was sorely disappointed that that link didn't lead to .

wat. I'm admittedly biased by being a huge Gundam nerd, so I don't look at it the same was as the average anime watcher, but I couldn't stand the Gundam 00 movie. Nevermind the fact that adding aliens to Gundam removes one of the major things that makes the franchise unique (if I wanted my giant robots to fight aliens, I'd be watching Macross); the movie was 75% metal blobs chasing things around, 20% beamspam, and 5% not-suck. And that's not even bringing up the plot holes. If the metal blobs learn things by assimilating them, then wouldn't they assimilate a person or two, go "oh, shit, people don't like it when you assimilate them" and stop? Apparently not. But yeah. Even as a Gundam fan, someone who really wanted to enjoy it, I couldn't bring myself to think that the Gundam 00 movie was anything but shitty.

I loathe the whole "moe" thing to an extent beyond my ability to articulate. I guess it could theoretically be done well, but every example of moe that's ever been pointed out to me is just generic cuteness used instead of actual characterization. Basically, being moe requires a character to act like a six year old girl regardless of their actual age or situation. Which is fucked up.

Kow Otani is a pretty sweet composer. He did Gundam Wing, Outlaw Star, Zoids New Century, and Shadow of the Colossus (which is a game, not an anime, but whatever), among other things.

I didn't even know "not liking jazz" was a thing you could do. I mean, preferring other styles over it, sure. But someone puts on jazz and you say "ugh, turn that shit off, man"? Unpossible.

Artistic value and entertainment value are not the same thing. I completely agree that Eva did interesting things artistically (though not as much as most people seem to think -- like I said earlier, most of the "symbolism" was pretty much meaningless bullshit), but that doesn't mean that it was entertaining to watch.

I agree completely. This is an amazingly succinct explanation of why Evangelion is not entertaining. It may be realistic psychology, but I'm watching a goddamn giant robot cartoon -- realism can and should take a step back to entertainment value. You know why the idealized hero -- the guy who overcomes all obstacles before them and, at the end of the day, saves the world and gets the girl -- is popular? Because it's fun. Shinji is not fun. Evangelion did something new and different -- props to them for that. But that, by itself, doesn't make it good. Also this. Eva spends a lot of screen time on bullshit that has nothing to do with anything and serves no purpose except to confuse people into thinking it has meaning. I will say that Eva has amazing fight scenes -- when it finally gets around to them, at least. So it wasn't all bad.

Looks like not so much.

Madness, sir! Rankest insanity!

I can't figure out how to embed that instead of just making it a link. D'oh.

I'd be down for vs. Saxton Hale. I've never actually played, but I hadn't played Prop Hunt before we did it, either. Sometime Saturday night would seem best to me -- or at least most likely to have a good number of people online.