One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 – Additional Episode 2: Koby’s Combat Chronicle PS4 [REVIEW]

Another episode/mini-mode, and this one too based around the new DLC characters included in the DLC character pack that released as the same time as the additional episode, this time around Coby/Koby, one of the older One Piece characters that’s also notable for its incredible glow up and comeback later in the series, and a demonstration of Oda’s amazing long game, where in most shonen mangas it would have been simply one of the first characters Luffy meets in his adventure, the kind that’s basically forgotten after it fulfills its purpose, and never, ever appears again.

As with the first one, the episode introduces the second Soul Map to further increase the characters stat beyond the previous cap, improve existing skills and unlock some new ones, which include stuff like buffing attack while your combo counter is high, or more unique ones like converting/consuming the coins you collects into health directly.

Where Yamato’s Adventure was a time attack mode that forced you to fight hard and fast so to keep the mission/adventure going and hopefully actually finishing instead of getting a time out, Koby’s Combat Chronicle is more a survival mode, where you undertake various missions as you can, with some special ones with more unique or new objectives, all on the same life bar.

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One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 – DLC Pack 5 PS4 [DLC REVIEW]

Before the final reveal in december, i honestly hoped this would have been a One Piece “Film Villains “DLC packs, but nope, the “reveal” (the silhouette gave it away since we knew of the this second Season Pass existing in trailer announcement form) of Uta was simply to indicate this was gonna be a One Piece Film Red DLC characters pack.

Which makes sense, since Film Red was beyond successful at the box office, it was arguably the goddamn best One Piece film since Film Z, and it also big a vehicle for j-pop singer Ado helped it making it the 6th grossing anime (and japanese) film of ALL TIME so far, so yeah, you bet your ass the production committees and suits were gonna push it into related One Piece products.

Still, it’s a shame because i do think a One Piece film villains DLC characters pack would have also sold really well if it picked some fan favourites like Zephyr or Shiki, but alas, this is not the case. Maybe in Pirate Warriors 5, whenever will that materialize.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember #36: A Sound Of Thunder (2005)

Since we’ve looked at a LOT of low-to-no budget dinosaur films this year (maybe even more than usual), let’s end with something that actually released in most english-speaking cinemas, had some actual movie studios and actually known industry faces attached to it, with A Sound Of Thunder.

Based on a short story of the same name by Ray Bradbury and set in the still “distant” future of 2055, it tells the story of a company, Time Safari, that offers to rich customers the possibility to travel back in time and hunt dinosaurs.

Due to the huge risks involved with the “space-time fabric and whatnot”, the company regulates the safari by hunting species of dinosaurs that would have eventually died anyway of natural causes and keeps the clients from stepping off the designated path of the safari experience.

While on a hunt, a gun malfunctions, forcing the team to scatter and flee from an Allosaurus, and even if they eventually regroup, when they come back to their time with no harm done… they soon find out their actions had consequences, like a sudden increase in global temperature and the over-night instant, abudant growth of plant life, with further trips resulting in even more messing with the space-time continuum and endangering the existence of humanity as a whole…

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Salutations!

You’ve made it to 2024, and hopefully we will be able to see and play Ena: Dream BBQ when it releases, really look forward to that.

And maybe to have all Disgaea titles ported to PS4 and PS5 in their “Complete/Complete +” edition, come on NIS, re-release Disgaea D2, cowards.

(Again, for clarifications, this is not a sponsorship or anything, i just fuckin love the ENA series by Joel Guerra, just big fan, even bought two of the ENA plushies to help them fund the game).

Happy new year!

The Flying Luna Clipper (1987) [REVIEW] | Laserdisc Vaporware Of Yore

Think there is little to new variety to the blog, maybe lamenting i don’t review stuff like Walerian Borowczyk’s filmography? Too many occasional ninjas, exploitation flicks, or ninjaxploitation flicks? You’re wrong, but for the sake of it, we’re going into proper obscure, cult classic weird territory with The Flying Luna Clipper, the best intro movie to a game that doesn’t exist.

Imagine an obscure japanese point and click game heavy on surreal imagery of moon faced TV presenters, birdmen and anthro fruits, all natively dubbed in nearly “engrish” fashion, but instead of having to solve inventory puzzles or explore or witness dream scenarios while Osamu Sato tunes play in the background… minus the gameplay aspect.

Because this was never meant to be a game, but a showcase of what the MSX line of 8-bit computers could accomplish, an art film distributed by Sony and directed by Ikko Ono, the graphic designer mostly known for the cover artworks of MSX Mazagine, also having a column in the magazine itself for various illustrations, Ikko’s Gallery, that would later be featured in this film, presented by/as “Ikko’s Theathre”.

And it’s the very definition of forgotten gem, since it did receive various releases on home video in Japan at the time, but it was basically only salvaged from the darkness in 2015 when Matt Hawkins found a copy of its Laserdisc release in a thrift store, and uploaded it to Youtube, and ever since growing its niche popularity, to the point it’s definitely one of the main inspiration for what would later become the “vaporwave” art scene, itself stemming from the music style of the same name.

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[EXPRESSO] Five Nights At Freddy’s (2023) | Children Of Chuck E. Cheese

I kinda didn’t want to review this one for various reasons, but i did review The Flash movie after all, so let’s get this over with, shall we?

And FIY, i barely known anything about the games, i’ve seen some gameplay but i don’t know anything about this weird lore the series supposedly has running through, just the basic premise of the games, as in, it’s about a person employed as a night guard for an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese styled pizza place-kids entertaiment center, where the animatronics mysteriously still walk around its grounds and attack anyone they find in their roamings….

Kinda surprised it took so long for the series that basically invented the “mascot horror” subgenre to have its feature lenght film out, so long that a horror version of the Banana Splits came along, and we even had Nicolas Cage join into the mascot massacre fun with Willy Wonderland.

And honestly, in itself, it’s not very good… though i don’t think it’s very bad either.

Production value are fairly high, the animatronics look good and have a substantial presence on screen, though it takes a while for the movie to show and have the animatronics move about and do something of substance, as it spends a lot more screentime establishing its lore and okayish characters than in actually trying to be scary or gruesome.

Which itself it’s a non issue since this movie it’s clearly targeted at a children audience (even though most fans that grew up on the games are most likely in their 20s now) and relies on jumpscares, which maybe fitting, feels like a missed opportunity, since it’s really not scary…. but it’s also not deliberately trying to be child-friendly or goofy, kinda feels stuck in between, for whatever reason.

Still, not quite awful.

Anthem PS4 [REVIEW-FUNERAL DIRGE] | EA’s Dark Void

We’ve reviewed the horrific and turdular legend of Devil’s Third in October, so since today’s is Allsaints here, let’s speak of the dead, with another review-funeral dirge.

A really long one, too, because we’ll burying this one deep, just to be extra sure.

Don’t take a drink every time i mention Destiny, don’t, your liver will thank me.

And yes, while you can still buy and play Anthem, since physical copies are ubercheap and overabundant, the servers are still live with no announced plans of shutting them down… it is a formality, a pure technicality, air escaping from the lungs instead of his ass, just bring them out when Eric Idle shows up. Or just throw him on the cart as well, again, it’s for the better at this point.

FIY, i followed the absolute disaster this game was, saw it being discussed and unanimosuly declared absolute trash, i red the Jason Schreier’s editorial, i saw the dumpster fire blink at the edge of Alpha Centauri, etc. So i knew the shitshow this game caused, and i eventually picked up a PS4 copy new for 8 bucks from Amazon, because i knew i wanted another unholy artifact in my game collection, sitting next to other abandoned – and most likely by now unplayable – garbage fires.

I saw them announcing the “3 acts” and then backtrack that to oblivion, but i mostly enjoyed this game the best way, the recommended way: not playing it and seeing it discussed and torn apart by pretty much everybody, with even the more positive folks betraying the fact that this was another live-service disaster piece of crap.

The Fallout 76 of 2019, if you will.

But still, i didn’t bother to actually play it yet, as i waited to see if their last attempt to turn it around with a new version called “Anthem Next” (basically attempting a No Man Sky’s tale) would be given the greenlight. Every sign pointed to no, but Evolve Phase 2 did happen (and died not even a year in, but still), so i wasn’t ruling out the slim possibility of it happening. Not yet.

To no one’s surprise, Anthem Next wasn’t approved so then i decided to take out the PS4 disc, install it, let it patch itself to playability, and actually play it now that’s officially a living dead horse, just waiting for EA to kill it 100 % dead by closing the server and making it totally unplayable to anyone else in the future. Dear god, how i hate this industry and its clear malign lack of any interest in preserving its own history. I genuinely hate the “anti-archivism” built into these games.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #7: Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City (2021)

When the first trailer for this reboot of the Resident Evil film series was revealed, the reception was kinda split, and i guess it was in part because over time people learned to enjoy the crappy Paul W.S . Anderson films for what they were, liked their brand of cinematic cheese and overall embraced their “so bad they’re charming” nature.

And i do agree that there’s something comforting, especially in retrospective, about them, for all the flaws and plots that had barely anything to do with the ones in the Resident Evil videogames themselves, they did manage to faithfully recapture the B-movie feel of the games (itself borrowed from many zombie B-movies) in their own way, while hindsight confirm they were products of their time indeed, in this case from an era where film adaptations of videogames had a bad reputation about them, quite different from today’s perception, with an Uncharted movie released and a Gran Turismo film that at the time of writing is just a month away from hitting theathers.

Times have indeed changed, so it’s not that much of a surprise to see Capcom (itself a different company from the confused and “appeal to the west” driven mess of back when the Milla Jovovich led film series was still going) opt for a reboot film instead of trying to follow up from a film that indeed was called Resident Evil: The Final Chapter and indeed served as closure. Kinda.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #6: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)

“Funny” story: this is actually the second RE movie i watched, and the only one i ever watched in theathers. I wasn’t that interested at the time in the film series, so i just picked up on DVD years later the first Resident Evil movie, but didn’t bother with the sequels.

But since it was gonna be the final installment, i was a bit curious, so i went to see at one of my local cinemas, and turns out it wouldn’t have really mattered much if you saw all the sequels or none at all, because The Final Chapter will forever remain in my head as one of the most embarassing final bouts for a film series, or movies that somehow end up being distributed to big cinema chains.

An istance where i could realistically see people asking for their money back at the end of the movie, where i would agree with their anger and supplement them with rotten vegetables, so they could aim for the distributors and anyone involved outside of the poor employees, because it’s not their fault, so instead of littering the floors, give them a rotten leek so we can all stick it up Sony’s picture (via their Screen Gems’ hole, specifically), or throw a tomato at the HQ of Costantine Films.

Jesting aside, i’d be embarassed to release a movie like this, personally, even if – truth to be told – it’s not as bad as i remember it being, not “if your eyes could puke” bad, it’s still incredibly badly edited, so choppy that it’s a miracle you can actually tell what’s going on in almost half of the action scenes that involve melee fights (and some others too), where you can barely see things happening, mostly thanks to some occasional slow mo, but still, it’s almost a “blink and you missed it” type of deal, so badly edited is more than a good 40 % of the action scenes.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #5: Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

Not even waiting the 3 years between sequels anymore, as the well is running dry and instead of filling it with blood of the scribe, we’re making these even faster as we approach the penultimate chapter, with Retribution following upon the twist reveal at the end of Afterlife, with the Arcadia surrounded by a lot of black Umbrella helicopters that captures the original Alice and brings her to a remote underwater location in the Extreme North section of Russia, used for testing the T-Virus, from where she has to escape alongside both old and new faces, including many other characters from the videogames that Paul W.S. Anderson couldn’t cram in the previous script, like the fan favourites Leon Kennedy, Ada Wong and Barry Burton.

So, if the keyword of Afterlife was “clonatron and mind control robo-scarabs taken from RE 5”, Retribution also adds to the vocabulary salad “simulation” and “diorama”, showing off obvious inspiration from Westworld with Umbrella creating sets and clones to populate it before they die in it, because fuck any attempt of constructing more setpieces when we can literally redo the previous ones like it’s a rematch of previously beaten bosses in an older Zelda game.

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