Author: Shmee

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Fire Emblem Heroes Is Pretty Great … The First Time Around

I haven’t owned a current Nintendo console for a while, so I have missed out on all the Fire Emblem games, but now that there is a mobile version I was able to get in on the fun, and I love it.  At least I used to love it.  It starts out really strong, and it has that Nintendo polish that you have come to expect.  The base gameplay is great, but the end game is terrible.

While the console version of Fire Emblem is a tactical turn based RPG, the mobile version is more like a miniatures game.  You get new units with new abilities, and then you swap them in and out depending on the abilities of your opponents.  Then you simply position them the best you can to best use those abilities.  It is simple to learn, but complex to master.

The problem is that Fire Emblem Heroes is also what is called a “gotcha game”.  To get new units you earn orbs, and then you cash in those orbs and pray you get something good.  Even if you do get the unit you want, it may be a lesser version of what you want.  You see all heroes have a star value attached to them, so you may get a cool hero, but he may only be the three star, and to up him a star level you need hundreds of thousands of “hero feathers”.  You can only use those feathers after he as gotten to level 20 in the game.  Not to mention if you add a star to your hero he starts again from scratch from level one with none of his learned skills.

At first this is okay because all your heroes are low level and the game is throwing orbs at you, but once you get to the upper levels of the game, the orb earn rate drops through the floor, and it will take forever to grind your hero back up to where he was.  Not to mention just earning all those dang feathers.  Worse yet the game uses the old mobile standby “stamina”.  Every level takes a bit of stamina to play, but once you get to the upper levels they take so much stamina that you can only try the level a couple of times before you have to quit and wait for your stamina to refill, or pay up for more.

The game is so fun that first time through you don’t care about all these free to play issues, but once you have gotten through the game once it really starts to make the game less fun.  There is no good end game unless you are willing to drop a bunch of cash, and that is a shame because if it had tweaked some of these game systems I could see Fire Emblem Heroes becoming a new obsession.  As it is now, it was just a really fun diversion for a couple of days.

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FX’s Legion Is Mind Bendingly Awsome!

Marvel’s Legion on FX is the most unique comic book show on the air.  Thanks to Legion’s powers and psychosis you never know what is real and what isn’t, yet it somehow manages to plot an interesting path with its story even though there are seemingly no fixed points fact wise.  Series like this are starting to reveal the full potential of comic book adaptations.

While this show takes place inside the impossible to figure out X-Men movie continuity, you will not need to have seen or understand any of that to enjoy this show.  Just know that crazy things happen when a powerful mutant looses his mind, or at least thinks he has.  It is one of the weirdest shows on TV and I cannot wait to see more!

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Z Is An Okay Beginning

Amazon’s new show ‘Z: The Beginning of Everything’ focuses on the life Zelda Fitzgerald and her tumultuous relationship with famed writer F. Scott Fitzgerald.  It is fine start to the show, but if Amazon wants it to catch on like their other prestige shows they will have to up the ante a little.

The show starts off during World War One with Zelda (Christina Ricci) flirting with the soldiers that come to town for training.  During a high society party she meets the man of her dreams: a struggling writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (David Hoflin).  Of course her parents don’t approve, but when Scott finishes his first book and it is a massive success, Zelda runs off to marry him and live the good life.

My problem with this show is that none of the characters really grow.  Zelda kind of learns that life isn’t going to be what she dreamed it would be, and Scott becomes more of a jerk, but there is no real ark.  The show drifts from one party to another.  I wish it would have gotten deeper in to who the Fitzgeralds are/were.  Part of the problem is the running time.  Each episode is only thirty minutes long, so factoring in beginning credits and ending credits, it is hard tell an interesting story with twenty minutes of screen time.

Christina Ricci is the reason to watch this show.  She puts everything she has in to Zelda.  It is like Zelda Fitzgerald has come to life in your living room.  David Hoffin is not as good.  You believe that he is jealous idiot, but he is just not a compelling one.  The other side actors are very good, and mostly make up for Hoffin’s dull performance.

If you have five hours to kill (less of you skip all the credits), ‘Z: The Beginning of Everything’ is an okay choice.  The 1920s are a fun period, and the Fitzgeralds defined the decade.  However much like the ’20s the show just doesn’t go very deep.  It is a lot of flash without much substance.

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Disney’s The Jungle Book Is Going To Make It Very Hard On Warner Brothers!

Disney’s The Jungle Book, the live action remake of their 1967 film, was better than it had any right to be.  The special effects were awesome, and young Neel Sethi as Mowgli was able to carry the film.  It is no wonder that this was a hit for Disney almost bringing in $1 Billion worldwide, but next year Warner Brothers is going to release its own version of Kipling’s famous book, and I am not so sure that it should.

The Jungle Book eliminated most of the flaws the original film had by updating the script to be less pro-West, and cutting Mowgli’s questionable reason for leaving the jungle.  It also fleshed out the side characters quite a bit.  The live action, while I was doubtful, did breath new life in to these characters.  Between The Jungle Book and Cinderella, Disney’s live action train shows no sign of slowing down.  Though the less said about the Alice in Wonderland movies the better.

Warner Brothers is now in a perilous position.  It has already has spent hundreds of millions to produce their version of the book with the great Andy Serkis starring and directing, but there is almost no way their version will be better, or better enough than Disney’s to make their money back.  Now there are more than enough tales to tell from Kipling’s book to make another movie, but I am not sure the audience knows that, and no matter what you do it will still be a young boy in the jungle surrounded by CG animals, so most people are just going to think it is a rip off.

Warner Brothers has already delayed the film to give it a little space from the Disney movie, and they changed the name from The Jungle Book to Jungle Book (so different), but I still think this is going to be a disaster for them.  Every time two studios have gone head to head with the same film, one movie bombs or is at least forgotten.  Deep Impact lost to Armageddon, Donte’s Peak to Volcano, Mirror Mirror to Snow White and the Huntsman, and for some reason there are always two Three Musketeers movies at the same time (please no more Three Musketeers movies).  Jungle Book will loose to The Jungle Book, and with history as its guide Warner Brothers should have known that.

I hope for Andy Serkis’ sake that Jungle Book beats my expectations, but I doubt that it will.  It seems to me, if you are a major studio and another major studio is making the same movie and theirs will be out first, you should scrap your plans, or at least put them on a long hold, but as an observer it is always fun to see who will win.  Lately Disney has been winning everything.

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How Did The Gods Of Egypt Get Made?!

Some movies deserve long reviews to talk about their significance, acting, storytelling, or to get to the root of the movie’s message.  Gods of Egypt is not such a movie.  It is all bad:  the acting is bad, the special effects are bad, the story is bad, the cinematography is bad, and to top it all off it is racist and sexist, which is bad.  Granted it is so bad that if you know what you are in for you may have a good time trashing it with your buddies.  To some up, it is the opposite of good.

What is baffling about all of this is that it was greenlit in the first place!  And not just greenlit but given a $140 Million budget, so it was a major movie for Lionsgate.  With some insiders even saying that executives hoped that Gods of Egypt would be the franchise to replace Hunger Games.  What?!  I can’t believe so many people had so much faith in this movie.  Had Wrath of the Titans been a success, maybe, but it was a failure.

Now I could see making a fun little sword and sandals movie based on Egyptian culture instead of the usual Greek based tale, and then amp up the cheese, give it a small to medium budget, and I am sure it would have played well enough.  It probably also would have been wise to cast at least a few Egyptians to be in the movie, but $140 Million with almost a completely white cast?  Surely someone must have told them that this was a bad idea.

In the end Gods of Egypt got the box office result and critical lashing it deserved, but if you are looking for a movie for Bad Movie Night, they don’t come much worse than this, and from a major studio to boot.  However, that is the only circumstance where Gods of Egypt gets any sort of recommendation.  I wish I could have been in the meeting where Lionsgate’s executive group agreed that Gods of Egypt deserved their full support.