The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Game of the God damned year.
I mean, come on. This year had some slight competition, but there was no way that the sequel to Ghost of Tsushima wasn’t going to be my GOTY. It’s not close. This was the sequel to one of the best games I’ve ever played and was at least of equal quality. The only thing holding it back from being obviously better than the original was I had some idea what to expect going in.
Absolutely fucking amazing. Fifty-eleven stars out of five.
I’ve been playing Ghost of Yotei during my scant free time lately— it’s kind of nuts how busy the last couple of weeks have been, now that I think of it– and so far, about ten hours in, it’s at least the equal of Ghost of Tsushima, its predecessor, one of the best games I’ve ever played. If you go look at my review of Tsushima, you’ll notice I keep harping on how amazing the facial animation is– and, yes, I used the same line about Pong, which will keep being relevant until I stop playing video games.
I hit a moment last night that absolutely floored me, to the point where I decided I needed to be done playing for the night because there was no way anything else I was going to do in that session was going to top it. I’m going to dance around some spoilers, but I’ll do my best to be as ambiguous as possible.
There is a moment in the game where a character encounters another character who they believed was dead. And there is a good three or four seconds where you realize what is going on before either of the characters speak, just from the look in the eyes of the character realizing what is going on. Their eyes moisten, just a little bit, and the look that crawls across their face is this amazing and perfectly readable mix of disbelief, joy, relief and shame, and it is quite simply the most complex emotional moment I have ever seen a digital character convey in my entire life.
(To be clear, that’s a random screenshot above. I found some online that were from right around the moment I’m talking about and decided not to use them to avoid even that much of a spoiler.)
And this is just ten hours in. I’m sure there is more to come. That said, Sucker Punch, if you fuckers kill my horse again after what you did to me in Tsushima, we’re gonna have a problem.
*happy dance*
I probably shouldn’t write this review yet.
It’s interesting, to read this book so close to reading Iron Flame, because on the surface they are such similar books: a young woman joins a school to become a dragon rider. The book focuses primarily on her experiences with her dragon school, where she is separated from her family, and her struggles with gaining acceptance in a place where she is felt by most to not belong.
Only, like, take that book and shake in a couple of cups of R.F. Kuang’s Babel, which I should remind you was my favorite book of last year, and then make the main character First Nations, and then make the worldbuilding approximately a thousand times more compelling and interesting and carefully thought-out than the Fourth Wing series, and … gimme a minute, I wanna do the happy dance again.
So. OK. This book is 511 pages long and I pretty much read it in two sittings with some sleep thrown in there somewhere, and if you happen to wonder Hey, Luther, did you decide last night that you couldn’t sleep after having your eyes closed for an hour and read another 50 pages before trying again, then I’d have to wonder what the hell you were doing in my bedroom in the middle of the night, because yeah, that happened, and also you’re a weirdo.
Oh, and a big chunk of the book is basically dedicated to the main character’s struggles with chemistry, only it’s magical, dragon-based chemistry, with different words for everything, and the map at the beginning of the book is very much of Earth, and the dominant culture is called the Ainglish, which you would think would map perfectly onto the English only for the bit where the Norse appear to have colonized the world instead of them, because everything’s super Germanic other than the social structure which is pure Victorian Britain, and my God I want Moniquill Blackgoose to write a thorough and unapologetic history of this world and how everything happened because I want to know exactly how much actual history went into this book along with the actual science and gaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh it’s so so so so so good go read it NOW.
I started off by saying I should have waited to review the book, and the reason for that, plain and simple, is that I’m book-drunk right now, on a level I haven’t seen since Jade City came out (!!!), and I can’t pretend this book is perfect, because it isn’t, but I can tell you that every single problem I have with this book comes from my brain and that emotionally I am absolutely one hundred percent in love with this author and her world and I want more right now. A lot of the gripes are of the wait, this doesn’t quite make sense sort of fashion anyway, and I am pretty sure that I trust this author enough to believe that my questions will be answered in future installments. The “shaping” of the dragon’s breath is actually connected to the chemistry– dragon’s breath has weird effects on basic elements in a way that I’m not a hundred percent sure that I understand, but neither does the main character, who maybe??? is a little too good at literally everything??? but that’s another brain-complaint, and sometimes I like reading about cool and competent people who take no shit from anyone and refuse to be rescued, and yeah, I’m gonna compare her to Rey Skywalker, who gets complained about exactly the same way that I suspect some people might complain about Anequs, but who I love as a character in the exact same way too.
God. Why are you still here? Go get this book right now. Maybe I’ll cool off on it a bit– just a bit– in a week or two but you deserve to feel how I feel right now about a book too, so go buy it.
So.
Standard disclaimer, as always. Y’all have seen movie reviews from me before. You know what I’m like when I like something. And Miles Morales has, since almost immediately after he was introduced, been one of my all-time favorite comic book characters. He’s up there with the Hulk, Iron Man, and Superman. I have been waiting for a Miles Morales Spider-Man movie for a long time.
(Now I’m just waiting for a movie with goddamn Ganke in it, but that’s another story.)
So you already knew I liked this movie. There would have been a shift in the fabric of the universe if I hadn’t liked it and absolutely everyone would have noticed it. Did you notice a shift in the fabric of the universe last night, around 10:30, as I was walking out of the theater? No, you did not. Of course I liked the fucking movie. It’s Goddamned brilliant. It’s so good it made me forgive them for what I initially thought was the kind of dodgy decision to make Miles’ movie animated instead of live-action.
(It’s not dodgy. This movie would have been impossible as live-action. They made a better movie by making it animated. It needed to be animated.)
So put that all aside. I want to talk to the two or three of you who don’t care about superheroes or superhero movies and for some reason come to this blog anyway.
You need to see this movie because it’s one of the most amazing animated films ever made.
You need to see it as a cultural artifact, guys, of what cutting-edge technology can do in 2018. The movie could have been about anything and I’d be recommending it because of how absolutely incredible it looks. I was talking to one of my oldest friends about it last night– he was lucky enough to see it last week, and told me at the time that words couldn’t do it justice. Last night, he made the point that the movie is expectations-proof, because there’s nothing that can prepare you for what it’s actually like to see this on the big screen.
And you need to see it on the best, biggest movie screen you can reasonably get to. This movie needs to win about four thousand awards even before we get to the part where the story is incredible too. This movie gets Miles, y’all. It understands this character thoroughly. It understands Spider-Man thoroughly, in a way that most of the live-action movies maybe haven’t always. The voice acting and the casting are outstanding. The character design– this movie’s versions of the Kingpin, the Scorpion, the Green Goblin, and especially Dr. Octopus are fantastic. The music is superb. This movie succeeds on every level but one, which is that it’s gonna scare the crap out of my son so I can’t take him to see it.
Oh, and the stinger at the end and the tribute to Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, both of whom passed away this year?
I am lucky enough to be married to a woman who is not only willing to go to this neverending series of geek movies with me, but who genuinely enjoys them. She called Into the Spider-Verse her favorite superhero movie last night. And this was one of those movies, I think, where she was mildly interested but might have skipped the movie were it not for me pushing to see it. I can’t be trusted; I know that. She can. This one’s something really special, y’all. And it ain’t like you’ve got anything else to do until next week when Aquaman comes out. Go see it.
I am, in general, very skeptical of “give it a chance, it gets good later on” types of arguments for anything I had to spend $60 to get. For $60 you need to be fun in five minutes and you need to stay fun for however long your game ends up being, and I’d rather have a lean, entertaining 30-hour game than a 100-hour game filled with … well, filler.
I’m nonetheless very, very glad I stuck this one out– I just beat it half an hour or so ago, although I’ve left a number of the mop-up tasks for later. I may or may not get back to them.
But: forget the game for a moment. Spider-Man PS4 is one of the best Spider-Man stories I have ever encountered, in any medium. Comics, movies, whatever. And even that, as I said in the piece from earlier today, takes a good long time to get rolling. But once it does … wow. I was in tears during the final act. I’m not gonna bullshit around. I’m a grown-ass man and a video game just made me cry because the story was that good and they get this character that thoroughly. Fucking tears.
And then, the three movie-style stingers after the credits?
*kisses fingers*
Can’t wait for the sequel. And if they put the same people in charge of writing it, I’m not gonna have shit to say about the gameplay. Because with a story this good, I’ll chase fucking pigeons all day if I have to.
There’ll be a real post later, but for now, do not allow yourself to miss this, because amazing. Watch it in HD:
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