I’ve been sitting on the The 100’s most recent episode “Thirteen” for a few days now, trying to wrap my head around what happened. And, well… I’m disappointed, to say the least. The 100has struggled with important issues in the past, such as racial representation, which it continues to struggle with today. However, while it hasn’t always done a good job with depictions of race and characters of color, it’s consistently done well with Clarke’s and Lexa’s plotline. The show has spent the past two seasons excelling at characterization, worldbuilding, and being an inclusive and friendly show for LGBTQ+ people, despite its often violent premise. At least, that was the case until last week.
I did not want to watch this episode. “No Way Out” really tested my tolerance for this show because everything bad happens in it. The Walking Dead has been struggling with its storytelling for quite some time. It’s clear that the writers are having trouble coming up with new and interesting conflicts, because they’ve resorted to rehashing older storylines. Except it’s somehow even worse than that—those storylines have lost all meaning and are damn near impossible to get invested in anymore. The Walking Dead has devolved into a pointless mess of plotlines that it’s not at all committed to keeping up with, and “No Way Out” illustrates that perfectly.
Well, it’s nearly that time again. The Walking Dead’s next season is almost upon us, and if it’s anything like the previous seasons, I will spend my time watching it hating Rick Grimes with every fiber of my being while simultaneously being invested in everyone else.
And not only is The Walking Dead starting back up again, its spinoff show Fear the Walking Dead is finally making its way to the small screen. I’m going to be honest here: right now I’m much more interested in the spinoff than the actual show.
I love The Walking Dead. Truly, I do, but dear God, if this season taught me anything, it’s that Rick is a horrible leader and I was right to hate him. At this point, I don’t know why anyone would ever like his character. There have been a few other characters I absolutely disliked—Lori and Shane come to mind—but the biggest difference between them and Rick is that Rick is the main character, which means he’s going to be on the show until it ends. He will never go away. He will never not be the leader. He will never stop taking away screen time from better characters.
It also hasn’t helped that despite all the other characters dealing with some really unfortunate deaths, one of which was unnecessarily brutal, the entire season finale, “Conquer”—which was an hour and a half long, instead of just an hour like all the other episodes—was mostly a Rick Grimes appreciation episode.
This season started off so happy. I was genuinely surprised by how happy it was. Then, in the midseason finale, The Walking Deadkilled off Beth, whom I loved, and another beloved character died this week as well. Even worse, “What Happened and What’s Going On” was yet another episode almost as emotionally draining as “The Grove”, made only more emotional by one of the characters hallucinating the two little girls from the “The Grove” as he slowly bled out and died.
This past semester I’ve been super busy—I’m a full-time student with two jobs and an internship—and since I don’t have time for much of anything anymore, I decided it was a good idea to start procrastinating what I need to get done by replaying Final Fantasy XIII. I never really went into a full review for the game, though I did talk about its sequel a while back. To recap what I’ve already said, FFXIII doesn’t have the best storytelling. The plot itself is fine and rather compelling, but it wasn’t told in the best way. Additionally, the game is very linear until Chapter 11—you are quite literally on a single path that you cannot deviate from for the first ten hours or so of gameplay, and you are also incapable of returning to earlier parts of that path once you’ve moved on—which a lot of people didn’t like, including me.
However, one thing that I really think this game excelled at, and which helps me forgive a lot of its shortcomings, is the character development. There are still problems in this regard—I like Lightning, but she’s still just a carbon-copy of Cloud from FFVII—but for the most part, I really enjoyed the characterization here. One character that I was particularly pleased with is Hope.
Several Teen Wolf actors let hints drop on Twitter before “Insatiable” aired that there would be a major character death this episode, and they weren’t kidding. Let’s see if I can make it through a recap without ragequitting and then I’ll tell you how bogus and stupid said character death was.
It’s been a week and a half since the midseason finale of Once Upon a Time’s Season 3, which means I’ve had plenty of time to sit around and figure out what I thought of it. In general, I think it’s moving in a good direction, but I still have some complaints. Specificity (and therefore spoilers) after the jump.
Recently, at Comic-Con, the new Walking Dead trailer premiered.
I have to admit that I had a bit of a falling out with The Walking Dead last season. I had started reviewing it weekly, but the season finale I especially couldn’t take, and in order to not think about it, I didn’t review it. I’m hesitant about season four because of how poorly I felt the last season was handled.
It took all of one sentence from Carol for Daryl to get over his brother’s death. Carl’s practically on his way to becoming evil. Andrea’s relationship with the Governor was one of the most annoying things I have ever watched, and she couldn’t figure out he was evil, despite all the signs, like having a room filled with severed heads. Then, after realizing the truth, she gets bitten. Additionally, the final showdown between the Governor and the Atlanta Survivors didn’t really happen, despite the huge buildup toward it. All in all, it left me extremely underwhelmed.
I’m willing to put my grievances aside for this upcoming season, however. The finale ended with the Governor going off somewhere and the Atlanta Survivors taking in the remaining citizens of Woodbury, which means we’re going to have a lot more characters this time around, which might be a good thing, because the original survivors aren’t doing so well at the moment.
Furthermore, we’re going to be introduced to some more characters of color. We already have Glenn, a Korean, who gets a lot of screen time, T-Dog sadly died, but now we have Tyrese and his sister Sasha, and we look to be getting a few more.
Michonne so far has been a really great character as well, and other than Beth, I don’t have too many complaints about female representation. One of the problems with the representation, both female and POC, however, is that since this is Rick’s story, all the other characters seem to eventually die. Glenn’s dead in the comics, currently, and so is baby Judith. The show and the comics are fairly different—Shane dies at the end of the first volume, but the show sadly kept him around until the end of season 2, and Daryl’s a completely original character—but the show still seems intent on killing off most of the cast.
Speaking of which, I get the impression from this new trailer that Sasha is one of the murder victims, since Tyrese seems to have a severe reaction to finding one of the bodies, and then he goes on to seem almost suicidal in grief. That’s my prediction, at least.
Overall, everything seems to be becoming more desperate for the survivors. Someone’s sabotaging their efforts to stay safe by baiting the walkers to the prison, and group looks to be finally splitting apart this time. I personally really like Carol and Daryl together, so if they do split apart into two groups, I’ll be sad to see it. All in all, I hope this season will learn from the mistakes of the last season.
Final Fantasy VII is considered by many to be a classic, and though some of the previous installments had varying degrees of success, VII has the honor of being theFinal Fantasy game that made Final Fantasy popular in America. It came out all the way back in 1997 and was the first in the franchise to utilize polygon graphics and to be developed for the PlayStation. Furthermore, it was also the first game of the series to be ported to Windows. At the time of its release, it had some of the best graphics ever seen in a video game.
Though they suck by today’s standards.
This was also the first Final Fantasy game to take place in a more modernized setting. On the whole, it was the first Final Fantasy to do a lot of new things. This game was pretty groundbreaking, and has thus far been one of the most successful games ever. Certainly, VII has a lot going for it. Not only was it different in terms of technology, it also features a lot of well-written characters and a good story. That’s not to say that there aren’t any problems in the game. There are problems all over the place.
The biggest issue I noticed right away is how this game was edited. Everything involved with it is a graphic designer’s nightmare. And I don’t just mean the game. Everything from the box to the strategy guide has problems. The translations are terrible, and they mar what could otherwise have been a great story. It’s not a good sign when even the game box has noticeable, easily fixable mistakes. I cannot actually take a picture of my game box for you guys, because the text would be too small to read, so I recreated the image instead.
Well, I will agree that that is a very creative way to spell “masterpiece” and I’ve never seen it done that way before.
I’ve been sitting on the The 100’s most recent episode “Thirteen” for a few days now, trying to wrap my head around what happened. And, well… I’m disappointed, to say the least. The 100 has struggled with important issues in the past, such as racial representation, which it continues to struggle with today. However, while it hasn’t always done a good job with depictions of race and characters of color, it’s consistently done well with Clarke’s and Lexa’s plotline. The show has spent the past two seasons excelling at characterization, worldbuilding, and being an inclusive and friendly show for LGBTQ+ people, despite its often violent premise. At least, that was the case until last week.
Lady Geek Girl and Friends 