I’m just gonna list the characters and what I thought of them. Also it’s worth nothing that I didn’t make any decisions on this run because I knew SOME stuff already so I let my sister who loves this kinda shit make all the choices. We didn’t disagree on most things, except for one and I’ll note it.

Sam = DEAD. I failed the last DON’T MOVE which I think is utter bs because I didn’t move but she got fuckin’ gutted. I’m kinda okay because while I didn’t hate or dislike her character I think she was probably the most boring of the group. Plus it shows that her (along with Mike) got a big star power boost since you control them the most and they seem to make all the decisions. As per teen horror the ‘hero’ usually ends up being the most boring one.

Josh = DEAD.  He got his head crushed by Wendigo. Butterfly Effect says I missed something as Sam which would’ve saved him. Not sure what it was but I have a feeling it’s probably something you would’ve found had you completed all of The Twins clues. Tumblr for some weird reason has just straight up attached themselves to Josh because the fucking love woobies but you know what? I hated this character once it was revealed what he was. Yeah, the shit that happened to him was terrible and it’s really obvious he has mental issues that caused a lot of this...but that doesn’t excuse the lengths he went through to do this and the danger he put everyone in. He can’t be blamed for the wendigos but he can be blamed directly for almost every death. Chief among them being Emily and Matt’s potential deaths and also to an extent Chris’s potential death. That last one is super weird considering Chris along with Sam is the ONLY OTHER INNOCENT person as he did not participate in the prank. So yeah, I get that he’s got some shit going on but that’s not an excuse to wipe away any wrong doing. I will say however out of the cast Rami has one of the better (if not stereotypical) performances.

Chris = DEAD.  Ashley didn’t let him back in the house after The Wendigo was chasing him because he decided to shoot her in the second Saw game. This was the one choice I disagreed with my sister on but she was in control so she decided to ‘kill’ Ashley. It’s also worth noting that she also chose to kill Ashley in the FIRST Saw game, too. Basically my sister as hellbent on killing Ashley. Not because she hates her, but more so because at both turns she felt that Josh and Chris respectively were more useful to the survival effort (Josh knowing his way around the mountain, Chris having been better with a gun). This became a theme of her overthinking things but it made for a good story. Chris was probably my favorite character in the game only because he felt the most natural of the group. Nothing he ever did felt like it was a leap in logic or out of the ordinary (lookin at you, Mike) and straight up he was NOT down for most of the BS that happening. Shame he didn’t get to live tho...which brings me to....

Ashley = ALIVE. Ash made it to the end despite my sister’s best efforts. My thoughts on Ashley are kinda mixed. I ended up not liking her characters because I felt her reasons for letting Chris die were a bit thin--Sure, when faced with a life or death situation he could have (potentially) chose to save himself over you...but the reverse was that you willingly let him die when faces with a situation that you were ultimately safe in. People have been making the argument that she was ‘mentally broken’ at that point but I don’t buy it because the game goes out of it’s way to show that before and after that section she is pissed at Chris. Also the foreshadowing that she is a character that has the most options to ‘tell the turth’ or ‘lie’. She can lie to Matt about seeing Em and Mike before Chris’ death and she can also choose to lie to the group about Em’s bite. I think from the jump she was played up to be open to the interpretation that she’s not THAT above choosing whatever option keeps her the safest so yeah. Maybe had we chosen different we’d feel different about her but naaaaah. We were rooting for you, Ash.

Matt = DEAD. Got his face fuckin’ hooked by a Wendigo. I wish I could say more about him but since homie gets like NO shine of his own it’s hard to even give him a character other than being Emily's punching bag. Maybe on the return trip I’ll see how I could’ve saved him because The Butterfly Effect for him was confusing. It stated that he didn’t have the flare gun which would’ve saved him BUT Emily also has one that says SHE didn’t have the flare gun which would’ve saved her from the bite. The thing is I DID give him the flare gun and he immediately shot it off. I don’t know how I was supposed to save him either way which feels kind of cheap but I’ll live. He won’t tho. Also don’t blow me up with telling me HOW to save him, let me find out on my own.

Emily = ALIVE. She, despite the entire game wanting her to be dead, survived. I turned around on Emily hard. I knew she was a terrible character and most of the backlash from the internet braced me for what was going to be the bitchiest of queen bitches in game history but...I kinda liked her? I hated how she treated Matt but when shit got it’s realest Emily was about surviving hands-fucking-down. Kinda gross that I see a lot of people saying how they went out of their way to kill her at the first chance because I think that says more about them than it does her but she lived up to her trope of being a self serving asshole well enough. I wish there was a way to improve on her status with Matt tho because it seemed like damned if you do damned if you don’t. Matt tried to save her (twice) and in the end she still acts as if he ditched her in the mines when that wasn’t the case at all. I also don’t blame her for smacking the shit out of Ashley like most people do simply because if I just found out someone just almost got ME killed with no prove I’m pretty sure they’d catch some hands, too. I ended up liking her a lot because despite all of her faults when push came to shove (or slap) she rose to the occassion. Keep in mind while Mike and Sam do the brunt of the heavy lifting for the action portions of the game Emily is not too far behind them. She’s also the one that discovered what really happened to Hannah and Beth, she alerts the eventual rescue, (indirectly) leads The Stranger back to the group, and does so whole she is in distress. It’s hard to like Emily because of her personality but it’s equally hard to hate her just because of her personality. 

Jessica = DEAD. Everything I’ve read has told me that besides Matt she seems to be the hardest person to keep alive and I believe it because her death came after Mike was too slow to save her from The Bone Zone. This was another one that I kind of disagreed with my sister on because she made me take the slower routes, but I also did fail a QTE during it. Also it’s worth noting (not sure if it has an affect) that she and Mike weren’t on best of terms when she got got. They weren’t going to bone but instead just cuddle. Since she was around for such a short amount of time I also didn’t get to feel much attachment to her other than her fulfilling the “dumb blonde” stereotype. I will say though that having her pull back the curtain a bit and explain to Mike that she is super insecure was a nice touch to give her some sort of personality--but it came too little too late. Maybe if she had survived I would’ve seen more of it but I sort of doubt it. The game seemed pretty hellbent on making her the defacto victim no matter what.

Mike = ALIVE.  He made it all the way through by sheer star power alone it feels like because I failed a LOT of QTEs with him and felt like they put him in a LOT of situations where he should’ve died only to be saved at the last second. It’s obvious, just like with Sam, and that wanted him to be the male lead of the game because it seems almost all of the action set peices centered around him...and they were also the most boring parts of the game. This strength of this game laid on the character interactions and the mystery and all of his sections were mostly played solo and felt like a low rent Resident Evil which...eh. I wasn’t feeling it. That in turn wrapped up a lot of his character with these boring sequences and made him feel terribly flat--similar to how Sam felt flat. It’s sort of ironic that the two ‘stars’ are the least interesting of the group. I would’ve liked to see more of his goofy side that was hinted at with Jessica but I doubt had she even survived we’d see it. He just fit the ‘action bro’ archtype and never moved on.

And just because I feel like mentioning it.

Wolfie = DEAD. We didn’t barricade the door so The Wendigo got ‘em. Poor dog. 

I’d list The Stranger but I don’t think he was saveable either way because Chris’ DON’T MOVE was one of the ones I passed.

So there ya go. 

Also spoilers are over

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NOW

So this was totally a show. The premise of a horror/comedy anthology show in which characters can and will die at any time is a pretty interesting one. Throw on the ‘whodunit’ aspect on top and it gets even more interesting. 

So why did I find myself so bored? How did this manage to not grab me in and make me interested? This isn’t a hypothetical question--I actually know the answers but leading off with a question made this flow a bit better.

The thing is, I haven’t watched Glee nor have I every really watched any of the AHS shows, so this style of writing (which everyone I talked to already dubbed The Murphy Touch or something) is completely new to me and I’m already completely over it. I get that a big trope in horror movies is to make a character so unlikeable that you actually want to root for their death. I have absolutely no problem with that. Make me hate the character, make me loathe them, put them on a pedestal for the world to see as a shining beacon of what kind of person NOT to be. 

But don’t be so goddamn lazy about it. Five minutes into the show we already have your central character being the same old Mean Girl archtype this time sprinkled in with highkey racism (”I call her White Mammy because she’s pretty much my house slave.”) and then highkey homophobia like right away. It’s just so bland and such low hanging fruit to get to immediately go “This character is bad, I don’t like her” which again--I totally get that you are supposed to be making her utterly unlikeable. This is not the problem. It’s more the fact that her lines in which she drops racist buzzwords, homophobic shit, ableist shit. Basically all manner of shits were crafted by writers that you can just tell thought they were writing the most witty shit ever.

Like I can imagine someone sitting in a writer’s room going “HAHA! WHITE MAMMY! GET IT? CUZ SHE’S WHITE...AND A MAID! HAHA GOOD JOB ME” and it’s like...where did your mindset have to be in in the first place to think that this was gonna be award winning dialogue? I am to understand that the main man behind this show is an out gay man so of course I’m not going to come at him for being homophobic but it’s more like...bruh. This shit is just flat out lazy.

All of the writing felt lazy to the point where it did it’s base job of getting you the thinnest idea of what a character is supposed to be and that's it. Chanel #1 is a bitch so everything she said is deadpan snark with an air of ‘eugh’ on top, Gotcha. Cat from Victorious is...Cat from Victorious. The black women characters are all loud and over the top and ‘sassy’ (Although I will openly admit the biggest laugh I got was when the security guard said what we were all thinking at a certain scene). The deaf girl is a punchline. The lesbian is the overly butch ‘predatory lez’ stereotype...in which they actually name her Predatory Lez. The gay guy is 100% incapable of not being aroused by every man he sees and is joked up as another ‘predatory’ homosexual. 

I know it feels like I’m not talking about much of the show itself but that’s because while watching those two hours this was all I was hung up on. Any of the mystery of who the Red Devil is or the intrigue about what happened with the Bathtub Baby or even the little twist at the end was just lost on me because every time a character opened their mouth I could feel my eyes rolling.

Maybe it’s gonna get better. I dunno. I’m sorta trapped into watching it one way or another but man. I had high hopes for this style of a show and it’s really disappointing because this IS an interesting idea but the Cartman School of “Let’s put all of our time in energy into thinking of different witty racist/homophobic catchphrases to throw out” is just not appealing to me. Partially because similar to Cartman, I can guarantee that shit like “White Mammy” or whatever wonderfully ‘witty’ line they come up with is going to worm it’s way into the lexicon of people who watch this and be used as a punchline for ages.

Let's be real from the jump here. I don't much care for anime. It's not so much that I don't care for it as an art form or as a style or even a style of animation. It's just that there's so much of it now that it seems like the really good ones are just too few and far between. You'll hear a lot of me talking shit about anime if you've ever known me and a lot of it is mostly about just the general scene anime seems to attract. A lot of fans that are more interested in jokes about titties or oversexualizing little girls (who aren't really little girls so that somehow makes it okay but not really) and just in general being die-hard to the point where it actively puts me off.

That isn't to say that there isn't anime that I enjoy. I actually enjoy a good chunk of it. Maybe no so much serials or shows but quite a few of the long form movies and things of that nature. Usually my rule with anime is that it has to speak to me on SOME sort of level or really interest me right out of the gate in order for me to hold my attention. I'm willing to fully place that on the blame of me having not that great of an attention span when it comes to my entertainment but I'm going to sherk a bit of it on a lot of anime being so goddamned vanilla nowadays that it doesn't GIVE you much of a reason to stick around.

So why did I stick with this one?

Because it spoke to me on a level.

Ore Monogatari is about a guy who's freakishly large for his age who has trouble with girls mostly because his whole life he has been looked at as a giant by his male peers and a monster or freak by his female peers. No, this isn't going into some 'Nice Guy' rant here. It's just a fact of life that if you are one of those kids that hits puberty early or for whatever reason are just blessed with being a fucking giant then your life is gonna get pretty strange pretty fast once people start noticing.

Personally, I've been about 6 feet 8 inches tall since I was about 13 years old. Before that I've always been a 'big' kid. Even if I wasn't a large as I was I'd still be freakishly tall for my age and I have witnessed first hand the amount of male friends that I felt like they kept me around only because I was so much bigger than everyone else that I could deter any threat or help with any situation. I've also been on the receiving end of being seen as a freak of nature by both male and female friends. It's a fact. It's something I've grown up with and for a long time it was something I embraced. So immediately hearing this story I was already drawn to the fact that I see a lot (almost to an uncomfortable degree) of myself in the main character of Takeo.

I also see a lot of the same situations in his friendship with Makoto. Now admittedly when I first watched this I thought I hated Makoto because he seemed like the kind of doucher I had known as well. A guy who thinks he's too cool for school and such a hot shit and I was immediately put off by him.

Until I got about two episodes in and realized that despite the main character literally being me that Makoto straight up might be my favorite character in this thing. I hate to throw around the term of 'bro' but when I think of someone that's a total 'bro' I am thinking of Makoto.

Doesn't let rude girls talk shit about his friend? Check. Doesn't use said friend to his advantage? Check. Every bit as brave and outgoing as his friend despite being like 1/4th his size? Check. Even cool enough to straight up call his friend out when he is being a goddamned idiot? Like for real. This is a character I like.

I like a character in an anime. This is a goddamn travesty.

But that's what I felt when watching this. Sure, it still has the normal anime trapings of the episodes being kind of cookie cutter (pun) and sort of filler-y. I'm not totally down with the whole art style but out of all of the anime I've peeked into and looked at this has something that I felt was missing from things I tried to watch based on friends recommendations.

Heart.

I genuinely feel good watching this. I mean it makes me feel sort of depressed at the same time because I would've loved if someone was as interested in ME as Rinko is in Takeo but still I feel like everything about this show is coming from a good place. I don't have to roll my eyes at shoehorned in titty jokes. I don't have to fast forward through boring action scenes. I don't have to wait for what feels like the other shoe to drop. I don't have to feel like Rinko is about to hit some 11th hour twist where she turns out to be terrible. The girls on the show are actually written with a sense of personality and aren't just there to be ogled. Like...this feels like someone actually cared.

I realize this doesn't sound like much of a review. I dunno. I don't review anime.

Full disclosure; I have never been the biggest fan of Batman. I just sort of find Batman himself to be pretty dull and boring and usually a victim of bad writing and plot armor. A lot of the things people say they like about Batman tend to apply to the world of Gotham City and his Rogue's Gallery more so than himself and I find myself on that side of the fence so to speak. Batman, the character, is easily the most boring part of the entire franchise to me but the Arkham Games themselves have always stood up because they are just as much about all of the cool shit I like about Batman and for the most part Batman himself just takes a backseat.

However, with all of that being said I still really hope this is the last Arkham game because no matter how much I like how this world looks and the villains of Batman...I'm just dog tired of samey Batman adventure games and I'd rather see them go away forever rather than limp to a slow, embarrassing, and increase dull death. Which sadly, seems it started to feel like that as I hit the waning hours.

Well, I should rephrase that. Because I haven't actually beat the game yet...because I feel like I have no real interest to continue from where I am at mostly because out of all of the Arkham games to date this one feels the most focused on Batman as a character as I said 223 words ago I am not a fan of Batman's struggles. I simply don't care. So when you focus a large bulk of the game around Batman's increasingly dire mental and emotional state I kind of want to check out from the game narrative wise. It's a shallow path to take, but I just wanna sneak around a room and kill knock-out people in inventive and stealthy ways. I can take or leave Batman's guilt-ridden trip down memory lane or the distracting (in both good and bad) interactions with Joker. I'm not here for that.

This is strange, because it sounds like such a petty thing to fault the game for because obviously this is simply a love letter to any and all Batman fans and the one they’ve arguably been waiting forever for. You get your Batman drama, you get your sendoff of The Joker, you get Robin, Nightwing, and Oracle all in the same game. Catwoman, Two-Face, Hush, Azrael, Harley Quinn, Batgirl, etc etc. Like they hit all of the check boxes for what a Batman fan would love to have in what should be the final outing in the Arkhamverse.

And even with all of that, even with how tight the game plays at times, even with how great it looks, even with how good it all comes together at the seams...I simply don't really care as much this time around.

And that's on me. I admit that. It's just not what I'm looking for. This is a really good case of a good game with the wrong player.

However.

There's still shit in the game that even if I was a Batman fan I don't think I'd fuck with. Like I can play lip-service and excuse stuff because "I don't get it." and "I don't care." and so on and so on, but on a mechanical level there's just some stuff in this game that baffles me.

The Batmobile, for instance.

Who the fuck? Who sat down and decided that The Batmobile was the thing this franchise had been missing? I get that the last Arkham game got knocked for being a bit too by-the-numbers and they obviously needed to put in SOMETHING to keep it interesting but...

Why?

In game that had some of the best open-world traversal this side of Saints Row 4 why did you decide in the fourth installment that NOW you needed to bring in a car? When has being on the ground level of these games ever been an interesting thing? Never?

Never.

And then you couldn't even make the car control well enough to justify it. Its super floaty when in Battle Mode and when driving it's solid but never EVER feels 'right'. It never clicks. It never hits the point where you decide that traveling this way is a more optimal way of to get around the map than just grapple-gliding. It feels like such a thing that was shoved in for the sake of adding a new feature rather than a well thought out and complex addition.

I used the word complex because just from playing an hour of this game you can FEEL that they wanted the Batmobile to be a much more complex feature. How? Because you can bet your ass they can, will, and do find a way to crowbar it into any section they feel needs padding out. I lost count of how many times a mission's momentum is just stopped dead in its tracks by breaking everything by having you do an extended Batmobile segment. Be it a Batmobile puzzle, a tank fighting sequence, or just a flat out race. It feels so contrived and annoying that it ruins the natural flow of the game. When you introduce a new mechanic to a long standing franchise that mechanic should either make something that was difficult or cumbersome before better or immediately justify why it was included. This does neither.

Traversal was already good and only gets better in this outing, and not once was anyone ever clamoring for tank combat--because it didn't exist. Instead they created a reason for it to exist in The Arkham Knight's militia and then suddenly all of these brand new hook holes have been conveniently built in Gotham to accommodate whatever half ass pulley puzzle they decide to throw at you. It's not that I don't appreciate the attempt or that the Batmobile controls terribly (it does take some getting used to), it's more that I can't think of a reason to justify its existence and I don't think Rocksteady did either.

Instead they just opted to create a bunch of contrived situations in which you would be forced to use it. For instance The Riddler's quest line features mostly Batmobile required puzzles *on top* of the 200+ trophies littered throughout the world. Most of which require use of the Batmobile to get.

I just don't get it. I've never really cared for the Riddler Trophies to begin with but forcing them to be linked directly to what I feel is the weakest part of the game ensures that that is a quest line I am never going to see through to the end. Sorry Catwoman.

Batmobile aside, I still find myself liking a fair bit of this game when it isn't actively being...this game.

I think that made sense.

This game falls into the same realm South Park: The Stick of Truth falls into for me. I loved most, if not all of the gameplay in Stick of Truth but absolutely HATED the storyline, plot, characters, and just everything about it...because I fucking hate South Park. I found myself trying harder and harder to rationalize actually liking this game while actively disliking it. While I am not offended or outright disgusted by Batman's storyline in Arkham Knight I still feel like I am trying to rationalize liking how this game feels and plays versus my complete apathy towards the content itself. Maybe if this engine was in a different game or it featured characters I actually cared about I could get more out of it. And yes, despite not finishing the game yet I know who the Arkham Knight is. And no, I still don' care.

But as I said in the opening, I hope this is the last Arkham Game because I think I've had my fill and I'd love to be able play with these tools and see Rocksteady's skill when applied to something completely new.

Because you scrolled all the way to the bottom:

Batman is boring.

Batmobile is contrived and unneeded.

Gameplay is solid. Combat and Stealth are still fun.

Wish I cared about the story as much as the game wants me to.