The sunny mornings are back again, which is a welcomed change after a very lousy winter that only gave darkness but no proper winter in Helsinki. The street dust is now replaced with birch pollen, but that is a minor nuisance that can be handled with medication.
Anime viewing continues
The anime-movie screenings at WHS Union continued with Space Adventure Cobra: The Movie. I didn’t know anything about this either (just shows how limited my Japanese pop-culture knowledge really is), but it was another fascinating animation relic. I remembered afterwards I saw once a DVD box of the original tv-series in my local library, so I reserved it to watch more of Cobra’s adventures.
All these anime movies at WHS Union made me remember an old anime tv-series named Serial Experiments: Lain. I saw it over twenty years ago and I had a vague memory of it being unique, so I wanted to watch it again.
Since I couldn’t find it on any streaming services and didn’t want to bother watching an English dubbed version of it one YouTube (sometimes I wonder why some obvious stuff doesn’t get taken down on the platform), I simply bought a quite expensive blu-ray copy of it (I can always sell it to get back some of the money).
After watching all thirteen episodes, I can say it is still stylistically haunting, but the plot was so muddled that no wonder I didn’t remember anything about it. Historically it was interesting to see how the emerging rise of the internet was seen back them and I smiled when a hardware problem was solved by moving jumpers on a motherboard. The popularity of X-files conspiracy themes was also present, something that hasn’t aged well here, though.
I must mention that the blu-ray version surprised me with its high image quality, which came more apparent in some later episodes where the source material didn’t allow the same kind of restoration work by having scenes that dropped to much more lower quality. It did hamper the immersion at times.
Long-term game campaign finished
After 228 hours and well over a year ago when I originally started playing it, I can finally declare I have completed Tactics Ogre: Reborn. This was a long campaign that has multiple endings and I think I got the worst. While the game now gives the option to rewind to certain key anchor points to play out the other paths in the story, I will take a break now.
Pixel characters beating each other up. Fun times.
Overall it was a good turn-based tactical game, with a surprising amount of depth in the combat mechanics considering this is a game originally from the 90s. The story on the other hand was too complex for me to really care about, especially when I took many long breaks in between.
One of many hard decision making moments that determine the final outcome of the long campaign.
Lost in space
Now I’ve moved on to No Man’s Sky, which hasn’t really convinced me yet (I’m trying it for multiplayer reasons). Yes, there is a very addictive playback loop of mining, trading and upgrading, but the background story feels very much slapped on to the game and isn’t executed in a manner that would interest me.
While the game looks fine, the amount of graphical glitches is actually quite astonishing considering the game has been active for eight years of so. Or maybe because of it?
Anyways, I recently got killed in survival mode, lost all my possessions and my equipment left broken, so I wonder will I bother grinding myself to get back to the point before that unfortunate event. My dopamine craving brain says yes, my reasoning says no.
Across the universe in No Man’s Sky.