Xenoblade

To vistas.

    Various publications have called Xenoblade Chronicles “a landmark achievement,” “a towering triumph,” and “the best RPG [of] this generation.”  One review raved that “everything it does dramatically improves and innovates the RPG genre.”  People like it, and while I certainly enjoyed my time with the game I don’t think it’s quite worthy of evangelization.  It’s towering, all right: huge and complex and epic in a way that’s downright Biblical, but its ambition occasionally gets in the way of its playability.  It takes the Japanese RPG down some new roads, but not all of those roads are worth traveling.  And it may well be the best JRPG of this generation, but considering the competition is that really much of an accomplishment?  It’s a big, bold, beautiful game with a lot to admire, but the second coming of the JRPG juggernaut it is not.  But if we’re lucky, it’s a herald of better days ahead.

Tall Tale

    Xenoblade Chronicles was directed by Tetsuya Takahashi, a JRPG veteran who worked on classics like Chrono Trigger before helming original games like Xenogears and Xenosaga.  Xenoblade is not a sequel to those games any more than the latest Final Fantasy is a sequel to the one before it, but they share a breadth of creative vision that is undeniably interesting.  The narrative idea at the core of Xenoblade is sort of brilliant: a long time ago there were two titans, the Bionis and the Mechonis, who fought against each other in an epic battle.  In the millennia since their fight, civilizations have sprung up to live on their corpses.  The Bionis has cities on its head, marshes on its thigh, and jungles on its chest.  It’s an intoxicating notion and a pretty effective expression of the well-worn idea that the world is a living thing.

    The level designers take this idea and make the most of it.  An early area located just above the Bionis’ knee shows off what they have in store: it’s a vast plain complete with swooping valleys, craggy mountainsides, intricate cave systems, and more, all of it seamlessly connected with zero loading times.  Monsters, not all of them hostile, dot the landscape, and in the distance there is always the Mechonis rising menacingly above the horizon.  Add in weather effects, a day-night cycle, haunting music, and a draw distance that has to be seen to be believed, and the world of Xenoblade approaches something like beauty.

    I just wish the game gave players more reasons to explore its painstakingly detailed geography.  Those who take it upon themselves to traipse off the beaten path are rewarded with crystals, implements that can be used to upgrade equipment by way of a mind-numbingly dull mini-game so boring I actually resisted exploration for fear that I would eventually have to engage in it.  Players can also take advantage of the game’s quest system by talking to certain NPCs (conveniently marked with exclamation points hovering over their heads) who will send them off on a variety of undercooked, uninvolving errands that feel more like taking out the Sunday trash than embarking on a grand adventure.  In the end, the best reason to explore the game’s environments is to see what beautiful sight the developers have queued up next.  That’s a great compliment to the art team, but it leaves the game world feeling strangely sterile despite all the love that clearly went into building it.

    Luckily, the central story is strong enough so that players can more or less afford to ignore the piteous extras.  The main characters fall into recognizable types familiar to anyone who’s ever played an RPG.  There’s Shulk, the fair-faced, soft-spoken hero.  His friend Reyn is the boorish tank.  There’s also a couple of ingénues, a taciturn swordsman, and a roly-poly, two-foot tall woodland critter who would be outlandish in any other game but who fits into a distinct JRPG mold as old as the genre itself.  The group doesn’t break any new ground, but they’re still a likable lot drawn with just enough specificity to set them apart from their long line of forebears.  They’re also well-acted by a cast of mostly British actors, and after spending upwards of sixty hours with them I admit I grew attached.

    The story itself isn’t half bad, either.  For as long as Shulk has been alive, his home on Bionis has been under periodic attack by the Mechon, malevolent robots from Mechonis.  After a particularly brutal assault on his home town, he sets out on a quest for revenge that slowly builds into something bigger.  The tale is well-paced, with few cut-scenes lasting longer than a couple of minutes and a healthy stock of interesting ancillary characters.  There are a few baffling twists along the way (what JRPG would be complete without them?), but the story rights itself by the home stretch and barrels ahead to a satisfying, if safe, conclusion.

Turn-Based Battles and Other Dirty Words

    Takahashi, whose Xenosaga titles often felt like a sci-fi miniseries occasionally interrupted by gameplay, shows admirable restraint in cutting down on the number of obtrusive cut-scenes.  For the first time in his solo career, the emphasis is on the part of the game you actually play, so it’s unfortunate that the best I can say about Xenoblade’s gameplay is that it could have been a lot worse.  In another much-lauded move, Xenoblade’s combat unfolds in real time.  First, players approach monsters in the field.  Before beginning a battle, they choose one party member to control while the game’s AI takes over for the others.  When not auto-attacking, each character can choose from their own list of special skills, each of which have their own effects, cool-down times, and tricks to using properly.  The battle system is fast-paced, clean, reasonably deep, and I kind of hate it.

    Look, I don’t know exactly when the RPG developers of the world got together and banished turn-based battles to the deep dark pit currently occupied by save points and auto-aim, but this shit has got to stop.  The Xenoblade team actually does a lot to make their real-time fights more involving.  Some moves work best when deployed from a certain angle, periodic glimpses into the future allow you to stop particularly deadly assaults before they happen, and chain attacks allow players to string together complimentary techniques from different party members.  But even with these updates the combat too often feels rote, like playing an MMORPG without all the social interaction that make MMORPGs worth playing.  There may come a day when some enterprising developer effectively marries the kinetic satisfaction of real-time combat to the mental massage provided by turn-based battles, but today is not that day.  Today is just Friday.

    Outside of combat, the menu-based character building is satisfyingly rich, perhaps too much so.  There’s a lot to do.  AP earned in battle lets you update techniques, passive skills are learned and even shared over time, and a relationship system affects how well characters work together in battle.  Generally, the game introduces these and other factors gradually enough so as not to overwhelm the player.  The exception is the inventory management system, which is simply too dense to be any fun.  Each character can be outfitted with a weapon, armor, leggings, helmet, shoes, and armguards.  Each of these can then be bedazzled with a limited number of attribute-enhancing gems (the product of our mind-numbingly dull crystal mini-game from before), which can then be rearranged to achieve different effects.  The end result of all this complexity is that whenever I saw a new shop, I cried a little.  Equipping your party takes a depressingly large amount of time, and while I grant that many less obsessive players may not have a problem with this, I think the better solution would have just been to simply the process.  Who wears armguards, anyway?

    As tedious as parts of the Xenoblade gameplay experience could be, I appreciate that they came mostly from a desire to overachieve.  So the battle system never quite takes off into the stratosphere.  It gets the job done and it introduces new ideas that can be expanded upon in future titles.  So the story never quite lives up to the potency of that initial image.  It’s still a good yarn told with breathless earnestness in classic JRPG fashion.  So it doesn’t reinvent the JRPG.  Who said it needed reinventing?  All the genre needs is games of vision and caliber, and despite its shortcomings Xenoblade possesses these two things in earnest.

The Avengers

Two men in Halloween costumes fight to save the world.

The Avengers is, among other things, one of most audacious marketing ploys Hollywood has ever conceived.  Sure, it’s a summer blockbuster at heart, complete with an enormous budget and a smorgasbord of special effects designed specifically to melt the eyes out of your head, but it’s more than that.  It’s a direct continuation of no less than three entirely discrete big-budget super-heroic action movies, and in making it Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Pictures have demonstrated a commitment to bigness seldom seen even in an industry as overblown as the movies.

Thinking about it, something like The Avengers was bound to happen sooner or later.  Comic books about superheroes are known for taking place in complicated, densely interconnected universes, so it makes sense that the movies based on them would eventually start to link together.  You don’t need to have seen the movies leading up to The Avengers to enjoy it, but a bit of context helps.  The plot revolves around the Tesseract, a mysterious alien cube of great power that was last seen plunging to the bottom of the ocean in Captain America: The First Avenger.  The Tesseract is currently being studied by S.H.I.E.L.D., a clandestine espionage agency headed by veteran spy Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson).  When it’s stolen by demi-god Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who himself was last seen plummeting through a dimensional worm-hole at the end of Thor, Fury enlists the help of super-spy Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) in rounding up a crew of heroes capable of getting it back.  That group includes the brilliant but abrasive Iron Man (Robert Downy Jr.), recently revived World War II legend Captain America (Chris Evans), and Bruce Banner, aka The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo).

Thor (Chris Hemsworth), god of thunder and Loki’s brother, eventually joins the team as well.  It’s a big cast, and each of them brings along their own unique star power and iconographic baggage.  To manage it, the producers tapped writer-director Joss Whedon, a man known mostly for the creation of television series like Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  It was a smart hire.  Whedon has plenty of experience directing super-powered ensembles, and his script takes the story seriously enough so that we can get invested but not so seriously that the going gets dreary.  Laughs are plentiful, and they go a long way toward helping viewers settle into the premise.

Whedon also does a good job of pacing the movie such that almost everyone is given a chance to shine.  As the smug, cynical Iron Man, Downy Jr. gets the lion’s share of the crowd-pleasing lines along with the movie’s most moving heroic moment.  Evans’ Captain America provides an effectively earnest foil.  Chris Hemsworth’s Thor adds conviction and weight to the central plotline, and Tom Hiddelston has a blast smirking and sniveling his way through his role as the villain.  Even Johansson’s Black Widow, who has no superpowers, feels like she matters.  She has an especially great scene with Loki where she tries to fake him out into revealing some incriminating information.

Everyone, in short, is sure to have their favorite, and for me the Hulk nearly runs away with the show.  Ruffalo is the third actor to play the role in recent years, and he brings a wry, smirking self-pity to it that somehow never becomes grating.  The lone dud of the group is Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), an expert marksman whose role is so slight it almost feels like he doesn’t need to be there at all.  That hiccup aside, each member is well-developed enough so that we don’t want them to die once they arrive at the inevitable special effects-laden battle toward the end of the third act.

As spectacular as that battle is, and much credit is due to the effects team for some imaginative and technically immaculate work, its inevitability does take away slightly from the overall effect.  For all of its meticulous craft, for all the jokes and the bombast and the carefully choreographed characterization, The Avengers is occasionally too busy being an action blockbuster to dive as deeply into the characters as I wanted.  That’s part of the plan, of course.  If the movie holds things back, it’s so they can be better explored in the series of spider-webbing sequels.  The Avengers is a great time at the movies, but it’s also a link in a chain so wide I don’t think even Marvel knows where it ends.  With The Avengers, Marvel has committed not only to a franchise but to a network of franchises, and if the quality remains this high it’s a network in which I’m glad to be caught.

Chasing Ghosts

    Imagine that you’re in the back of a dimly lit bar in rural North Carolina.  You’re talking to a bespectacled, heavy-set gentleman, slow of eye and soft of speech, who’s pouring out his life’s woes to you between slurps of amber draft.  He tells you that he has no job, that he lives alone, and that he is not on speaking terms with his best friend, not since the two had a blistering fight over twenty years ago.  “What did you two fight about?” you ask.  And the man says that the friend beat his high score in Berserk.

    Do you laugh at this man?  He did, after all, just say something ridiculous.  Or do you sympathize with him, unable to mock a guy for whom this is clearly a very, very serious business?  If you ever happen to catch a 2007 documentary called Chasing Ghosts, and I think anyone with a subscription to Netflix and even a passing interest in video games should, you’ll get to make your own decision.  The man’s name is Joel West, and he’s one of a group of guys who back in the grand old 80s considered themselves to be the greatest video game players in the world.

    Of course, this was in the days when video games were confined mainly to arcade machines like Pac Man and Asteroids.  The title of Greatest Video Game Player in the World means something very different today, but just try telling these guys that.  Watching this movie, I caught myself absentmindedly gaping more than a few times after one of the now middle-aged arcade heroes reflected on their gaming pasts.  Consider our Berserk player from above, who at one point looks into the camera and says without a trace of irony that “there are days when you and the game become one.”  Or take Roy Scildt, a Missile Command prodigy, who talks down to his colleagues for playing “pansy-ass” games like Pac Man rather than “macho” ones like Missile Command.  The movie’s best running joke, or maybe it isn’t a joke, is that these guys take what looks from a distance to be a trifling hobby deadly seriously.  They talk about their high scores in Donkey Kong as though they’re Olympic gold medals.  Half the time I wasn’t sure whether to double over laughing or burst into tears.

    And yet, there are times when the movie inspires genuine wistfulness.  Director Lincoln Ruchti structures his documentary around a 1982 gathering of these gamers in Ottumwa, Iowa, the self-proclaimed video game capitol of world.  They were meeting to compete against each other in the pursuit of all-time high scores at the Twin Galaxies Arcade, and the strange thing is that some people actually took notice.  Life Magazine profiled the event as representative of the age, local cheerleaders became gaming “groupies,” and a few of the best players got the chance to compete against each other on national television.

    But of course it couldn’t last.  Arcades started to empty as home consoles came to the fore, and most of these kids seemed unwilling to make the switch.  In another of those tragi-comic moments, one gamer criticizes Street Fighter 2 for being too ostentatious and lacking the character of simpler games like Millipede.  Some of the guys grew up to be the kind of navel-gazing, basement-dwelling stereotypes modern gamers have been trying to escape for decades, but most of them moved on, got jobs, and started families.  What they have mostly in common is that they all look back on their days as gaming superstars as some of the happiest of their lives, and after a while I admit their nostalgia proved catching.

    So how are we supposed to react to these guys?  Laugh or cry?  Viewers could be forgiven for doing the former.  We’re talking about men who freely admit to playing Galaga for 48 hours straight and then smiling smugly as if they’d just won a Nobel Prize.  But there are too many moments of real vulnerability to take the entire thing as a joke.  Battlezone specialist Sam Blackburn has a particularly open moment, admitting that he took to video games after braking up with his girlfriend, killing time by moving flashing dots across an arcade screen when he wanted to be spending it with someone special.  The role of video games in society has evolved so much over the past thirty years.  They’re in our homes, they’re shared with our family and friends, and to play them, even to play them a lot, is considered an ordinary hobby rather than a strange handicap.  But I wonder if there aren’t some gamers who still feel a bit of a sting when they tell someone they love video games and get a flustered look in return.  Maybe the guys profiled in Chasing Ghosts are pioneers, digital frontiersmen who legitimized gaming for future generations.

    Or maybe they’re hopeless nerds.  Watch the movie and decide for yourself.

The Cabin in the Woods

    When Wes Craven’s Scream was released in 1996, it was hailed as a unique take on the horror genre.  The plot was standard issue slasher flick.  There was a killer.  There were victims, most of them young, many of them girls.  There was an attractive cast of teenagers destined to either solve the mystery or die trying.  But unlike so many teenagers in so many horror movies before it, these kids knew they were in a horror movie and tried to use the rules of the genre to their advantage.  That gave the movie a satirical edge, but as layered as Scream became it never broke those rules, even if it had some fun bending them.

    Not so with The Cabin in the Woods, a new movie co-written by geek god Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, Whedon’s longtime collaborator and the film’s director.  If Scream attempted to deconstruct the horror genre, The Cabin in the Woods rips it open stem to stern, stuffs it full of dynamite, lights a match and lets the chunks fall where they may.  It starts, as these flicks so often do, with a group of photogenic college students: there’s good girl Dana (Kristin Conneley), bad girl Jules (Anna Hutchison), alpha jock Curt (Chris Hemsworth, lately of Thor), beta jock Holden (Jesse Williams), and affable stoner Marty (Fran Kranz).  As this quintet sets off for a weekend at the titular cabin in the woods, we can already tell that the script is more carefully written than we might have expected.  It would have been easy to write these characters off as stereotypes, but the writers actually give them personalities and at least a few clever lines apiece.  As a longtime Whedon devotee, I enjoyed hearing his brainy brand of banter battered across the big screen.

    But it soon becomes clear that the film has other things on its mind.  For even before the kids set out on their vacation, the audience has been privy to the pithy discussions of two office drones (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford), bored salary slaves who work in some vast underground complex teeming with employees all seemingly bent on monitoring the every move of our protagonists.  Much of the fun in these early stretches comes from slowly uncovering the details concerning just what these two layers have to do with each other.  Unpredictability, it turns out, is one of the film’s strongest assets.

    For reasons I’ll leave you to discover for yourself, it ends up that the underground office exists to manipulate our heroes into acting out a typical American horror movie, and Whedon and Goddard spend the film’s middle sections poking fun at familiar horror staples.  Characters who are otherwise well-rounded individuals find themselves devolving into genre stereotypes, amalgamated redneck zombies rise from the earth to splatter our group’s guts across the forest floor, and the heroes inexplicably want to split up (to cover more ground, of course) even when it’s painfully clear they should stick together.   At this point, I became a little concerned that the movie would be satisfied to just point and laugh at the absurdity of the horror genre, but it’s in the third act, when the movie’s two worlds collide, that things get really interesting.  To spoil what happens would do you a disservice, but rest assured that the film’s final third is very dynamic, very imaginative, and a lot of fun to watch.

    The final act also takes a bit of a left turn into profundity that comes off as a touch insincere.  The script goes beyond satire into something approaching philosophy, openly pontificating about the nature of horror movies, why people continue to see them, and why society may need them.  The Cabin in the Woods is practically made out of right angles so the shift isn’t as jarring as it might have been in a different film, but some of the diatribe still made me want to roll my eyes.

    The movie, perhaps inevitably, is unable to find a consistent tone.  Parts of it play like a straight-up zombie flick, parts like an office sitcom, one chunk like a special effects bonanza and one part, at once the most interesting and tiresome part, like a sociological dissertation.  At a lean 95 minutes, The Cabin in the Woods is probably too short for all of these segments to be fully realized and joined into a cohesive whole, but if it went on any longer I fear it would lose its frenzied, sharp-turn-over-a-deep-drop spirit.  It’s too bold a movie to be perfect, but it’s a lot of giddy fun and should especially please those who take their humor with a heavy dose of irony.

The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games is an adaptation of the first of three novels in a series of science fiction books. I have not read the books, but I do know that, like Harry Potter and Twilight before them, they are feverishly popular among young readers. And for a movie created with the express intent of suckering those readers out of billions of dollars worth of their parent’s money, The Hunger Games isn’t half-bad. Which isn’t to say that it’s great. The script presents us with some interesting ideas but doesn’t really engage them, the conclusion is foregone long before the last reel starts to run, and there’s a general sense that some particulars got lost in the transition from page to screen. Still, the movie is a deftly directly, well-acted popcorn flick that bodes well for the future.

The world of The Hunger Games, like so many sci-fi worlds before it, is a bleak one. Our heroine, Katmiss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), lives in District 12, an impoverished, powerless satellite state ruled over with an iron fist from the glitteringly wealthy Capitol City. Every year, each of the twelve Districts must offer up one girl and one boy to participate in the Hunger Games, a televised battle to the death organized by the Capitol to remind the outlying Districts just who’s ruling and who’s being ruled. For a movie aimed mainly at the 12-16 crowd, the whole concept strikes me as pretty ballsy, and the movie shows some follow-through by pushing the edges of its PG-13 rating. Even though director Gary Ross leaves the gorier details to our imaginations, this is still a movie where teenagers get stabbed, sliced, and shot to death.

With an interesting premise and the conviction to see it through, The Hunger Games seems poised to turn into something special, and at times it almost does. In a plea to save her little sister from participation, Katmiss volunteers to represent District 12 in this year’s Hunger Games (the 74th annual, for those counting). She and fellow District 12 denizen Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) are whisked away to the Capitol where they’re told that winning the Hunger Games isn’t just about survival of the fittest; you also have to be liked by the viewing public. The period leading up to the games takes up a surprisingly large chuck of time, and it’s there that the movie is at its best. There are all kinds of parallels, whether intentional or not, drawn between this society and our own. The Hunger Games as a monstrous outgrowth of reality television, the cruel, dandified Capitol dwellers as representative of today’s upper class, and so on. When the actual Hunger Games started up, I found myself wanting to know more about what was happening behind the scenes, more about the public’s reaction, and more about the reasons why this ritual had lasted so long in the first place.

Part of the problem is that we know next to nothing about most of the contestants. We know Katmiss. She’s level-headed, good with a bow, and tough under pressure. Jennifer Lawrence gives a consistent, likable performance that goes a long way toward keeping the movie grounded; that the Hunger Games segments of The Hunger Games are compelling at all is due mostly to her. Peeta gets some screen time but never makes much of an impact; he’s the kind of blandly handsome, non-threatening male lead sure to enrapture tween girls but who doesn’t really stand out to the rest of us. And the rest are a wash. A couple of the contestants are sadistic jackasses, and to say that they die unpleasantly after doing less harm than you might expect should come as no surprise. Mostly the combatants just die off namelessly one by one by one. This comparison has been made before, but it really is borne out: the back half of The Hunger Games plays out like a less exciting version of the Japanese action flick Battle Royale.

In the movie’s defense, I suspect that fans of the book will enjoy these parts more than I did. There are a number of bit players, such as Hunger Games producer Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley) and State stylist Cinna (Lenny Kravitz, for some reason) who felt a bit extraneous from the main action but who I figured had deeper and denser roles in the book. The scope of the movie is quite vast, and it stands to reason that some subtleties got lost in translation. Also, there’s the probability that many members of this gang will get greater development come the sequels, the prospect of which I’m sure has already set Hollywood producers to drooling. I say let them have their fun. The world of The Hunger Games is probably interesting enough to be worth a second visit, and if the filmmakers augment their able workmanship with a touch more daring the trip could be something special indeed.

21 Jump Street

21 Jump Street is a really good movie I had no idea I wanted to see. And I don’t think you could really blame me, either. The movie is an adaptation of a television series from the late 1980s about a couple of mismatched rookie cops who go undercover as high school students in an effort to fight teenage crime. I hear something like that and alarm bells go off. Buddy cop flicks and high school comedies are among the more well-worn and predictable genres knocking around movie theaters today, and the prospect of mashing them together didn’t sound terribly appealing. I think the makers of 21 Jump Street realized this, because their movie makes merry and merciless fun of its many influences in addition to providing a steady stream of inventive gags and adding just enough heart to keep the whole experience from feeling pointless. I get the idea that everyone involved in the movie had a blast making it, and that enthusiasm can’t help but rub off on audiences.

Any discussion of the movie’s many strong points has to start with its playful screenplay, which was written by Scott Pilgrim vs. the World scribe Michael Bacall. The film quickly makes clear that it will not be taking itself or its origins seriously. There’s an early scene where Police Captain Dickson (Ice Cube) decries the media’s attempts to repackage old entertainment and pass it off as new in the hopes to make a quick buck. The moment is played completely straight, as it has to be, and it works. Bacall also has fun toying with the templates of high school comedies past. The two undercover cops at the center of the story, smart but shy Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and dim-witted man of action Jenko (Channing Tatum), are both in their mid-20s and completely flummoxed by how much the high school social scene has changed since they’ve been away. The popular kids are no longer the coasting jocks but are instead the environmentally conscious, Berkeley-bound hipsters. Schmidt’s love interest isn’t a bombshell cheerleader but an earthy, sweetly funny theater-geek. The movie keeps throwing out little curveballs like this all the way up to the closing credits, and it’s a lot better for it.

Bacall places much of the comedy on the shoulders of his stars, and they’re more than up to the task. At this point in his career, Jonah Hill has the endearingly insecure guy-next-door thing down to a science. He’s awkwardly affecting in early scenes that show his geeky high school past and wryly self-effacing for the rest. But the real surprise here is Tatum, who up to now has been known mainly as an action star or That Handsome Guy in sickly sweet melodramas like The Vow. With this movie he shows a real talent for deadpan comedy. Better still, the leads don’t hog all to the laughs to themselves. Like last year’s Bridesmaids, 21 Jump Street makes a point to fill out the minor roles with a host of comedy veterans and, what’s more impressive, to actually give them things to do. Saturday Night Live’s Chris Parnell gets a few laughs as the spaced-out head of the school’s theater program, The Office’s Ellie Kemper amuses as a lusty science teacher, and so on. I think this inclusiveness is one of the reasons the movie feels so damn cheerful so much of the time. Even after the twentieth-odd dick joke, even as a character lay bleeding on the ground with a hole shot through his throat, the whole thing seemed so good-natured that I couldn’t help but like it.

Although the hole through the throat bit was pushing it. The one element of 21 Jump Street that doesn’t work quite as well as the rest of it are the action scenes, which for the most part feel too much like standard car chase n’ shootout fare to make much of an impact. Although at one point there is a killer gag involving an overturned tank trunk that stubbornly refuses to explode. There are also a couple of scenes, like the throat shot one, that feel a shade too violent for a movie that’s normally so easy-going. I like that the movie was willing to go there, but for me those scenes skirted too close to the line between so-sick-it’s-funny and just kinda sick.

But hey, at least the movie’s not afraid to earn its R rating. And the bulk of it is so fresh, so free-wheeling and warmly funny, that it might force me to revise my opinion of all television from the 80s. If this movie is a sign of things to come, why not go ahead and make a Magnum P.I. adaptation? Revive Doogie Howser. Call Chris Rock and get cracking on a Cosby Show flick. Good on the producers of 21 Jump Street for taking a movie people probably didn’t expect much from and turning it into something worth seeing.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

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The Legend of Zelda is a big deal. The first entry in the series came out in 1986 and represented one of the industry’s first attempts to make a game which focused on adventure over action. Nintendo spent several years refining that formula before coming out with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 1998. That game was one of the first to effectively implement combat in a 3D space and featured one of the richest, most fully realized game worlds of the time. The series has spawned a swath of imitators, made a ton of money, and is partly responsible for Nintendo’s venerability as a developer. It’s a big deal.

At the same time, The Legend of Zelda is a chore. The last few games in the series, 2002’s Wind Waker and 2006’s Twilight Princess among them, have switched up the aesthetics but kept the core gameplay more or less unchanged. Add in 2007’s Phantom Hourglass and 2009’s Spirit Tracks, and the Legend of Zelda seems in danger of stagnating.

So comes Skyward Sword, a game which has the unenviable task of paving a new path for the series while remaining faithful enough to its past to please long-time fans. It’s a fine, fine line, and while I don’t think the game always walks it successfully, Skyward Sword is still a full, lengthy adventure with a lot to offer and enjoy.

The more things change…

Although they’ve played it safe in terms of gameplay, the last few Zelda games have at least taken us to some interesting places. The Wind Waker was set on a vast ocean. Twilight Princess took place in a darker, relatively more realistic version of Hyrule. Skyward Sword continues that trend. This time, Link begins his adventure as a citizen of a floating island called Skyloft where he spends his days napping, riding around on the back of a giant bird, called a Loftwing, and hanging out with his best bud Zelda. The game spends quite a lot of time upfront introducing the player to the characters and their world. It’s nice to get an idea of who Zelda is and what she means to Link, but it didn’t take long before I was itching to get to the game part of the game. When a mysterious storm tosses Zelda off the back of her Loftwing and down to the mysterious surface world below, I was more than ready to chase after her and start adventurin’.

Upon reaching the surface, the player starts to realize just how different Skyward Sword will be from past games in the series. First up are the controls: Skyward Sword makes use of the Wii-motion Plus attachment to give the player complete one-to-one control over Link’s sword arm. Move the Wii-mote to the left, and Link moves his sword to the left. Make a downward slash with your arm, and Link makes a downward slash with his. This new degree of control is enjoyable in and of itself. It’s fun to just run around and make Link wave his arm like a lunatic, but Nintendo has also cleverly integrated this feature into the gameplay. Many monsters will block or counter your attacks unless you swing at them from a certain angle. This makes combat a touch more cerebral than in past adventures.

As usual, Nintendo provides Link with a bevy of weapons and tools, most of which make use of the new motion controls. Items like the slingshot and the bow work about how you would expect, but a few of Link’s new toys are pretty inspired. The whip, for example, lets Link swing from banisters and yank far-away switches, while an air cannon allows for some interesting physics-based platforming. Best of all is the Beetle, an airborne, remotely controlled drone that can be used to scout terrain, pick up far-off items, and air-bomb enemies. The dungeon areas, always a highlight of the Zelda games, challenge the player to use these items in inventive ways. Thanks to them, some of the latter dungeons are among the most deviously well-designed in the history of the series. There are a few points where the motion controls come off as gimmicky, such as when Link has to rotate three-dimensional keys to unlock giant doors, but for the most part they breathe interesting new life into Zelda’s puzzle and combat-based gameplay.

The changes don’t end with the controls. The geographical structure of Skyward Sword is markedly different from past iterations in the series. In most Zelda games, Link runs around a vast, interconnected over-world in search of dungeons, treasure, and whatever else. In Skyward Sword, the world is divided into a number of independent sections. First there’s Link’s home in the sky. Here, Link can interact with villages, fly to surrounding islands on his Loftwing, and undertake side-quests. Link is safe in the sky, and eventually it starts to feel like a pit stop between his more dangerous journeys to the surface world, which itself is divided into three discrete areas none of which are accessible from any of the others. Rather than try and compete with open world games the likes of Skyrim, Nintendo seems to have gone in the other direction and compartmentalized its game world to a greater degree than ever before.

This choice might rub purists the wrong way, but it definitely gives the game focus. You’ll never be confused as to where to go next; a new section of unexplored surface will be all but roped off for you. The world is also far denser than it was before. When getting from point A to point B in Twilight Princess, the player had to transverse a huge but kind of empty area that gave him freedom but didn’t provide much to do with it. The surface areas in Skyward Sword are smaller but are packed to bursting with monsters, terrain-based puzzles, and goodies placed just out of sight or out of reach. In this game, the world is basically an extension of the even denser dungeons. I wish Nintendo had found a way to connect the surface areas into a unified whole, but the smaller scale ensures that minute-to-minute gameplay is faster, more stimulating, and ultimately very satisfying.

But that razor-sharp focus has some unintended consequences. Because the game made my objectives so very clear so much of the time, I started to become very aware of the fact that I was playing out a pre-set pattern rather than embarking on an adventure. Go to a new area. Explore it, make your way through the dungeon, beat the boss, and repeat. This tedious predictability is especially stark in the early goings when the areas explored are most similar to those from Zelda games past, and it takes some of the gee-whiz fun out of the experience.

…the more they stay the same.

That experience is helped and hindered in about equal measure by the game’s story, which is probably among the more robust tales the series has told. That still makes it pretty slim by modern standards, but there are some unexpectedly impactful moments and the principal characters are charmingly drawn. Link remains a mute, but thanks to the game’s effective facial animations he is a very expressive mute. The character of Zelda, who is often relegated to sitting in a tower or getting spirited away to a demon dimension early in the game, is well-developed. I was surprised how easy it was to sympathize with Link’s desire to find her after she is, inevitably, kidnapped.

One character I could have done without is Fi, this game’s version of Navi the fairy. Ever since introducing us to Navi in Ocarina of Time, Nintendo has felt the need to saddle Link with an ever-present partner who occasionally gives unsolicited information about what he should do next. Fi, a spirit who lives in Link’s sword, is easily the worst of this lot. She pops up at the slightest provocation to interrupt the flow of the game and impart incredibly obvious bits of wisdom. A sample: Link enters a room in search of an item. Fi: “The item you seek is in this room. Find it and complete your task.” I loathed her. This is one Zelda tradition I would be very happy to see taken behind a shed and shot.

That tension between tradition and progression is apparent throughout. Skyward Sword’s best sections throw enough new material at the player to make him forget that he’s playing the fifteenth entry in a long-running series, while the worst remind him that parts of the series remain stuck in the past. A section involving a search for a pirate ship on a time-traveling ocean is unexpected and delightful, while an Ico-inspired protect-the-tag-along trek up a familiar mountainside is deeply tedious. One water-based dungeon features eastern-inspired architecture, a giant statue that figures prominently in several puzzles, and a mysterious lower level that gives it a real sense of place. Another dungeon, the fire one, doesn’t do much to stand out and feels like an excuse to present us with yet more blow-up-the-false-wall puzzles. Nintendo made some brave choices with this game, but I think they should have made even more.

One tradition I do support is Nintendo’s continued commitment to excellent production values. The game’s score, which is fully orchestrated, sounds very rich and features a number of memorable tunes. Graphically, the game is bright and bold with more than a few artistic flourishes. The art style is a combination of the Saturday morning cartoon look from Wind Waker and the relatively realistic vibe from Twilight Princess. I think it’s a good look for the series going forward.

It feels a bit petty to complain about Skyward Sword’s failure to reinvent the wheel when I know that, shortcomings aside, it’s still a excellent game. It’s consistently entertaining, polished to a shine, and in some respects is very inventive. But I know Nintendo is capable of more. They CAN reinvent the wheel; I’ve seen them do it, and if they want the Legend of Zelda to remain the big deal it is they may have to do it again. Skyward Sword isn’t quite up to that challenge, but it remains a fine, fun game more than worth your time and money.