One Piece manga review - Chapter 4

I didn't even remember watching some of the anime I reviewed on this blog!

Chapter 4, eh. Even in comparison to the average filler chapter, very very little happens here.

In our last episode, Asshat Luffy (btw, he's wearing that hat because he is bald as an eagle) kicked Aleppo's ass for some reason or another. The latter now makes a great deal of never having been hit by his father, Ass-Hand Morgana. Is it common for the One People to hit their children? Luffy sure could've used some smacking education, but alas, as an orphan he lived the good life.

So Gestapo asks his father, Ass-Hand Morgana, to kill Luffy for him, because he's trouble. Now what does his father, the Marines(tm)' captain do? He hits him, after a lifetime of not hitting him. What are the odds, huh? Chekov's gun much?

Luffy bickers with Zoro, who doesn't want to join him and become a pirate. Now let's see whether that will happen with future potential crew members as well, eh? The PIRATE ERA all right, where nobody wants to become a pie rat. Drinking game: take a sip whenever Luffy shouts that he wants to become the Pirate King or somebody else refuses to become a pirate. Anyway, Zoro loves to be tied to a post and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. 

After that filler^2, the plot finally moves on a little. Captain Morgan turns out to be more paranoid than Hitler in his bunker days, outright killing (!) a subordinate Marines officer for refusing to kill (!) a little sister of Nami (the one that tried to poison/feed Zoro at the stake in the previous chapter). Course he may just have wounded that guy, but fuck if we, the readers, are ever told. Characters in One Piece, save for the main characters, are throwaway one-shows anyway, inevitably only turning up again 500 chapters later, minimum.

Now Ex-Ess Morgan deserves some special mention as one of the weirdest freaks in a manga where all characters are weird freaks. His lower jaw has been replaced by metal, so How would he be able to talk if his c

Garfield explained #3

1978-06-22

Jon correctly assumes Garfield is overweight. Jon wrongly assumes he has bigger mental capacities than Garfield, leaving him with an inedible pile of ashes instead of a stereotypically cartoonish-looking steak that looks like it came out of 1940's Tom and Jerry, and a particularly grotesquely ugly and dumb look on his face.

Streak of food-themed Garfield strips: 4

1978-06-23

Garfield lies on a microwave, enjoying warmth like all cats; however the "Happiness is a warm microwave" angle didn't pass through the censors for obvious reasons, so Garfield instead covers an ancient TV set that probably doesn't correspond to any TV set that actually ever existed, based on the ridiculous layout of buttons and the radio-like dial bar thingy (the thing where you set the frequence, anyway). 

Author's note: This is probably THE Garfield strip where the titular character behaves most closely to an actual cat.

Video game reviews #2 - Life is strange (part 2)

Still don't get the title...

Story:
Previously on Lis, Max went to college (NOT university) and met her friend Chloe, who might or might not be a Schrödinger's cat after 5 years of ignoring her.

I don't think chapter 2 was about much in particular, but chapter 3 is where things get interesting. However, one cannot ignore the red herring in the room, namely how much of a loathsome Christian straight-edged CUNT Kate Marsh (more like Kate Darsh, am I right?) is. That despicable worm of a character single-handedly overshadows and ruins the middle part of the game (and the whining about her death doesn't stop til the end in fact). Face the facts, writers of this game: SHE IS NOT MAX' FRIEND!!! MAX GOT NO REASON WHATSOEVER TO CARE ABOUT HER. All she ever did for her was lend her a book! If there is anything else, we don't see it in the game AND neither is it ever stated anywhere. As for the negative side: Kate whines ALL THE TIME. "Max, do that for me! Max, answer my text! Max, do this. Max, do that." FUCK OFF KATE!!!!!

And as I hoped we can (indirectly) drive her into suicide. However, that triumph is all but ruined by the yammering and whining that follows. Everyone was Kate's friend all along, or so they say. Like, I don't give a shit! This should not have been part of the story whatsoever. The story is SOLELY about Max and Chloe's relationship. But more on that later.

So natural disasters happen (quite effective in building up atmosphere), Max and Chloe get closer again, Chloe's stepfather is annoying, Max' photography teacher turns out to be evil (another thing that should definitely not have been in the story as it cheapens everything with its mundaneness), some shit with timelines (the highlight being the trip to the universe with Alternative Chloe in it, which is definitely kinda touching but cheaply executed. Facing a LIFETIME of being a head is infinitely more scary than being already almost dead due to respiratory failure. Death would've been a blessing to her, so what is the big deal with speeding it up a lil? That's not a meaningful choice there. Would've been a hugely meaningful choice without the last-minute tacked-on "Oh I'm already almost dead" BULLSHIT.), and in the end a tornado destroys Arcadia Bay (really not surprising an end but nevertheless effective). Or you can choose the bad ending and let Chloe be shot by Nathan, but since the entire game (!) is about rescuing Chloe dropping her like a hot potato at the very end is completely retarded. Who the fuck would do that?! But apparently, 52% of players chose the Sacrifice Chloe ending - LOL

So what did and didn't I like about this game?

Con

-) Kate Marsh ALL OF MY HATE
-) some other characters are also extremely stupid and/or confused/confusing (Victoria, Nathan, Frank (what the fuck is that character about?!?!? what is his purpose in the game?!)
-) all the bullshit and whining about Rachel Amber and then we get told in chapter 4 - "Oh, she's been dead all along, sorry about that." - FUCK YOU, WRITERS. Rachel should've appeared out of nowhere and turned the game on its head! Her appearance would've totally changed the dynamics of the Max-Chloe relationship! And to add insult to injury, she has been killed by fucking Nathan, the useless secondary villain character that adds nothing to the story. Major bullshit moment there.
-) Another huge stinker: this game is completely sexless! When I saw the penis of Michelangelo's David censored (!) in chapter 2, I knew we wouldn't get to see tits or anything more than a kiss in this fucking game! I have no clue what they were thinking. Fucking Americans and their hateful prudance.
-) We only get to see Max kiss Chloe in the bad ending. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU! I almost wouldn't have watched it at all before uninstalling after being done with the achievements, and that is their ONLY kiss in the entire game (the one in Chloe's room doesn't count, their lips barely even touch).
-) The writers let Nathan to use loaded right-wing insults (feminazi, libtard). And both of those don't apply to Max at all! This game is completely politics-free (unless you go up a meta level and question concepts like integration. And even the token blacks in Lis are barely even there and don't play a role in the story), so those terms were only shoehorned in in order to appeal to left-wingers, which is fucking disgusting. Apparently they go full retard in Lis 2 with major bitching about Trump - well I can't see myself playing that one anyway since, well, it doesn't have Max or Chloe in it, so how the fuck is it a Life is strange game then!
-) Ending is too inconclusive. This could have been prevented easily by: letting Max snap a picture of the tornado destroying the town (and therefore letting her win the contest and jumpstart her career as a photographer), and by letting us see the corpses of Chloe's mother, Warren and Frank at the destroyed Two Whales diner in the penultimate shot of the game. What we get is Max and Chloe driving off into the sunset and that is really not fucking much! Fanfic writers to the rescue! In fact, I can imagine entire fan games that refine the entire storyline by cutting out all the unnecessary bullshit and instead deconstructing the mechanics and tropes of the game (this is what chapter 5 and maybe even everything after seeing Alternative Chloe for the first time should have been about! Imagine if the remainder of the story would've taken place in that alternative universe! Now THAT would've been groundbreaking!) And the elephant in the room: does Max keep her rewind power?! WTF were they thinking not answering any of those gaping holes (Kate Marsh spreads for Jesus) when there is no sequel!
-) There is an attempt at deconstruction that also serves to make the "Kill Chloe" choice palatable to the players at all - but since all we see is repeats of the key moments in conversations with Chloe it is an utter waste of time. Writers were missing imagination there and clearly have never seen Evangelion.
-) In many cases, your choices don't matter much, don't matter at all or you aren't even given a choice in the first place! This is especially painfully obvious in the Kate Marsh situation.
-) No exploration. The scope of the entire game is waaaayyy too small. I wanted to be able to move around town freely and explore many different locations and talk to all kinds of people! This would've infinitely superior to the entire "rewind" gimmick - hey I already knew of that concept, but under the name QUICKLOAD! Oh my Satan. Yeah yeah I know full voice acting is expensive, but this is a triple A title and I'm sure episode 1 alone already made the money the entire thing cost back. This game could've been sooo much more than a (mostly linear) visual novel. What a shame.
-) Max is waaay too convinced the tornado is her fault. The very first scene of the game takes place at the lighthouse, during the tornado. And that is BEFORE Max gains her powers. Do the math.
-) Unskippable dialogue in 2015!?!
-) That puzzle with the doorways in chapter 5. Had to look up the solution and still have no clue what that shit is about. Once you even turn into Victoria? WTF
-) This game certainly doesn't reward you for sticking to your choices, and often you are even forced to rewind to be able to complete it at all.

Pro

-) Max. Maxine is great! I love her, I'd love to be her! Can't believe American guys could create such a likeable character in 2015! She is never obnoxious (unless she is being a do-gooder, which mostly happens in the Marsh situation), she actually cares about people; obviously very charismatic as for the people who actually care about her (or want something from her) she is always the centre of attention. Teacher's pet too. Most importantly she never ever mentions feminism, social justice warrior-ing or any other political bullshit. It's unfortunate she uses make-up at all, but one can easily pretend she just didn't get any sleep (seriously that make-up just makes her look very tired or sad all the time. Plus it's unrealistic it's even on her after showering, swimming etc.) She never wears anything but pants other than in the bad ending, where the choice of a dress can be forgiven. There's some similarity with Shiina from Narutaru but Max isn't *that* charismatic so she still gets shit from bullies like Nathan and Victoria, but other than that I really don't know any similar characters! To sum things up, she is a girl every normal person would like to be friends with, or more. Quite good-looking too, as I said in the chapter 1 review.

-) Chloe. The desire to see Max and Chloe end up together as lesbians kept me going ever since chapter 2 and made a lot of the bullshit elements mentioned above a lot more palatable to me. Chloe really isn't perfect, she's rough around the edges, whimsical to the max (PUN), doesn't really have any purpose in life, gets involved with stupid and banal people like Frank and she really (as the game suggests in chapter 5) takes advantage of Max (and her supernatural ability) all the fucking time (to the point of inevitably being killed unless Max rescues her). Plus that stupid dyed hair. (Is she actually a vegan? I swear I saw her eat the same thing as Max at the diner in like chapter 2, which is ham and eggs or something.) But Chloe is also the perfect counterpoint to Max! When Max is careful, cautious and introverted, Chloe is a guns-blazing risk taker who's always fun to be around with. The flashbacks we get to childhood Max 'n' Chloe are really touching. They are such great friends. I tried my damned best to save Chloe's father to make her happy. And they always played pirates, not princesses. What's not to love about those characters...

What we get to see in the true ending (as opposed to the things mentioned above that are painfully missing) is directed perfectly: Max and Chloe holding hands while watching the destruction of their home and certain death of all their friends and Chloe's mother and stepfather. Chloe accepting the terrible choice Max had to make and how highly her friend values her: "I'll always be with you. - Forever." Chloe touching Max' shoulder in the car while driving past the carnage. All of that was hitting very close to home. Great stuff there. I would trade my life with either of theirs in a second.

Warren deserves a honorary mention. Though he isn't any special in any regard, I wouldn't have minded Max ending up with him. They certainly have a lot in common. But in their final conversation in the diner during the storm, you can very tangibly see he's miles and miles away from hooking up with her. If the writers intended that scene to display that, kudos to them. He's just a nerd, and she is quite literally a supernatural being. But Warren deserved that hug, I liked him.

Graphics and sound:
Very good, high production values. Only the music is lacking and sometimes really really bad.

Setting:
Nice, believable world full of life. Shame the boundaries are so small. Big corporations causing the decline of the small-scale fishing industry is a nice backdrop. I loved talking to all the townsfolk, which also means the writers did something right. Quite a high degree of realism, other than the supernatual stuff of course. With each day you come closer to apocalypse, the perfect storm, the end of the world (Max Payne 1 also used that element very effectively) - really a very well built scenario.

Summary:
So while riddled with many flaws this obviously is a standout title and proves even Americans of the 2010s can still create great stories once in a while (sadly, the other 99.99% are disgusting propaganda nowadays, which is why I stopped watching new Hollywood movies altogether some years ago). There's a prequel I will get when it's on sale (not paying 16 Euros when I can also get it for 4). Lis 2, as I said above, doesn't look like something I'd touch but maybe I play through episode 1 when they make it free of charge (after all, this is also how I was sold on this game).
Btw, I didn't replay the game from the start or at least parts of it to make different choices to hear new dialogue pieces. I'm quite content with the choices I made. Only in a few select places I rewound to hear alternative bits.

3/5

Why I quit playing #1 - Terraria (PC)

How not to do an introduction to a game - EVER

60 minutes in and I was not able to BUILD A HOUSE. The game does NOT TELL YOU WHAT TO DO!!! When I have to rely on the wiki to be able to complete the first thing in the game, it has failed. And not even that worked. "Lay down a wooden foundation." Yet there is no "wooden foundation" item you can craft! The controls are so unbelievably finicky and there is no undo button, so my wooden walls or whatever end up in the wrong spot and I can't remove them! Which wastes the building spot! No customizable controls either - I do NOT want to have to do 100 million mouse clicks when I could just press a key instead - but the game doesn't allow me! I could literally go on complaining for an hour here, but I will only say I can't see how this ever made it out of alpha as it is an unplayable mess! Literally the worst game I've played on Steam. Note to devs: having neither a tutorial nor a manual IS NOT AN OPTION FOR A COMPLEX AND FINICKY GAME YOU DUMB FUCKS!!!

Video game reviews #2 - Life is strange (part 1 - Chapter 1)

No it isn't.

Life is strange is a visual novel (IN 3-D!) that sold a huge number of digital copies (limited edition digital copies to boot!) for some reason. As the first chapter was free and I mainly play video games for ShiTEAM achievements now (as I'm done with all the endless-type online games I used to play in the last 8 or so years for various reasons), and I was searching for a point & click adventure anyway I picked it up (as much as you can pick up a download - which is not at all because it doesn't physically exist!).

So in LiS you run around (or rather walk at a snail's pace - the couch potato main character clearly never exercises.) a small town campus. The main character, Maxine (wtf is that name?!), is studying photography MAYBE - I know nothing of the American university system - well, at least that is the only class she ever visits (1 out of 1 in the first chapter). Movement isn't the only thing at a crawling speed in this game, as gameplay consists of 25% walking (no kidding!), 25% dialogue cutscenes with various NPCs and 50% listening to Max describing various objects, landmarks and whatnot. Even with such a limited degree of interactivity, the controls are really not very good, as is typical for each and every console port I've ever played (granted, that's a very small number...). Invisible walls are really restrictive - there certainly is no exploring in this game.

Setting:
Loner hipster girl 18-year-old Maxine Caulfield (note the really unsubtle and irrelevant reference to Holden Caulfield of The catcher in the rye fame) - wait does that make any sense? Being a hipster doesn't make any sense if you can't show it off to your hipster peers. Anyway, she is a massive photography nerd, exclusively using a Polaroid camera (which would clearly never be allowed at university). Her hobbies include not contacting her best friend, getting bullied and standing up for pathetic losers she doesn't have any relationship with in the first place (that is, if you let her do that - this IS an interactive novel after all. You can make some limited choices... but more on that later). She really isn't too interesting, but not offensively loathable either, and that already beats most women (both in fiction and in reality) by default. Also she got a pretty good body - however this is rendered pointless by the fact we don't see anything in that shower scene. BOO. In fact, it's quite hard to ever see her feet outside of cutscenes cause the camera is really rigid. Some fanservice really would've worked wonders there.

Anyway, so Max goes to class, lives at a dorm, has limited social interactions with her nerd and loser friends and uses social media. Note that "taking selfies" isn't on that list cause you can ONLY take "selfies" with a "smartphone" - and not with a Polaroid camera (don't listen to the game's lies). And BAM suddenly she develops the magical ability to rewind time to a limited amount. However, instead of using that power in a sensible way to e.g. take over the world, she merely uses her rewind to impress her hipster teacher (who she naturally has a crush on) and protect her loser friends. In fact, there is no reason for this supernatural bullshit to be in the game in the first place. It's a stupid gimmick that adds little to nothing - especially as your choices are really not important in the first place as they are way too limited in the moral sense. You can't kill the stupid bitch bully, you can't tell Chloe (again, WTF IS THAT NAME?! that's one of the stupidest non-black names in existence!) to FUCK OFF, even when she tries to make you take the blame for smoking a joint IN FRONT OF THE INSANE SCHOOL SECURITY GUARD (which probably would cost Max her scholarship), you can't even do small things like outright telling the pathetic CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALIST loser queen to leave you the fuck alone. So if you can't make meaningful (= moral) choices anyway, what's the point of being able to reverse them instantly instead of via reloading...?! Possibly the rewind gimmick will pay off later, but I can't see right now how it would be able to convince of its necessity in the story.

Story:
The storyline can be summed up in one sentence.

Characters:

So we got Max, which is, like I said above, not too bad. She is actually interested in something useful (namely photography), and that's quite a likeable trait.

Chloe: is a massive bitch. Implied to be a vegan subhuman, doing nothing but blaming Max for not contacting her (note: that always goes both ways...), daddy's girl (too bad her father died in a freak triple penetration accident), confuses smilies for emojis (seriously, are the writers of this game that stupid?!) even though smileys predate them by 20 years, fake hair colour, nail dirt, hipster punk cunt. However even with all of those traits I don't actually *hate* her - something in this game actually works quite excellent, but I can't put my finger on it yet. Certainly it has to do with the high productions values. Oh and she gets murdered by one of her drug dealer peers at the beginning of the game but unfortunately you can't not reverse time there (as you can have EITHER full voice acting or large-scale branching in a visual novel. Guess which one I prefer...).

Bitch: rich bitch with short hair that likes to make fun of poor losers and outcasts. However, she doesn't do that with style so she's quite annoying. Maybe we can kill her in one of the later episodes...

Not too hard to figure out the inspiration behind the Bitch character...

Christian fundamentalist girl: one of the worst characters I've ever seen in video games and sadly you can't tell her to get lost once and for all. However I'm keeping my fingers crossed I can drive her to commit suicide in the course of the story.

Other characters don't matter in Episode 1 and never will.

Summary:

Life is strange is doing many things wrong, but all in all it is quite playable. Ep 1 is really short though. At the end I expect a payoff that even might fill me with a slight warm and fuzzy feeling. LiS really only works as a visual novel as it doesn't have the substance to even fill a TV show. Technically it is really well made, graphics and sound are good. The music is godawful though (I especially HATED that "American girls" song!). In my eyes, the format works even if the content really isn't that good, and I can imagine much better games made with the same sophistication of production values. For example, imagine Higurashi married with this technology! Who says visual novels have to be static pictures for all eternity! Life is strange Chapter 1 at least disproved that idea for me once and for all and for that I'm glad I have played it...

PS: yeah, the title makes no sense. Nothing in this game is strange whatsoever. And while most of the references in this game mean nothing to me, some made me chuckle. Nekromantik, lol. And that literally one day after I had watched a different Jörg Buttgereit movie (namely Der Todesking)!

Garfield explained #2

1978-06-20 - #2

Jon, whose nose is so huge it puts most jewish noses to shame, tries to make his overweight cat exercise in one of his rare sensible moments. Garfield, whose life revolves primarily around feeding and sleeping, however devours the rubber toy, musing how salt would improve the taste, implying his regular diet includes salt.

Fun fact: Average-sized cats need about 21 milligrams of salt per day (so Garfield should have no more than 100 mg a day). Common signs of salt poisoning include walking drunkenly, vomiting, diarrhea, excessive thirst or urination, and seizures.


1978-06-20 - #2

Garfield unsurprisingly is too immobile to chase after a live mouse (or rather rat, based on its relative size compared to Garfield compared to Jon), instead preferring to feed on human food and plastic toys. Naturally his owner Jon is to blame for his sad state of fitness, highlighting the issue of whether mentally handicapped people living on their own should be allowed to own pets.

Streak of food-themed Garfield strips: 3

Garfield explained

Garfield explained

Inspired by this guy: http://marmadukeexplained.blogspot.com/2008/04/marmadukes-impotent-neighborhood.html. Shitty comics, just like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, have spawned great derived fandom/hatedom material in the past. A more well known example of this phenomenon is Square Root of Minus Garfield (http://www.mezzacotta.net/garfield/), another I came across recently is xkcd sucks (http://xkcdsucks.blogspot.com/2008/11/comic-505.html), but obviously there are tons of projects wringing fun out of unfunny source material out there, including my own webcomic Charlie Down. Basic idea of this project is to get me to work on my blog more than 1-2 times a year again.

So ideally I would tackle Marmaduke (since the guy above just randomly dropped off the face off the earth eventually), but I wasn't able to find any online archive of the strip reaching back to the 1950s (or even to the last century at all), and for me beginning at the beginning really is the only way to do things, so the next best thing (or actually one of the few comic strips I even know) is a fellow member of the unholy trinity of pet-related comics... Garfield.

So after this hideously jumbled intro (I got rusty...), let's start with the very first strip. I'm afraid old Garfield is a lil better than what it became after the redesign however... but I really only read the first 5-10 strips so I have no idea what will await me.

So... Garfield explained in the vein of Marmaduke explained by Joe Mathlete.

1978-06-19 - #1

Jon Arbuckle, a cartoonist displaying pupillary distance hinting at a genetic disorder like lobar holoprosencephaly owns (and, in a juridical dilemma, is owned by) an enormously fat and unnaturally orange cat which has cheeks that put a hamster's relative oral storage capacity to shame. Jon's rambling to unseen forces and him imagining his pet talking can only be explained by his devopmental delay.

Note that the lamp from panel 1 goes missing in panel 3, indicating a sloppy start of a cartoon that isn't particularly hard to draw to begin with.

Why I dropped #2 - Monster manga

Monster by Naoki Urasawa

Monster starts out alright by introducing the main character, young genius brain surgeon Tenma, who lives and works in Germany. He lives his life until he decides to disobey an order of his superior and saves a random young boy's life instead of keeping the mayor of the town or whatever the hospital is in alive, resulting in obvious trouble for his superior.

*facepalm*

I call bullshit.

A children's life is not worth more than that of an adult, but actually LESS. First, while an adult has numerous social connections, a circle of friends, a partner perhaps, a child is only really loved by his parents and grandparents (if at all). Children's so called friendships are flimsy as fuck, so they clearly don't count. Teachers generally hate children - and that is pretty much the entire periphery of a child as children aren't allowed to interact with any other grown-ups in this day and age because those could be creepy pedophiles (so let's treat all adults as such because of a small minority. Logic yay)!

Second, adults generally have a job and hence contribute to society in some way or another (unless they are coppers or politicians or some such wastrels) - while children are in school and thereforae are a COST to society until they become old enough to work.

Third and unnecessary to even mention, the world is cruelly overpopulated. At a certain point in time, an adult might already have had the audacity to spawn his seed into the world in a purely selfish way, while a child decides on whether or not to breed only later in life. In other words, the mayor in the example above pretty likely already had sired children if he had the wish to do so, essentially preventing any ADDITIONAL burden to mankind. Saving the life of the boy means he might put additional burden on mankind later.

So for any logically thinking person, saving the mayor's life as per the order of your superior would have been the morally right and sensible choice. However as the mangaka feels he has to degrade himself in order to appeal to the sickening sappiness that blots out reason in the deranged minds of the general public, Tenma is of course an IDIOT and saves the child, called Johan. As some sort of cosmic comeuppance or divine justice, that mistake turns out to quickly ruin his life, costing him his girlfriend and promotion. However, Tenma's enemies are ruthlessly killed, causing an excentric police investigator (who has a really stupid gimmick) to try and pin the blame on Tenma somehow.

Now this is where I initally stopped reading a long time ago (6-10 years) because I had seen Death Note right before and I really couldn't take another criminal vs policeman logic battle story then. However, Monster isn't actually about any of that but about Tenma and Johan's twin sister (who initially seemed an ok character, but it turns out she was the one to shoot Johan in the head and from then on everything goes downhill) chasing after Johan who is actually a split-personality serial killing motherfucker responsible for many many murders (for example Tenma's bosses and many of his and his twin sisters' foster parents even - who ironically adores Tenma for saving his life when he was a boy!

That storyline is bearable for some time, but at some point the author randomly decides to throw the laziest and most uncreative villains possible into the story - Nazis (*sigh*) - and the bullshit spirals out of control. So the Nazis plan to burn down Little Turkey in some German town - of course the author handles all of this in the most stereotypic black-and-white way (evil Nazis, good Turkish immigrants - he even invokes the dreaded "hooker with a heart of gold" trope) and never asks himself what right hordes of Turks unwilling to integrate have to occupy a foreign country in the first place. Clearly Urasawa couldn't have pulled that stunt in a story set in his native country (the Japanese themselves would never allow great numbers of foreigners to settle in their country). By the way, Hitler himself declared the Japanese (his allies in the war) "honorary Aryans", so the Nazis beating up Tenma wasn't really the smartest thing to put in the manga (well maybe they just didn't know that tiny tidbit, huh). I'm certainly not claiming the Nazis were any kind of good guys but to just put them into a story as a generic villain whose motivations aren't even explored the slightest bit is just the textbook definition of laziness. And to not look up the situation of Turks and their unwillingness to drop their primitive and harmful beliefs primarily motivated by their cancer of a religion - Islam - is doubly insulting. But of course that bullshit sells stories and wins awards cause it doesn't require any kind of thought on the part of the left-leaning reviewer or manga reader - right?!

So of course the FIRE storyline turns out to be utterly useless - nobody dies, at least some of the Nazis are arrested (they weren't important to the story in the first place... yay), the Turks are left free to further spread the boundaries of their parallel society in a Western country, Johan murders some guys - the "good guys" neither win or lose even the slightest thing (and the morally ambiguous smuggler sidekick Tenma picked up even has to lose the expensive carpet he stole so that "evil isn't rewarded" *facepalm* - And guess how he loses it: a 100000 DM carpet is used to extinguish a fire in lieu of e.g. Tenma's shirt *double facepalm*). At this point, I gave up on this asinine timewaster and looked up the further development of the plot on Wikipedia. That was around chapter 40 of 100.

Turns out that the rest of the story is just a REPEAT of events happening earlier! Johan kills people, the "heroes" chase after him, and in the end Johan's sister shoots him in the head AGAIN and Tenma, complete fucktard that he is, operates on Johan AGAIN and saves his life AGAIN, only to allow the murderer to escape from the hospital AGAIN (allowing him to probably kill even more people in the future).

*facepalm*

So this manga really was little more than realising you have gum stuck in your hair, a storyline that turned useless as soon as a boy decided that his life's work was to kill a lot of mostly random people for no reason and COULD actually execute that, a setting that is first established just to be discarded chapters later and a total bullshit nonsense ending.

On the plus side, the German names mostly were well chosen, having a brain surgeon main character was actually quite interesting, the drawing was also quite well done. And on a side note to the author, women in Germany do NOT all wear skirts at all times (because skirts are stupid). From reading the mangaka's Wikipedia article, it doesn't look like he has ever lived in Germany for longer periods of time.

Avoid unless you really like your main characters behaving in the most illogical ways, going out of their way (!) to keep the FUCKING POLICE from solving the murders and catching Johan (I mean it kinda is their job, you know! They aren't ALL about waylaying drivers) and your villains as - well fuck it, those two points are enough to make a super sane man cringe and review a truly shitty manga.

Interactive fiction review #14 - George

George by Cody Sandifer

A hoax demo

George is an extremely short game set in a zoo. Apparently it was part of a hoax, which explains its duration and abrubt, unfinished end.

The plot involves two friends (or lovers), who appear to be drugged up and ready to embark on a dangerous mission (which is a combination always good for netting one a Darwin award). The game text breaks the fourth wall in one or two places, referring to the non-existent full version.

If this was but the beginning of an author's debut game, George would be a promising venture, but in its existing form this game is not worth the time it takes to download it.

2/10

Interactive fiction review #13 - Tears of a tough man

Tears of a Tough Man by Brian Humphrey

A debut title - and it shows

Tears of a Tough Man by Bruce Humphrey is a short mystery murder memento game in which you are meant to restore your main characters's memory by wandering around and triggering his recollection by doing various things. What might sound interesting is held back dramatically by writer's inexperience and ineptitude.

In a forum post, the author stated that he planned to implement multiple features missing from the final version but couldn't (for some reason) - it shows. (Spoiler - click to show)(e.g. multiple endings) Grammar and spelling errors, whilst not overabundant, distract. Some of the puzzles are made unneededly tedious by poor syntax and logic. The in-game environment feels unnaturally constructed to the point of being ridiculous. Likewise, quest-important items just happen to be lying around in your path. The ending (Spoiler - click to show)(if you'd like to try this out, the point you're likely to miss is "x stains") does not really reveal or conclude anything.

To sum things up, Tears of a Tough Man is an author's debut work that does show some promise but in its ineptness cannot be salvaged even by mending and polishing.

2/10

Retroachievements update #5 - Retroachievements? Go to hell!

Scott is somebody I really hate. FUCK him.

After years of using (and advertising) retroachievements.org I have tonight finally been convinced to rid myself of a project that is no longer in a useful state and shows zero promise for future improvements (same as Path of Exile, by the way, which I'm pretty sure I'll never play again due to the utter futility of playing it).

The terminal problem of retroachievements.org? The utter lack of leadership.

In any closed system, be it a game of chess or the laws of a country, rules and logic have to be intrinsical. If people don't play by the rules, there can be no meaningful competition.

Case in point: idiots adding achievements to already completed sets for no rhyme or reason, therefore deducting points from people who have already beaten achievements in that set. What's infinitely worse, however, is the REMOVAL of achievements that players have already cleared, again, for no rhyme or reason! I've spoken out against these things time and time again, to no avail. The final straw was the removal of many Super Tennis achievements, which I had spent weeks on clearing. I noticed that just tonight and it didn't take me a long time to make the decision that retroachievemens cannot be any longer in a state that allows for a meaningful competition. Hence, it's a total and utter waste of anybody participating there for a rank on the leaderboard.

Scott, the useless asshole who created the site (quite the example of a blind hen finding a grain of corn), didn't manage in 5 years to establish any system that prevents anarchy (not to mention answer PMs. And when he allowed donations after years of people begging to be able to donate, he did it on fucking Patreon. *facepalm*) In a closed system, you obviously can't have anarchy, cause see above. The paragon of incompetence, after he disappeared for literally years, did nothing to fix the state of anarchy. What he actually did was to break all emulators (I didn't even bother to re-download most of them, cause setting them up again was an infinite pain I literally lost hours of my life on).

Losing retroachievements is a shame. The original idea was a spot of genius, and I've had many enjoyable hours of playing games for achievements and chatting with people on the site. Could I have made #1 eventually? Probably not, because I've never in my life managed to dedicate my efforts to one single thing. It's still a sad moment for me. But I'll make sure to erase my memory of using that site just like the achievements I (and in some cases, ONLY I!!!) completed were erased.

My parody comic strip: Charlie Down - (A Peanuts parody)

Yet another idea I carried around with me for years spontaneously comes to fruition...!

Now hosted on http://charliedown.webcomic.ws/ via the Comic Fury platform (and updated only there cause I'm too lazy to upload everything twice...)

I've come up with the idea of drawing a Charlie Brown parody strip ever since I checked out the first couple of strips (and yes, I mean the 1950s ones...) in a drunk stupor and was appalled at how horribly unfunny those were. Granted, I recently discovered Family Circus (which had been mentioned in my all-time favourite webcomic, 8-Bit Theater, to be exact, but I never bothered to look it up) and had to re-gauge my scale of unfunniness in a painful way - but those old Peanuts strips still are completely unfunny and utterly baffling more regularly than even bloody Garfield! And I doubt the newer ones are any different, by the way...

Anyway, so I somehow came across the parody series Dysfunctional Family Circus (which even has a Wikipedia article!) which was started back in 1989 recently, and today (!) I put one and one together and realised that I didn't have to DRAW a parody (Note: I can't draw for shit...) but could just use the original and use Photoshop on its ass! Granted, I have to use Photoshop CS2 (release date: 1991...) because that is the only free one and Fuckdobe doesn't actually sell its software anymore but only rents it out - it's a pain, but it's once again making it possible for even me to draw a comic (just like I used to do 9 years ago when it took me half a year to learn how to properly imitate Order of the Stick's (which by the way sucks now beyond belief) style because I am spatially retarded).

No clue how I'm gonna manage the rest of 'em (a blog post per comic seems stupid) but here is Charlie Down strip #1... and obviously, the level of funniness may vary with what I'm given to work with. By the way and for the record, this is the only thing I've ever been creating (so far: webcomic, music, drawing, interactive fiction, writing) that has nothing to do with my own story project which is called The She-Wolf and the Goddess ((c)2007 me). Though certain concepts invariably creep in...

Click it to see it in the proper size (sorry):

Dinosaur Comics also was a huge inspiration for me, as was √ of -Garfield.

PS: Apparently ol' Charlie Schulz didn't own a ruler back in the day, because this strip's borders were actually crooked!

PPS: Thanks to whoever bothered to create a Charlie Brown font - without you this would not be the same. Which it isn't, because it is a non-profit parody. So don't bother suing - though actually being sued by the estate of C. Schulz would definitely be the highlight of my life. ^^ (what a sucky life :-()

PPPS: At least sometimes a direct comparison between the original strip and the parody will be required or at least recommended. After all, mocking Schulz' thoroughly unfunny and sometimes utterly unintelligible (strips #1 and #2 for example) attempt at humour is the basic idea here.

By the way, doing these is a lot more work than you would imagine...

This third one pretty much displays the direction I want to take these strips into.

I really gotta look into finding some comic site where I can host these...

The OBVIOUS joke. I'm not proud of this one... :-(

This one went through a lot of rewrites...

Oh baby! The setting is basically established now! (Kiddin'.) And Patty looks so happy in the last panel...

First real in-joke for actual Peanuts fans... the horror...  (of there being actual Peanuts fans out there!)

Phew! So tough to come up with a punchline...

First Impressions #2 - Bioshock Remastered

First Impressions - Bioshock Remastered by 2K Games


(based on my one hour torture session with this shlock)


Also the last impression...

Bioshock. Huh. It sucked hard! So much for that franchise. Good thing I got out quickly (unlike the addiction issue I have with Path of Exile... sigh).

Setting

Underwater world that looks a LOT like the underwater level in Deus Ex (the "Bathysphere" ride in the beginning felt just like the submarine ride in DX1). A huge Fallout 3 feel too to it, though apparently Bioshlock came out a year earlier, so who knows why that is. I swear the men's room sign looks just like the pip boy! The posters and stuff everywhere all scream Fallout too, as do the enemy life bars, and the attept at irony apparent in the decorations (which works a LOT better in Fallout)...

The underwater kingdom - Rapture - is populated by fucking zombies (I facepalmed hard on seeing the first one... I hate zombies.), ugly-as-fuck robots and really ugly little zombie girls with glowing eyes. It's obvious from the start that you won't meet especially many humans there, and all of the aforementioned creatures don't have a shred of personality. You are constantly terrorised by an incorporeal voice which rambles on and on about going there and killing that, yet the game starts without even telling you WHO THE FUCK YOU ARE and therefore not giving you the slightest reason to care about any of it. Honestly, even fucking Half-Shite 2 (second most overrated game of all time) made more of an effort of making me care about moving through the levels, and that's saying something - at least in that game you are directly addressed as "Gordon Freeman" and are not just some blank fucking nobody. 2K Games fucked up the basic rule of storytelling (make the player care) harder than I could even have imagined! Groundbreaking!

Story

There is none. But yeah, there was something... apparently the mystery voice wants you to kill some other mystery guy - but who the fuck cares about that when there's nothing at stake for the player character or the slightest reason for him to care about any of the other characters in the setting (let's recap: zombies, robots, girl zombies, mystery voice, mystery villain)!!! What a piss-poor attempt at a storyline! Just throw him in (literally)! Holy hell.

Gameplay

SCRIPTED EVENTS NO JUTSU! Enemies always spawn in your vicinity (it's pretty obvious they didn't just MOVE there but were put there by the game), except when they spawn behind barriers and it's obvious instantly you won't be able to interfere with them. In one instance, the game wanted to create tension by spawning enemies clawing at a a glass wall in order to break through. To escape, the protagonist had to move into an elevator portal-style. However, I moved back out of the elevator to watch the futile scripted event and laugh about it.

Then the game... warped me to the next location (ten seconds later) like I had remained in the elevator!!! (I got that on video, btw.)

One episode like that really is enough to make me doubt the game design. Add to that that you can't jump over miniscule walls in the beginning because you would take damage... and you haven't received your lifebar at that point! Bioshock's linear-as-fuck level design makes Half-Life 2's look like Duke Nukem 3D, and again, that's saying something! In the beginning there is even a quest arrow to assure even the dumbest idiots (in other words, this game's fanbase that paid for a second part...) won't lose their way.

When you open the map, the interface screams CONSOLE PORT. Combat is clunky, but would be decent I guess. At the beginning of the game you are given magic powers for no reason, maybe eventually you get stuff like levitation that would be needed to make you progress, but the lightning ray you get in the beginning was boring and ineffective.

Fallout 3 has the same complete lack of a storyline, but at least has RPG elements and the tutorial set in the bunker to give you some kind of identification with your character. Oh yeah, and an open world instead of a train ride. On rails.

Graphics

are decent, but as I probably said before, graphics are only even a factor negatively influencing a game's rating, never positively. I grew up with DOS, so I know that it's gameplay and also controls which are the most important factors in video game making. Times have changed, unfortunately...

Summary

Playing Bioshock was a terrifying experience and quite probably it was the game I had the least fun with in a long, long time. To think this game got a 99 at Metacritic would be enough to make me question the collective sanity of mankind - if I didn't already KNOW before that man's decline is already going full throttle.

I died at the one-hour-mark, and I had no intention to continue as there wasn't even the slightest thing of interest to me. I play very few shooters nowadays, and the main reason for that is that most of them appear to be just as bland as this pathetic attempt at an atmospheric game (or Call of Duty clones or sequels). When you have played the best shooter of all time (DX1) and know that you have played the best shooter of all time, it is very, very hard to settle for anything lesser. Avoid like the plague, unless you are just as devoid of any individuality or personality as this vapid shell of a game.

Anime review #7 - Speed Grapher

Speed Grapher by Minoru Niki (2005)

Cat and mouse game with a cardboard face MacGuffin flying around on the screen

I have to admit it took me some time to figure out what the title of this anime was about, but it hardly matters. "Grapher" can only refer to "photographer", but speed is not a big factor in this anime per se. Patience is, though, as is the ability to withstand crappy writing. Speed Grapher was interesting for 2-3 episodes - but so was Naruto. Eventually, it turned into one of the most horrible pieces of SHLOCK I have ever been terrorised with in my life.

"I am indifferent about everything."

Setting:

Speed Grapher depicts a world (or rather Japan) where money is everything and everything can be in turn bought by money. So basically, it's like the real world but a lot more honest! Corruption runs amok among politicians and in the course of events this factor actually leads to the loss of souvereignty as international troops invade Japan! All of this could have made for a very interesting setting, but alas! it was wasted on a banal plot involving supernatural powers for no reason (*facepalm*) and unsatanly abysmal (but not abyssal) characters.

A few nice points here and there show how SEXY financial power and money itself as an object can be, but those pale into insignificance alongside the "meat" of this show, the storyline, which is as bland as unseasoned chicken. Try to eat 24 episodes' worth of that! I dare you!

Story:

Tatsumi Saiga, an established war photographer, investigates a secret de Sadian club which on first glance seems rather similar to the one depicted in Juliette (just with a lot less gay sex). However, the secret "VIP" membership buys high ranking politicians and businessmen something more than sex: their DNA is altered upon receiving bodily fluids from the "goddess" owned by the club, 15-year-old Kagura, who unwillingly participates in the process drugged and unaware. These customers are hence turned into useless monsters-of-the-week, most of them with spider powers for some reason. The same thing accidentally happens to Saiga, who upon being kissed by Kagura receives the power to make things explode by photographing them. Such a power would usually be OP, but of course, since Saiga is the "hero" protagonist, it has to be immediately overshadowed by the big bad's power of using his blood to achieve pretty much anything he wants - with deadly results.

So Saiga decides to rescue Kagura, who turns out to be the blandest cardboard face ever to float across a screen (even Hinata in Naruto has more of a personality! Wow, I can't believe I just typed that...), but not to FUCK her (cause she is "only" 15 which you would never even know from just watching the anime, where this tidbit is mentioned maybe once, and not 16 which magically would be (more?) legal then...) but just to keep her around for no discernible reason. Saiga has nothing but trouble because of this, as Kagura is kidnapped more often than Mokuba in Yugioh the Abridged Series (basically once every 3 episodes...) and he has to re-rescue her each and every time, which causes so much unnecessary stress in his life he eventually goes BLIND from it. Holy shit! Well, I for one'd be rather dead than blind. (I'd be rather dead than anything, but that is beside the point. Actually, I'd rather be a billionaire than dead because then I could make my movie.) To top it off, the abovementioned monsters-of-the-week are despatched against the couple at regular intervals - but as this is essentially a SHONEN anime (even though it features adult themes), the monsters are defeated without even breaking a sweat or a leg. What a twits! By the way, Saiga never has a lightbulb moment of coming up with the concept of a DISGUISE or just simply cutting Kagura's hair which is odd enough to make her instantly recognisable.

To spice up things, we are given a horny freak female police officer who consistently stalks Saiga, thinks nothing of raping him while he is unconsicous and is an overall bane on an already very poor anime, like a bee circling you while you are standing in a packed crowd of five thousand screaming pre-teens having to endure a Justin Bieber concert because your mother sent you there to watch over your little sister who thinks Bieber is a great musician and the cutest boy ever. And then your little sister got raped and you got stung by that bee. In the COCK. Yeah, that's really what Ginza reminded me of.

Anyway, eventually Kagura gets kidnapped for the final and last time, Saiga has to face off with Suitengu (that is the name of the villain and mastermind), Saiga goes blind and Suitengu kills himself, causing a massive economical crisis by essentially lighting a lot of paper money on flames (killing thousands of people, which is conveniently ignored in the anime - but by the fact a large part of Tokyo is LIT ON FIRE, it's a certainty!) A few years later, Saiga is still blind as a mole, has still not fucked Kagura, which would have been her only purpose (I wouldn't usually say something like that, but she really is nothing more than a blowup doll that moves and talks just a little more!), and that's pretty much it!

And not the good kind either...

Characters:

Saiga is a no-nonsense badass, which, coupled with the horrendously plain female sidekick, makes for an unappealingly dull situation. His relationship with Ginza which borders on sadomasochism would be interesting if it wasn't so downplayed. He has no reason to live for other than taking pictures, so when that is taken away from him (by Kagura), he instead adopts the concept of protecting Kagura from vague danger instead of turning her front side into a zipper with a big knife and drawing out the organs to devour them (with a side of fava beans) to (possibly) be cured of his affliction which would have been the logical course of action. Even when things go bad for him (danger of going blind from using supernatural abilities to fight monsters, losing his job and livelihood, getting stalked by mobsters and his crazy girlfriend), he never actually makes any attempt to CHANGE his lifestyle or anything. Suitengu would have paid a king's ransom (or rather bounty) for Kagura, and Saiga never had the slightest reason to be particularly loyal to her, just the same way one wouldn't especially miss a dog eaten by a crocodile when he could just go and buy a dozen more dogs AND crocodiles and some slaves to pick cotton! In a world where money is supposedly everything, a one-dimensional character like Saiga just isn't particularly interesting to watch. An evil badass (think Light Yagami - or even Dark Yagami!) would have had a field day in this setting and would have provided for an interesting story by himself.

Kagura is the goddess of blandness. She grows up spoiled rich and subjugated by her crazy and cruel mother. Of course when that witch finally croaks, Kagura storms back to her and when her mother dies without ever having cared for her even a tiny bit, Kagura doesn't even realise that. She is naive and innocent, yet that trait is never used to endear her to the viewer for some reason! It is like the creators of Speed Grapher aimed to write the most unimaginatively boring character possible and succeeded. What a smashing success! Speaking of which, there is a scene where Kagura tries to smash a window to escape and is physically (and hilariously) REPELLED by an inanimate object! That is how low her charisma score is! And Kagura's brain tumor arc is turned into a mockery when it turns out she has to... menstruate to be cured. Bleed for your life! Menstruate that tumor! From your brain! Why does that plot line sound like something feminists these days would come up with... Anyway, Kagura is the textbook MacGuffin, everybody wants to have her so the plot is about just that. During watching the last few episodes of SG I was thinking that I prefer Hinata from Naruto to Kagura as a character... that should tell you exactly how bland she really is! (Not as bland as Lain though, but that should go without saying.) If Hitler had a dog, and that dog had rabies and AIDS and the bubonic plague, and it could only bark in Mexican - I would rather fuck that dog than say something positive about Kagura!

"Mein dog has ein nice Arschloch!"

Suitengu is the villain of the show, and originally that works just fine and dandy. However, he turns out to be ridiculously OP and capable of killing pretty much anybody he wants. Even worse, a bullshit twist at the end destroys his character by making him hate money, hate the system, hate Japan etc. because a long time ago a rich guy forced his kid sister into prostitution, had him raped too for good measure and made into a child soldier or whatever. In the culmination of this onslaught of tripe it turns out he saved Saiga in a foreign country while they were both buried under rubble by... playing a music box. What pathetic SHLOCK! So in the end, he doesn't kill Saiga which would actually have been merciful in that situation as Saiga had lost his eyesight permanently by then, and basically commits suicide, blowing up all the money IN JAPAN in the process, killing thousands in the process off-screen as mentioned above and bankrupts the entire country - which conveniently recovers in just a few years. SHLOCK!

There are also a few boring henchman like the guy with the dog nose who can magically turn into a wolf but is killed by the female cop in like five seconds (I didn't make that up!) Some additional henchmen could've ran with the money, but instead go back INTO A BURNING SKYSCRAPER to buy Suitenguu like five seconds which is never necessary in the first place and of course turns out to be just another slice of patheticness on a shit sandwich (I think that is what the minimum-wage Burger King employees are talking about when they ask you whether you want cheese on your Crispy Chicken). And an overacting gay dancer or whatever. Who cares.

Themes:

Absolute power corrupts a lot, and money is pure evil or something. And it is totally ok to be bland as fuck as long as you have a cute face.

Final verdict:

Speed Grapher was not good. In fact, it was very bad. The good thing about bad anime like this one is that they are very easy to review, unlike stuff such as Madoka and Higurashi. The bad thing is of course that they are a pain to get through after you realise you are watching something that cannot just be saved in the last episode by some miraculous crazy genius twist. Avoid.

Interactive fiction review #12 - South America Trek

South America Trek by Conrad Knopf

Mario is missing. Fun is absent from this title as well

Conrad Knopf's South America Trek is an educational game from the dark ages of interactive fiction. Originally published as shareware in a series of similar titles, the author expected you to dish out 30$ for the registered version.

I pity you if you did.

South America Trek sends the player (who is sometimes adressed directly by the impersonal "narrator" for some reason) on a whacky journey through South America to learn geography and stuff.

The first major problem of this game that meets the player's eye is the size of this game. South America is a terrifyingly huge game environment with confusing (and sometimes illogical) path structure, yet manages to be undetailed and plain boring. Drawing a map, whether you use your computer or go old-school with pen & paper, is both a must and a chore. Items must be gathered (they happen to be just lying around, of course) and exchanged in illogical trades (e.g. bauxite for a torch) in order to be able to progress to new areas, which, of course, are just as boring and unimaginative (not to mention unimaginable - by the way, don't plan on "examining" anything in this game, it's not implemented) as the previous ones.

South America Trek is a game you don't want to play. Reading random facts (and sometimes blatant lies - sloths are NOT dangerous, for one) about places and countries in South America in interactive fiction form while having to navigate through an atrocious and insanely huge maze path system, constantly going in circles from orientation loss and backtracking to trade items, is as far removed from having fun as I can possibly imagine. To top it off, there's pretentious in-game advertising for the author's other works. I hope there's a video game designer hell somewhere...

The best thing about this game: The word "fuck" was implemented. In an educational game for children. LOL

On a personal note, writing this review has been dragging on for quite some time because the game was just so unplayable, and then I found out the hard way you can die with no undo option, so just this once, I didn't finish this game 100% (but I got close enough).

Oh, and it's a DOS game. Good luck if you want to save your game - I couldn't...

1/10, absolute atrocity

One Piece manga review - Chapter 3

It would be ridiculous...

Back-to-back chapter reviews, eh. I guess that will become the norm now since reviewing either Madoka or Higurashi is a very very daunting task. Actually, scratch that, Madoka might happen any day now. Did I mention I'm chaotic neutral? At least I used to be.

Chapter the third. That boy with the glasses and Luffy bicker on about how Zoro, whom none of them has ever seen, or knows the whereabouts of, does or does not have the potential to be added to Luffy's party. But Luffy has not made his mind up yet, either. No shit. He has not met him, remember?! Maybe Zoro's... a muslim. Or a robot. Either of which cannot be added to the party for... reasons. So this "adding to the group" speculation is rather pointless, but what's new in One Piece Land. I would ask the reader to note that Zoro is described as a "bloodthirsty monster in the form of a man who hunts fugitives all across the seas", but it is Coby weaving that story, and he clearly isn't a reliable narrator.

On the next page we learn that Luffy had actually been wanting to go to the Marine base all along (just as planned...). You know, the Marines who are the mortal enemies of pirates. Yeah. Sure, why not. Actually he needs to drop Coby off, who is on a never-ending quest to become a marine. Or he will become one five chapters later. Either possibility... sucks. Coby has to leave the party and is heartbroken at the thought of having to be Luffy's enemy at their next encounter - because there is no question about the fact the floor will be wiped with him then. In a tavern, Luffy accidentally finds out he has the weirding way and can use the names "Zoro" or "Morgan" as a killing word, blowing up groups of random guests. Or apparently Oda claims that the tavern patrons are so scared by the mere mention of either of these names that they are triggered to EXPLODE. I'll stick with my theory as it makes a lot more sense (and that is sad, really). What an unbelievable stupid scene. Something like that might work in animated form if presented just right, but in the manga it is just another contribution to this (cess-)pool of stupidity that personifies the taste of the average Japanese manga reader, based on the number of sales (and that is REALLY sad, really). If Oda had just SHAT on that draft page, the end result would have been preferrable, I am certain.



So Luffy suggests that Marine Lieutenant Morgan (who will dance the hempen jig later) could have done something "bad" to cause the townsfolk to be so afraid of his mere name; but Coby insistently denies that a lawful person could be evil at the same time, showing his lack of basic D&D knowledge. Or maybe he just grew up with 4th edition and thus has become mentally retarded! Or maybe he is just right! A commander of the Marines being a bad person is just as impossible as a black person being racist against whites! At least that is what Hollywood continues to shove down our throats throughout the 2010s. On a side note, I have witnessed multiple people in my country applying the nonsense term "African American" to black people who haven't even THOUGHT of living in America in their collective lifetimes... completing the circle of utter stupidity in a very ironic way.

But let's go back to fighting human stupidity by reviewing One Piece. (This is what LMTR14 actually believes!) The Marine base is revealed to be really ugly, sporting a camouflage pattern... for no reason. Its cannons are big enough to put a "Schwerer Gustav" cannon to shame, making one wonder what kind of pirate ships the Marines are aiming to destroy with weapons of that caliber! Maybe they need them in order to fight epic level munchkins like Luffy and Zoro... who is revealed to be on the very island Luffy goes to after having just been mentioned in the previous chapter for the first time... yeah, you gotta be shitting me. This is as stupid on a writing level as it is on an in-universe level. Zoro is just randomly captured on that very island Coby wanted Luffy to take him to? If either of them KNEW (magically) that Zoro would be there, they sure didn't announce that in any of the previous chapters. This is either a plothole on the gaping level of Michael's bitch of a daughter in GTA 5 or shitty shitty writing! I mean, Zoro could be anywhere! On a sofa, on a chair! But instead he is right on Marine Island, the happiest place on Oda's Earth(tm). If that doesn't make you dance with the devil in the pale moonlight, I don't know! (GET IT?)

So Zoro is teased at with him being shown displaying an "evil aura". The kind of guy who would kill a little girl for offering a poorly-made onigiri to him. Surely he won't later turn out to be some kind of good-hearted laid-back guy then, right? I do have to admit the drawing revealing Zoro's rather unrealistically shaped legs does look kind of cool. Luffy is further suggested to be epic level since to him breaking ropes while being bound by them is child's play. And we hear the character whose appearance probably didn't even surprise a Japanese boy back when this shit originally came out reveal...

...that he is epic level too. Zoro reveals that he had been tied up for 9 days, resulting in him getting "exhausted". Nevermind that the average human can only last some 3 days without water (especially in the brooding tropical heat of the OP setting), how Zoro had managed not to have to SHIT for 9 days is mindboggling!!! As Luffy (who knows all too well that he is invulnerable, rendering all future fights moot and pointless on a dramatic level) strongly considers freeing the pirate-hunter, a little girl sporting the same oversized pupils as every other female in the story (apparently) appears...

and tries to poison Zoro with a rice ball purposefully made with sugar instead of salt (hey, they are both white grainy substances!), purposefully cause the sugar is used to conceal the strange taste of the poison! Unfortunately (for the reader), a character even less likeable than Zoro appears on the scene - Helpoemer, the Marine Lieutenant's cowardly son of a bitch. He forces the unnamed girl to discard the rice balls from her hand... ahem I mean hands, and commits animal cruelty by feeding poison to ants. Our protagonist, ladies and gentlemen! Wait... what? Anyway, Nami's little sister is all mopey about the fact she doesn't get the mile-high bounty for Zoro's death now and decides to be punted out of the compound by a nameless henchmen, forcing Luffy to display his superior baseball skills. I couldn't make all of this shit up, I swear! Helpoemer makes Zoro an offer he can't refuse, and finally leaves the story forever.

FINALLY, after a long long boring speech about how Zoro wants to be the very best there ever was, Luffy, idiot that he is, feeds Zoro the rice ball. And what happens!? Zoro rolls a natural 20 on his fortitude save...

FUCK

Anyway, we learn that Zoro killed Helpoemer's robowolf (which was helping his master in combat) - I can tell that it was a robot because that thing seriously looks very HAPPY about being pierced with a rapier, ahem I mean slashed with a katana. That picture must be one of the worst drawings in the history of life itself - there is a burn victim (or a black guy, hard to tell) on the scene screaming his guts out because Zoro's right arm has transformed into a SHIELD that is affixed to his back!!! But to top it off, in the next (or is it the previous... damn scanlations) panel we see what can only be whatshisname with both his hands down his pants while his very suspicious gaze is fixed on the sexy little lighthouse girl! You can't tell me there aren't any shenanigans going on right there and then... IN HIS PANTS! And three guesses what is on his hand in the last panel of the page... Oda, you are a pervert!

Next, Luffy punches Helpoemer, who randomly returns to the story after a very long absence, in the face. Good, but boring. Luffy could just as well punch SATAN in the face since he is the main character of a shonen story and therefore can't ever lose a fight (just like in Dragonball Z!). If Luffy would ever fight Son Goku, the universe would implode out of the resulting paradox that is way way worse than the thing with the cat and the buttered toast! And finally this tired-ass filler chapter is over. FINALLY.

One Piece manga rant - Chapter 2

They call him Asshat Luffy

By the way...who does? Nobody ever calls Luffy "Strawhat Luffy" in the first 50 or so chapters (that is how far I got some years ago)! The title of the chapter is lying to us. There's a lie... in a Nintendo game. Oh wait, it's actually a shonen manga!

So, the story proper starts. Captain Fluffy "rows" his small boat wherever the waves carry him (we can see briefly he had two oars in the previous chapter - where no romance ever dawned, by the way - but he seems to have lost one in the meantime, making the rowing part a lot harder. Rowing is hard work too, and we are know one thing never changes in shonen manga: the main character is strictly averse to doing any actual work (other than physical training)! Now the ocean apparently hates Luffy just as much as I do, as our monkey boy is carried straight from a smooth sea to a giant-ass whirlpool, laughing light-heartedly as if he knew that as the main character he couldn't probably be die in the second chapter. Never mind that the whirlpool is big enough it could swallow a full-sized galley! Luffy reflects on how being able to swim wouldn't help him in the situation anyway, once again rendering the downside of eating the devil fruit moot and pointless. Good job, Oda!

Luffy now nails HIMSELF into the empty barrel he conveniently brought along (why the fuck is it empty? It could only have contained water - and if he already emptied a whole barrel of water, surely he would have brought food with him too... but we never see any. It has to be empty or he would be wet when breaking the barrel later. So the barrel makes no sense whatsoever.) while already being swallowed by the waves. So he does this impossible task WHILE underwater, even making the point he doesn't come out of the barrel dripping wet more ridiculous. Unless he drank the salt water too, or something. Oda clearly has never seen a barrel in real life, either. All this stupidity, and we're only on page 2 of the chapter!!! To top it off, this entire stupid situation could have been avoided with better direction (I'm using film terms as I wouldn't know how to describe what I mean otherwise). There was no need for the cheap scare of pushing Luffy 99% close to mortal danger before a scene change when 90% would have been perfectly sufficient. What I mean by this is that if the shot had been cut here (before the red or even the yellow part)

the scene would have been acceptable. Pushing your hero TOO close to danger before a cut makes the action unbelievable and appear silly and cheap in most instances. This unacceptable mistake permeates crappy Hollywood movies too, of course: bombs are always disarmed at 0:01 seconds, the foes' bullets always miss the target ever so slightly, there's always exactly one black guy in a clique of otherwise white people... oh wait, wrong enforced cliche! So, to end this argument: showing Luffy being swallowed by the water was enormous fail, since it added several levels of impossibility to the task of surviving the situation in a credible way. Throwing the last few panels in the trash would have salvaged EVERYTHING, and not have taken too much "excitement" away (I mean, even little children know that the main character doesn't die in chapter 2). If Luffy were given some off-screen moments (we can't tell how long they last, since he is off-screen! That is the genius of it!), we don't (necessarily) need any explanation as long as we know he's not underwater yet; there is a barrel with him, and he escapes from a barrel. That ONLY works if Luffy is given that amount of time. In the case presented, he is not given that time. I think I made the problem with the direction of that scene perfectly clear now...

Learn from this example, readers, for the sake of people like me who want to have even but a tiny pinch of logic sprinkled on their dinners, no matter whether it's a hamburger or Beef Wellington. It's not hard... it's not fucking hard!

Let's ignore the chapter title pages, they aren't meant to make sense. Even NGE has some weird ones too.

Ok, so we're on a "remote island" (one of 700 billion in the One Piece universe...) next. Alibaba's (or whatever her name is) pirate ship has the ugliest fucking figurehead I've ever seen. Our unlikeable fatass antagonist bitches about there being "dust" on her ship. Now, that's another example that Oda has a) never been on a ship in his life, which is hard to believe since he's Japanese and therefore by default LIVES ON AN ISLAND or b) is a fucking idiot or c) thinks the readers are fucking idiots. I pick c! (and also b.) Now, the thing with ships is... they float. On the ocean. And the ocean is... made of water. And water... is water. And rain is... water. See the connection there?! Now where does dust only build up? In places where there is no wind, or water, as any of these two prime elements would scatter any dust without fail. Sooo... the railing of a ship. That floats on water, which splashes over the railing when the sea is rough. That is exposed to rain (and it rains a lot in tropical regions) and strong winds (which are needed for sailing). SO THAT IS THE LAST FUCKING PLACE WHERE THERE WOULD BE "A LOT" OF DUST YOU FUCKING IDIOT!!!

Unless...

By now the possibility pops up that Oda puts stuff like that in as an attempt to be funny, or even ironic. I use non-sequiturs, missing-the-point, outright lying and other some such techniques all the time in my writing (also self-reference). But... I'm not laughing while reading One Piece. I'm not laughing because that is simply not what happened. Oda isn't being funny or ironic on purpose here. He's just stupid and lazy because he appeals to a target audience of people who don't give a shit about logic and reality. Suspension of disbelief only works when the rules of the setting are kept intact. I have no problem with accepting that e.g. Superman can fly, or Jesus can resurrect people for dramatic purpose (and sometimes also make people wither like a tree, KILLING THEM. Bet you didn't hear that one in church...). But not even Jesus could resurrect people THAT AREN'T DEAD. Or nail himself in a barrel FROM THE OUTSIDE. Because that simply makes no sense. It's illogical. From what I've seen, One Piece is not being illogical for the sake of being funny. And that would be the sole reason anybody with a functioning brain could justify all the bullshit appearing in the first two chapters alone! You can ignore it, sure, but you cannot justify it. That is all I attempt to prove here. It's certainly not impossible to "still enjoy it", it's just... wrong. Just... don't do that! Don't let hack writers get away with it. That is not beneficial to the evolution of humankind in general, and not beneficial to yourself either.

You morons enable evil fucktards like this one with spending your money on SHIT.

Fact is that I picked One Piece for doing chapter reviews exactly because nothing in this shit makes any sense whatsoever. Because so far, nobody else did what I'm doing now. I googled "One Piece sucks" and such things, and it became apparent that nobody ever tried to analyse the insanity. Why is something so bad the most-sold manga of all time? And what can change the nature of a One Piece reader? I just have to delve into this madness and sacrifice my own sanity to find out! And don't worry, I will go deeper in my analysis later, after having a better overview of this series. For now, it's chapter-by-chapter, page-by-page, panel-by-panel.

So Abidala is set up to be beautiful for two pages, only to be revealed to be hideous afterwards. The point? nONE. She kills (maybe. Ugh, not-showing-the-consequences-syndrome strikes again) one of her crewmembers with her huge-ass "bludgeon" (actually a spiked club or mace since it has spikes). So, since she (a woman? Will we see any physically strong women in this manga later? Before the rules aren't established, we can't rule on how much sense this makes) can bend her crewmembers to her will, she is supposed to be pretty strong, right? After all, she managed to earn herself command of a ship and a remote pirate island. So why does she even care about the dust? Surely it couldn't be... because she is a woman, right?! Yeah, we all know that is the reason. Especially she constantly asks everybody what or who would be "the prettiest thing of all the seas" like she was the damn queen in Snow White.

By the way, if the thing with the dust wasn't so blatantly SHOWN, but presented as a character trait - madness - it would've been OK! Once again... cut that damn panel where we see the dust is actually there, and you are in the green, Oda!

Coby, who is a useless midget wimp with glasses (and later apparently returns as a towering giant, putting him at age ten here, tops, if you compare the sizes), is her navigator and only kept alive because he "knows more about navigation than the others" - for no reason. Where has he picked up that knowledge? Could it be... that he is a nerd?! Will you present us any character that isn't an instant cliché, Oda?!

The concept of a "washroom" establishes the question how far technology has advanced in the OP setting. If the building pictured is that aforementioned establishment, the bathroom even has separated sections for men and women. That seems a little anachronistic to me, but we can't tell for sure by now.

Coby rolls up the barrel (that washed up on shore conveniently, instead of bursting in the whirlpool) of "sake" to the storehouse. All barrels inside look just like the barrel Luffy is in. It is implied that all the alcohol is for Amidala alone, but the the underling pirates want to get drunk nevertheless... maybe the first reasonable thing in this entire story and something I can very much relate to! With the power of ale, we cannot fail, after all! But Oda failed, letting Luffy erupt from the container after a "nice nap". No comment.

Amygdala then pointlessly levels the entire storage room (and the entire stock within it, apparently!!!) by throwing her melee weapon. If that doesn't scream epic level, I don't know. The antagonists suspect the intruder could be Zoro, the pirate hunter. Surely we won't see such a legendary character so soon into the storyline, will we!?! Yeah, it would be ridiculous to present him quickly after just having hyped him up so much.

Coby follows Luffy, who has been spirited away into the forest by the blow of the ogre woman's club. When hearing about a whirlpool, Coby assumes for no reason whatsoever that Luffy is not a "normal person". He then shows stretchy boy his pirate pen- ahem, I mean his pirate vessel he painstakingly "secretly" built (his mistress has (just) been shown to be extremely attentive to what her crew does, so this clearly could never have happened) and is perfectly willing to give it to him, no questions asked. Yet Luffy insults him to his face for no reason, a person who was nothing but helpful and nice to him. Our protagonist, ladies and gentlemen! Yet Cosley Crusher continues to suck up to Luffy, acting freaked out and bewildered by the fact that Luffy wants to be Pirate King and find the One Piece "in the pirate era" - so the fact Luffy aims to do what EVERYONE ELSE WANTS TO DO TOO!!! What a twits (sic!). Luffy then does the sensible thing and punches Coby (Buchannon) (off-screen) to shut his obnoxious yelling up. Our protagonist, ladies and gentlemen!

Of course Ali Bali overhears them (since Cody is so goddamn LOUD) and destroys the little boy's junk. Shit is gonna get real now, yes? No, of course not. Luffy's rubber body renders him immune (or at least rather resistant) to Argenta's mace thing, in other words bludgeoning and piercing (it has spikes all over it) weapons. Talk about over-powered. So if Luffy turns out to be immune to slashing weapons (e.g. katana) too - he's de facto invulnerable, since magic attack spells don't seem to exist in the OP universe. Luffy is basically a hero deity already, and that is right after character creation, which means that the devil fruit gave him a new type (bye bye, human - hello, outsider) with a ridiculous level adjustment of +20 or more. He's later going to face creatures as powerful as he himself is, so... fine. At this point Luffy seems to be ridiculously overpowered, but as can be seen e.g. in Dragonball (Z), such innate power can later in the story justified reasonably and retroactively. However, fruit eaters like Luffy are clearly a special case in the OP universe. His friends like Zoro and Usopp, who are mere humans and have not undergone a type change, clearly must seem like weakling children in his presence, right? We will see how they are displayed in the upcoming fights and reserve judgement for that point in time. ^^

By the way, Luffy might be rubber, but the straw hat clearly is not glue. So the hat not taking damage might be fine in the simplification and abstraction of D&D... but in drawn form it makes things rather unrealistic it isn't torn to pieces when a large spiked weapon hits it (and Luffy underneath it) with full force.

So then Luffy beats the pirate woman with one hit, in true shonen fashion. Her men are overjoyed to be able to shake off her yoke - we will see this every time a villain is defeated, I'm sure. So how fucking weak were they, then?! The grand line is continued to be hyped (boy, can't I wait for more overpowered characters... the excitement), Coby talks more shit about things clearly above his head (did Luffy tell him about the rubber fruit? So how is it surprising he ate it then? Or did Coby know about it beforehand? He clearly should be able to tell that Luffy ate the fruit then... by using LOGIC). Luffy gets the sudden overpowering urge to add Zoro, the PIRATE HUNTER to his crew, even though he had just heard about his very existence five minutes earlier. People all around seem to hate pirates with a passion, though - though we never see pirates doing anything evil early on. Somehow Oda had a very strange concept of what a pirate is...

So... this chapter was bad. Really fucking bad. I read ahead some, and things continue to be very dire, with one unique exception (!), but as far as I can remember, nothing is quite as offensive to my mind capable of using logic than this shitload of a chapter. The asinine and pointless one-shot character of Whateverhernameis, the dust on a ship's railing, Cody's incessant whining, Cody in general, the STUPID moment with the barrel... the ingredients of a nightmare. So glad I can put this chapter behind me now. But that doesn't matter much, does it? There are OVER EIGHT HUNDRED more of them!!!