A Little Bit of Self-Promotion

The Lovecraft E-Zine is branching out into print publishing, which makes me really happy, because, while I like my tablet and all, I really just love good old fashioned paper magazines.

According to their site, they'll eventually make paper editions of all past issues. Issue 27 is the only issue available, but that's okay, because it's the Second Annual Night in the Lonesome October tribute issue, which includes my story, Mother of Monsters.

To order the print issue, click here.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: But Not the Herald

It's been a while since I've written a proper Zelazny review.

And it seems like all of my latest Zelazny reviews open with a variation on that sentiment. Heh.

I had to check to see if had already written this one. This story always fails to make an impression on me. Reading it is like talking to the Nameless God in Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I can read it and then be unable to tell you the first thing about it, five minutes later.

(Amusingly, I googled the title while doing some research and came across someone's comment on the Facebook wall of their local newspaper, complaining that coupons had been left out of the paper: that story still doesn't explain why all the other newspapers got the coupons on sunday but not the herald.)

I don't think I would have written this review at all, save for the fact that it was written on Zelazny's blackest night, along with two of his most passionate and moving reflections on grief and loss, Divine Madness, and Comes Now the Power.

But Not the Herald is the Teddy Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore, admirable and respectable, but lacking the legendary status of its peers.

Now, I like the story. I don't want to make it seem as if I don't. Consider the opening.

As the old man came down from the mountain, carrying the box, walking along the trail that led to the sea, he stopped, to lean upon his staff, to watch the group of men who were busy burning their neighbor's home. 

"Tell me, man," he asked one of them, "why do you burn your neighbor's home, which, I now note from the barking and the screaming, still contains your neighbor, as well as his dog, wife, and children?" 

"Why should we not burn it?" asked the man. "He is a foreigner from across the desert, and he looks different from the rest of us. This also applies to his dog, who looks different from our dogs and barks with a foreign accent, and his wife, who is prettier than our wives and speaks with a foreign accent, and his children, who are cleverer than ours, and speak like their parents." 

"I see," said the old man, and he continued on his way.

I like that bit about the dog. This story reminds me a bit of Youth Eternal, which I first read in Threshold, the first of NEFSA's Collected Stories. (I'd like to review that one, but I can't figure how to cover a two page story that's almost entirely dependent on its twist.)

Our old man continues, sees people being jerks to each other and it accosted by muggers as he comes upon them burying the body of their victim.

The old man continued on his way to the sea, coming after a time upon two men who were digging a grave for a third who lay dead. 

"It is a holy office to bury the dead," he remarked. 

"Aye," said one of the men, "especially if you have slain him yourself and are hiding the evidence." 

"You have slain that man? Whatever for?" 

"Next to nothing, curse the luck!"

I like the story, with its cheerfully immoral parade of criminals. Disappointed with their earlier haul, these muggers take the box the old man carries, but he cautions them not to open it.

I am a Pantera's box you do not want to open.

They do anyway, and Hope, a winged creature with an infinitely delicate and pathetic voice, flies to the dark corners of the Earth.

When the two murderers turned again to the old man, he was changed: For now his beard was gone, and he stood before them a powerful youth. Two serpents were coiled about his staff. 

"Even the gods could not prevent it," he said. "You have brought this ill upon yourselves, by your own doing. Remember that, when bright Hope turns to dust in your hands." 

"Nay," said they, "for another traveler approaches now, and he wears a mighty purse upon him. We shall retire on this day's takings." 

"Fools!" said the youth, and he turned on winged heels and vanished up the path, greeting Hercules as he passed him by.

I think its biggest weakness is that, like Youth Eternal, it's too reliant on the twist for its impact. Nevertheless, it's a fine story, and it has the sly humor and mythological references one expects from Zelazny's work.

Awake, Arise, or be Forever Fallen: Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

This review will have spoilers! Big ones!

It ties into Monday's post about Lunar & Lunar: Eternal Blue, being another video RPG that I really enjoyed.

I wasn't sure about Ni No Kuni when I first read about it. On one hand, I was like "Hey, JRPG with designs and animation by Studio Ghibli!" and on the other hand, I was like "Oh, dead mom. Awkward."

And this isn't a mom who has been dead for a long time, the pain of whose loss has subsided to a dull ache. This is a mom who is alive and loving in the beginning of the game, and who dies saving her son, right there on screen.

Those were some itsy-bitsy spoilers. The next one is going to be really big.

Oliver's tears bring his doll to life. The doll was Drippy, Lord High Lord of the Fairies, who was trapped in this shape when he went up against the big bad, Shadar.

Shadar steals pieces of his victim's hearts, robbing them of courage, love, enthusiasm and other positive traits. In a broad sense, it seems like a childish threat that wouldn't be out of place in Care Bears, but it's handled in such a way that the little details about how the victims act when broken-hearted really lend it a kind of verisimilitude. We see how their pain hurts them, and the people who love them.

It's right up there Hyperbole and a half for a wrenching picture of depression.

Drippy explains that he comes from the counterpart to our world, where everyone has a soul mate. (I think this is one of the few instances where the localization was less than excellent, as soulmate already has a specific meaning in English.) The soul mate is their twin on the other world, and what happens to one, influences the other. Oliver thinks that saving his mother's soul mate will bring her back to life.

We see several cinematic cut scenes with the titular White Witch talking to her council and ordering Shadar around. We learn early on that the Great Sage Alicia, soul mate to Oliver's mom, went up against Shadar and was defeated. I thought the plot twist was going to be that Shadar had seized her heart and she had become the White Witch.

However, what happened was that Alicia fled to our world, an act that meant that she had no soul mate. Alicia wasn't the soul mate to Oliver's mom; she was actually his mother for real. Oliver's mom is really dead, for real, and she's not coming back. And, by the way, Shadar also mentions that he's Oliver's soul mate, and if Oliver manages to kill him, Oliver will die too.

And this little boy, when he should be bereft of all hope, steps up and vanquishes him anyway.

Oliver vanishes and we see Shadar drifting in the void. In his youth had been a soldier who was punished for protecting a little girl in the midst of a massacre. Reprisals were made against his family, and he believed that the girl died in spite of all he had done. He felt like nothing he did mattered and that a world in which this kind of thing could happen didn't deserve to go on. The White Witch heard his despair, and granted him the power to end the world. 

However, the little girl did survive, and she grew up to become Alicia. As Shadar was dying, she was there to comfort him. Shadar's final action was to release Oliver from his doom. It was really very moving, and it ties in with the theme of the whole game, that people make bad choices when they feel frightened and weak and alone.

It's a story about overcoming grief. We love people, and they die, and we have to learn how to go on living without them. There is a temptation to retreat from the world or lash out when we suffer a loss, but the peace of those paths is a lie.

The story and the presentation are top notch, the kind of brilliance we've come to expect from Ghibli. How's the gameplay? Pretty good. It starts out really generic, with a fight/cast/item/flee menu. But then, gradually, options are introduced over the course of the game, with alchemy and hundreds of little creatures to capture. The Wizard's Companion has a fantastic wealth of information about the world. I think the best stories always hint at more than they state outright, and that's certainly true with Ni No Kuni.

It's a great game, full of optimism and adventure and hope and friendship and good deeds. I talked about how games loom large in our childhood memories, until nostalgia distorts them beyond all recognition. Ni No Kuni is in good in truth as those childhood games are in my memory. It's very possible the best video RPG I've ever played.

Lunar: The Silver Star and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue

This was going to be the preamble to my post about how much I loved Ni No Kuni, but it got so big that I decided to spin it off into its own post.

I've been spending an awful lot of time complaining about things I don't like, so here's a post about something I loved.

For those of you who weren't around back in the early 80's, Dungeons & Dragons was once pretty mainstream. There was a confluence of circumstances which will never be repeated that made it so, but it really was part of mainstream culture once upon a time.

If I'm not mistaken, the first time I flipped through a D&D book was in a local craft store called Washington One-Stop. I started playing the game around 1984 or so, and I've been a tabletop gamer on and off ever since.

I've been playing video RPGs nearly as long. The only reason I didn't start sooner is that the technology was not yet in place. (And the fact that it does exist is one of the big reasons that tabletop RPGs aren't coming back.) I think my first computer RPG was the Eternal Dagger, and my first console RPG was probably Dragon Warrior. I played Final Fantasy I, II, and III, Phantasy Star I, II, III (ugh) and IV. Looking back, I think the thing that surprised me most is how many times I replayed so many of those games. I was a sucker for the melodrama. I rented a lot of games from the local video stores, back when that was a thing, and I would zero in on anything with RPG elements.

I've played a lot of them. Like anything, some of them were great, some of them were awful and some I remembered being great but were awful when I returned to them as an adult. I loved Phantasy Star II as a kid, but man, is it a slog to play through it again. (I still love the music and the story, though.)

I always enjoyed Working Designs' games. They provided quirky localizations of Japanese RPG, and they produced the bulk of their work for the Sega CD. (I still own a Sega CD, but I have no idea if it still works)

I'm going to plagiarize a ton of stuff one of my earlier posts that nobody read from 2010. This time I'll include pictures, though.

LUNAR: THE SILVER STAR

Lunar was awesome. I played it when I was working nights and before I met Jen, which was just a strange time in my life. I'm much happier now than I was then, but part of me misses being able to spend fifteen hours a day working through a video game. I remember renting Final Fantasy II for the SNES. Tim said "That needs at least 36 hours of play time and the rental only lasts for two days. You're never going to finish it in one try" and I said "That sounds like a challenge!" Lunar used actual speech in the cut scenes and I had the volume turned low because I was playing at 3 AM on my day off and then a cut scene begins and Ghaleon starts mumbling, "My apprentice Nash speaks well of you" and I had to run to the TV to hear what he was saying. Speak up, dude! You're the Premier of the Magic Academy! Do you mumble like that during graduations?!

I was looking through old posts to see if I had mentioned Lunar before, and I had forgotten this, and when she was really little, Lily was sitting in her little pink chair and I was singing to her. I was taking Fur Elise, the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth, and Ode to Joy, and singing "La" for each of the notes. She was smiling broadly at each of these, but what really made her laugh was when I "sang" her the song from an old video game. I think Tim is the only one who'll know the song I'm talking about, but it's the La La La song from Lunar: The Silver Star, which really does have "La" in the place of the notes. It's a catchy little tune and she laughed out loud at this. That was her first laugh.

I figured out two of the big revelations in Lunar pretty. I had just finished up another game called Lufia and the Fortress of Doom and it had the same plot twist, which is an element of Asian folklore that goes back to the Princess and the Cowherd, that of a goddess falling in love with a human and choosing to live out a mortal life with him. In each Lunar and Lufia, the amnesiac blue-haired girl is a fallen goddess who falls in love with the main character, recovers her memory but renounces her divinity to be with him.

The other plot twist in Lunar that Ghaleon, the Premier of the magic academy was a bad guy. If you watch the opening cinema, he's practically twirling his mustache and that gave it away.

"Damn, I'm evil. Also, my hand is gigantic."

 I'm not sure if knowing that diminished my enjoyment or not. It certainly provided a different experience than I would have had otherwise. It's a great game. The gist is that the world is in trouble, you have to save it, blah-blah, crying cakes, and that the people who saved the world the last time are the parents or the mentors to this generation.

Ghaleon is the one who drives the plot. He's probably my favorite video game villain of all time. He saved the world, but then ten years after that, he and his best friend had to save it again. He hates the goddess that empowered his friend for turning away from him. He hates himself for being unable to save the world.

This animation seemed a lot more impressive twenty years ago.

As part of his plan, he feebleminds one of the former heroes, turns another to stone, butchers the dragons he was sworn to defend, enslaves a goddess and uses her power to blast a floating continent from the sky. And yet, there's this bit at the end... As you're fighting your way through the final levels of his fortress, where the most powerful monsters in the game are hurling themselves against you, there is this level where peaceful music plays and gentle pixies flit around in an idyllic garden. The faeries will talk to you and it's clear they have no idea of the things Ghaleon has done. It's like he's trying to convince himself that he's not a monster. They believe him a kind, gentle man. And he was, once upon a time. One of the characters remembers how he used to take here on long walks when she was a little girl and wonders what must have broken inside him to make the monster he has become.

LUNAR: ETERNAL BLUE

As good as Lunar:TSS was, the sequel was even more incredible. It was the last game I did without easy access to a walkthrough and Jen bought it for my birthday when we were first dating, so it's special in that way too. It's set a thousand years later and the broad outline of the plot is pretty similar at first. You rescue a mysterious girl named Lucia, and run all over the place, assembling a ragtag band and eluding the White Knight Leo, who pursues you like Javert across the country. While fleeing him, your team arrives at an ancient temple where a recording shows you the events of the last game. As it's showing the defeat of Ghaleon it's suddenly interrupted by Ghaleon himself, somehow back from the dead.

It's worth noting that I was thinking it was great game and the only thing that could possibly make it better would be an appearance by Ghaleon.

Part of the game is to become the heroes out of legend, the Dragonmaster, the White Knight, etc, only to discover that...those roles are already filled. And Ghaleon, the traitor from the first game is their leader.

The game had so many scenes that I loved. You know how in these kind of games, you're always running against a clock before the the villain takes over/destroys the world, but nobody on the team has any problem stopping to get a kitten out of a tree. When you get to one village, Lucia, who was raised away from humans, says "Fuck this noise," and quits the party when you delay the main quest for yet another humanitarian mission.

When traveling through a Sherwood Forest type area, "We're close to Taben's Peak, everyone. Keep your eyes peeled and your hands on your valuables. Ronfar! Get your hands out of your pants!"

Lunar:EB has a lot of the tropes of that era of game, and one of them is that the main character has stats that are significantly better than those of the secondary characters. Leo is a special exception, as he has stats that match the main character's precisely. There's a bit where you've just finished a punishing boss battle and Leo catches up to you. One of the cultists shrugs and activates the runes that summon the boss again, and Leo and Hiro team up to smack it down.

Leo was pursuing you because he believed that Lucia was really the Destroyer, but he was starting to have doubts. When he asks you if you really think that Lucia is the destroyer, you have the option of answering "Only once a month". Heh.

The characters are awesome. I mentioned Ronfar, the lovable rogue who had been a priest, but who fell into despair and all manner of vices because he was unable to save Mauri, his beloved and Leo's sister.

There's Jean, who was raised as an assassin, but who found peace as a dancer, who is fleeing from her former mentor, Master Lunn. He is one of the four false heroes, and she has to defeat him in single combat. Everything about the game feels epic.

Leo was another great character. There's a scene where he realizes that he's been played and that he's been serving a false goddess all this time, and he faces up to the consequences.

It has the best scene ever in a video game. Zophar, the dark god that had been impersonating the goddess Althena, Lucia, the mysterious blue-haired girl whom you had rescued absorbs Althena's power into herself to destroy Zophar, thereby eliminating all magic in the world. Zophar then reveals that such power would destroy the world of Lunar as well. She hesitates, beat...beat...beat...each accompanied by a party member's face, and then she does it, "Althena's light shine forth!" unleashing the forces that will destroy a world.

She hesitated too long to actually do, and Zophar siphons her power, but she still has enough to teleport our heroes to safety. Cut to a town where Hiro is absolutely crushed by despair. Ghaleon shows up and threatens to kill everyone in the town unless you can stop him.

When you do, he reveals to Hiro that he allowed Zophar to revive him so that he could atone for his actions in the first game, but because Zophar could withdraw his power at any time, he could never overtly aid the heroes. And now that he has betrayed his master openly in order to rekindle Hiro's spirit, he will return to the grave once more.

At the very end, Lucia returns to her duties in a spire on the moon and the heroes go back to their lives. There's an ending song and a montage showing the fates of the main characters, and then it goes back to the title screen, where you have the option for a fully playable epilogue! It's not just a tacked on thing, but a full scale trek as Hiro gets the band back together and you get to see the outcome of all the good you've done as you search for a way to be with your beloved. At the end of it, you find Lucia, and the game ends while together they watch the Earth arm in arm.

I'm still going to write that Ni No Kuni post, so keep your eyes out for that. 

Zombie Ben Franklin

Apparently that's a thing.

Hey, I get to employ my little-used "zombies" tag for this post!

I took the online test for Jeopardy last night. I think I did okay. I was home with Lily and she alternated between trying to help and informing me that she was bored, and I'm not sure which was more distracting.  This test was pass/fail and I'll only know if I passed if I happen to be lucky enough to be called to the next round of auditions. Because of the number of people who apply, not everyone who passes the test will be asked to auditions. So, if I get an email inviting me, I'll go, and if not, I'll take the test again next time it's offered.

Anyway, my major concern is that I'll get there and I won't have any anecdotes to relate after the first commercial break. I'm boring.  "Yes, Alex, I blog about the works of an author nobody has ever heard of. Sometimes I watch cartoons with my daughter."

So I put out a call on Facebook to come up with stories I could tell on Jeopardy. A friend suggested the following.

"I will never forget the time that while discussing whether the use of Shikigami in modern society as a form of revenge had reached the same annoying level as Facebook flaming that you had to channel the spirit of Edgar Allen Poe to defeat and reseal the lich of Ben Franklin. That was a heck of a night."

I replied:  Ben Franklin!! Son of a lich! I thought his phylactery was that giant bell, so I cracked it, but apparently he keeps it in that accursed Institute of his!

Now I want to play that game, though! (Also, it would have been funnier if I'd claimed his phylactery was the Franklin Institute's walk-through heart. l'esprit d'escalier , I suppose.)

Maybe some Color out of Space entered into Franklin during his famous experiment. Or he prolonged his life with Masonic Rituals and Unholy Experiments with alchemy and electrical fluid. Or some Unknown Armies weirdness hinging on the Franklin era disagreements over the ideal shape of a lightning rod, as I really like Benny's pitch for the lightning rod!

"upright Rods of Iron, made sharp as a Needle and gilt to prevent Rusting, and from the Foot of those Rods a Wire down the outside of the Building into the Ground;...Would not these pointed Rods probably draw the Electrical Fire silently out of a Cloud before it came nigh enough to strike, and thereby secure us from that most sudden and terrible Mischief!"

If anyone has any good ideas about the lich of Ben Franklin, I'd love to hear them!