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Forest of Illusions

About Forest of Illusions

L.I. Underhill is a media critic and historian specializing in pop culture, with a focus on science fiction (especially Star Trek) and video games. Their projects include a critical history of Star Trek told through the narrative of a war in time, a “heretical” history of The Legend of Zelda series and a literary postmodern reading of Jim Davis' Garfield.

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Thoughts on Dynasty Warriors 9: The Blue Dragon

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In order to understand what Dynasty Warriors is really trying to tell us, let’s first get back to basics. Why is a video game series adapting the history of the Three Kingdoms, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms in particular, called musō (“unrivaled”) in the first place, and why would this be the game to pioneer “1 vs. 1000” combat mechanic it is so (in)famous for?
 
The mascot character for Dynasty Warriors has always been Zhao Yun, and I do not believe this is either accidental or arbitrary. Zhao Yun is known as one of the Five Tiger Generals, who were famed as the most loyal and revered generals of Shu. It is Shu’s emperor, Liu Bei, who is generally considered to be the actual protagonist of Romance of the Three Kingdoms (if you had to pick one) at it’s his exploits and deeds that are depicted in the most positive and sympathetic light. However while Liu Bei is certainly not a supporting character in Dynasty Warriors (especially if you choose to play as him), it’s Zhao Yun who appears on the box art of all the mainline entries and who is oftentimes used as the series’ representative in crossover works and publicity materials. He is also tacitly implied to be the default player character.
 
Zhao Yun’s feats are sometimes seen to have been exaggerated, but again, Romance of the Three Kingdoms *is* historical fiction. We have to think of the book as being kind of like the Robin Hood tales, except very much older. In Romance of the Three Kingdoms and other Chinese folklore, Zhao Yun is depicted as a warrior of unmatched strength, but also boundless humility and loyalty who never boasted of his achievements, did not seek out conflict and refused to draw attention to himself: The epitome of the perfect martial artist who never started a fight, but would always finish one swiftly and decisively if he was threatened or saw someone come to harm.
 
Historically Zhao Yun was known as an uncompromisingly just, loyal and honourable man who was driven by a desire to bring peace to the common people, and the stories emphasize this part of his character to a great extent. Dynasty Warriors shows this as being the ideal he sees in Liu Bei and the reason he is drawn to serve under him. The game even assigns as his signature weapon the Dragon Spear, an unpretentious implement dating back to the Paleolithic era whose beauty is in its elegance and simplicity (indeed, it’s for these very reasons spears have long been favoured by warriors the world over in place of bulkier swords, including by the Vikings, whom pop culture has made almost synonymous with gigantic swords) and also references his auspicious Dragon associations and motifs (his style name even literally means “Little Dragon”). After his death, Wei Yan remembered Zhao Yun as “A gentle, affectionate, wise, miraculous being who called the land to order” and that “With him, neither accidents or disasters could disturb the peaceful balance he created.
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Thoughts on Dynasty Warriors 9: Flavours of Musō

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Each numbered Dynasty Warriors installment comes in a set of three games. This is also true of Samurai Warriors, and the collaboration games (Gundam Musō, One Piece Pirate Warriors, Hyrule Warriors, etc.) will often have a variation of it. The three versions of Dynasty Warriors are as follows:

The Base Game (e.g. Shin Sangoku Musō 7/Dynasty Warriors 8)

These are the core numbered releases, and the ones that tend to see all the major changes. They will often appear at the start of a new hardware cycle to take advantage of graphical and processing enhancements made since the last main entry, will offer significant gameplay changes (while the base combat of course always remains comparable, things like modes, story progression, RPG elements and other features can and do change quite frequently and dramatically). This is when the vast majority of new characters will be introduced and existing characters will be completely redesigned from the ground up, oftentimes both aesthetically and mechanically. Some characters will lose former signature weapons and gain new ones (or in the case of Dynasty Warriors 9, get shifted into a different weapon class).
 
You might see new areas of China rendered and new parts of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms story included that weren’t before, or parts that were previously skimmed over for time and resource constraints will now be explored in greater detail (this oftentimes goes hand-in-hand with a particular new playable character). These are the games that receive the lion’s share of Koei-Tecmo’s resources and publicity, building lots of pre-release marketing hype. In recent years they also tend to get supported for several months afterward with a barrage of premium downloadable content, including special pre-order exclusive costumes, new weapons, stages, music tracks, and sometimes even new entire characters.

The Expanded Edition (e.g. Shin Sangoku Musō 7: Moushouden/Dynasty Warriors 8: Xtreme Legends)

Starting with Dynasty Warriors 3, each numbered entry has received a secondary release within 12 to 18 months of the game’s original launch, subtitled Moushouden. “Moushouden” means “Mighty Legend”, and gets appropriately localized into English as “Xtreme Legends”, spelled precisely that way. The name is in reference to Lu Bu, known as one of the fiercest, most powerful and most bloodthirsty warlords in Chinese history, and it’s Lu Bu who usually appears on the box art of Moushouden expansions in lieu of series mascot Zhao Yun.
 
Back in the olden days, Moushouden/Xtreme Legends releases were actual expansion packs: Secondary discs you would buy and that would interact with previous save data you had from the current base Dynasty Warriors game. You could also compare them to the myriad of revisions Street Fighter games tend to get over their lifespan as they bring with them gameplay tweaks and balancing, except in this case there’s only one instead of ten gazillion. But Moushouden expansions also bring with them a wealth of new content, often in the form of new game modes and revisions to existing ones.
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Thoughts on Dynasty Warriors 9: Records of War

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The latest entry in my favourite video game series is out this week in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea and will release in the United States and Europe next week. And I won’t be buying it, at least not yet. Allow me to elabourate.
 
Some might say my taste is suspect for picking Dynasty Warriors as my favourite video game series, but that would be saying nothing as my taste has *always* been suspect. Furthermore, I believe Dynasty Warriors, and the larger musō genre it gave birth to, is frequently misunderstood and sadly underrated outside its core fanbase (at least in the West). It is a deceptively accessible series with what I find to be a profound amount of hidden depth and meaning at both a mechanical and symbolic level. Furthermore, at the stage of life I am now at, Dynasty Warriors and its ilk are basically everything I’m looking for in a video game. Consider this series, written in honour of the release of Shin Sangoku Musō 8/Dynasty Warriors 9, an attempt at putting some of that right…And perhaps explaining myself.
 
While a major series in the East, Dynasty Warriors has an unpleasant reputation for being shovelware in the West. There are, to my mind, a number of different reasons why it has been misconstrued this way, only one of which is mild racism of the sort that would plague a knowingly-flamboyant, dramatized retelling of East Asian history to find a degree of overseas popularity. I will perhaps address those issues in a later post, but for now I want to focus on objections raised at the gameplay and industry level. Western audiences, and especially Western critics, tend to look down on Dynasty Warriors as being “the same thing over and over again” released far too frequently. Although one could question the logic behind this argument by pointing out the entire first person shooter, crafting-survival and open-world crime genres exist and are readily accepted by everyone, that’s not a line of thinking I want to pursue because (as I will discuss more later), it’s actually better to think of Dynasty Warriors as occupying a unique niche somewhere between annual sports releases (Madden NFL, NBA 2K, WWE and especially FIFA, the biggest video game in the world) and Nintendo games. Instead, it’s worth looking at some historical factors connected to the series itself dating all the way back to the first entry: Dynasty Warriors 2, a launch title for the PlayStation 2.
 
[Before I go on I should naturally explain that admittedly interesting titling choice. The original Japanese name for Dynasty Warriors 2 was Shin Sangoku Musō, which is still the official name of the series on the whole. “Musō” means “unrivaled”, which has gone on to be the unofficial name of the genre the game spawned, while “Sangoku” refers to the historical period during which the games take place, the Three Kingdoms period of ancient China. The telling part is “Shin”, which means “new”, “true”, “pure” or “god” and was chosen to distinguish this game from the first Sangoku Musō.
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End of Year Update

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No proper post today. I’ve had an incredibly trying few weeks, I’m feeling rather drained and uninspired and nothing really came up to come together. So instead I’m using my last column of 2017 to take stock of the past year for me at Eruditorum Press and begin to sketch out the year ahead.
 
I began with The Elder Scrolls and Nintendo and ended with The Elder Scrolls and Nintendo (well, technically I began with the Star Trek: The Next Generation comic “The Truth Elusive”, but the audience for 20 year old Star Trek tie-in comics can be charitably described as a niche demographic). Along the way, I moored the blog project I’ve been working on every week since 2013, Vaka Rangi, reached the climax of my unexpected series on The Legend of Zelda and went crazy with what once was a humble thought experiment to write about Garfield. I wrote about Shin Gojira a year late, creeped everyone out talking about Natasha Henstridge and Species, pissed everyone off talking about Sailor Moon and annoyed everyone defaulting onto my old game journalism habits between jobs. And my favourite band came back to see out the whole sordid affair.
 
So pretty much just another year, albeit a year of transition.
 
Fittingly, the biggest thing that happened to me in 2017 is something you won’t be able to see the effects of until 2018. I’ve talked about it elsewhere (and indeed a big part of this is cribbed from a comment I wrote under one of Phil’s updates a few weeks back: I wanted to consolidate it into a proper post and report on some new developments that have happened since), but I received some surprising news last winter that cemented what the successor to Vaka Rangi was going to be. Neither of my other current blog projects were intended to fill that gap: I started writing Hyrule Haeresis for Tumblr (for a blog that no longer exists, so don’t bother looking for it) and it was never intended to get as big as it’s gotten, and Permanent Saturday was, as I said above, originally a thought experiment that wound up having legs. Neither of them are at the daft level of scale or ambition Vaka Rangi was born from. This, however, might be.
 
I’ve been planning this all year and it’s basically all outlined and ready to go already, but since there is a “fieldwork component” to this project it has to wait until I can physically make that trip. I do not want to tell you what this is or where I am going because I want you all to be surprised. Mostly, I confess, because I like appearing unpredictable. I can tell you however that I may get the chance to start writing and posting sooner than originally expected: March instead of April. But you will know when the time draws closer. Once that launches, it will almost certainly become my main weekly blogging project for Eruditorum Press going forward, but it will not be the only one.
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Rule of the Jungle Ashcan 1: Solstice

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The following is a brainstorming experiment for a potential new project I’m considering that I’ve tentatively decided to call “Rule of the Jungle”. This is not the “Surprise Book” that will become my main blogging project here this coming spring, but it could potentially run alongside it depending on whether certain factors come into play for me. Since this essay may or may not go into the final book, which may or may not actually happen, that’s why I’m calling it an “ashcan preview” of sorts. Or maybe it’s a “vertical slice” of themes and concepts I might be interested in playing with in the finished product. It was inspired by things I always think about at this time of year and interests I’ve always had and I’ve got a rough path to an outline at least, so we’ll see where this goes.
 
Everything nature does is a circle. The heavens dance around themselves.
 
The stars and their planets are round, and we visualize their circular orbits and rotations as the passage of time. Seasons change, and the sun rises and sets. Even life and death are part of this same great circle: We are born from other realms, incarnate in these forms, live out our mortal lives in communion with one another and return from whence we came. Even in the lands where the seasons do not appear to change as dramatically, a circle may still be drawn: Power comes from the four directions, and a compass is round. And life and death remain.
 
I am a child of the summer. Not literally, as this embodied form of mine was first physically born in December, which, fittingly for a Northerner whose birthright is the mountains and hinterlands, is close to midwinter in the Northern Hemisphere. But it is my favourite season; the season whose power I feel the strongest and that resonates with me the best. I do love the winter and have learned to appreciate its stark beauty, but I am ill-prepared to deal with its particular extremes and the dwindling warmth and sunlight brought upon by autumn takes a severe toll on me. But seasons only change from the perspective of a single vantage point: Part of nature’s cycle is that, from the viewpoint of the entire world, seasons do not change so much as they appear to move. Not just the animals, but entire energies appear to migrate in tempo with the orbits of the celestial bodies. From where I sit writing this it is the depths of cold and dark winter, but elsewhere it is summertime.
 
But only temporarily. For as the solstice approaches the seasons are about to move once more, with the North beginning to depart the dark half of the year, while the South begins to enter it. Perhaps that’s why, at this time of year, my thoughts turn back to the summer warmth and the lands where the sun shines always.
 
All of this is a long-winded and self-indulgent way of leading into the fact that I tend to associate the winter holiday season with tropical imagery just as much as I do the snow-covered evergreen trees outside my window.
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Hyrule Haeresis 9

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And so it begins once again. And so it ends.

The stargazers tell us that when we look deep into the Night Sky, were are looking back in Time. Even at the speed of light, we can only see the stars as they once were, not as they are now. Hence, when we cast our gaze Skyward, we peer into our past.

It is always in Faroff Heaven where we seek our Origin. The foundational myth any state tells itself is of the separation between Earth and Heaven, because those in power cannot maintain it through divine right if the divine is accessible to anyone. And the Origin Story is always the tale which explains to us why the world is the way that it is. Our Natural Order issued to us from an aloof and distant land in a time so long ago it cannot be changed any longer. When Heaven is removed from us Heaven becomes banal. Or perhaps another Lament for a lost Golden Age, lost so long ago it might as well have been in Heaven? Some stories tell us how to get along with each other or how we might learn something of the nature of other living things. Some stories are alive themselves, giving us advice befitting our joint lives right now. What is the lesson you take from the story of your own creation?

Sometimes the entire world changes in a single moment, like the shifting winds, and a new Reality is born.

This is the real story of what happened with the Nintendo Wii. Although not created explicitly to compete with the Microsoft XBOX, its closest analog, the Nintendo GameCube had sat comfortably alongside it and the Sony PlayStation 2 for half a generation (Factor 5, Nintendo’s shield-sister, had in fact requested the GameCube to be a more competitively powerful console, and helped co-develop it). And this had been the tradition: While the Famicom had been more or less in a class of its own, the Super Famicom had been created as a direct response to the SEGA Mega Drive (or rather, the Genesis, as North America was the true stage for that conflict) and there was much more parity between the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation than people wanted to admit. And while the GameCube had struggled, the larger concern was that video games were becoming far too exclusive. Fewer people played video games overall than in decades past, and many people who used to play played no longer. So it was decided by both former president of Nintendo Hiroshi Yamauchi and then-current president Satoru Iwata that the GameCube’s successor would push inclusivity, approachability and accessibility above all else.

Nintendo decided to cut costs for both them and their users by effectively recycling and updating the technology used in the Nintendo GameCube and, after seeing a promising pitch for motion-sensitive video game controllers inspired by flight simulation from Gryration, Inc., the Wii’s final design and ethos was crystallized. Gyration had tried to pitch the concept to Nintendo’s competitors first, but had been literally laughed at.…

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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Buying Guide

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A combination of technical setbacks and my own incompetence ruined another recording session, so I don’t have a video for you this week. Instead, here’s something I’ve been sitting on that I’d planned to post here next year, so consider it another rough draft of sorts. I’ll update it with new info on Skyrim for the Switch and Skyrim VR for the HTC Vive as it becomes available to me.

While you’re at it, why not check out some of the other things I’ve done on Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls with Ben Knaak?

http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/spirit-tracks-the-elder-scrolls-chapter-i/

http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/spirit-tracks-the-elder-scrolls-chapter-ii/

http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/elder-kings-crusader-kings-ii-mod-with-ben-knaak/

 

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is one of my absolute favourite games, and I cannot put into words how formative and important it’s been to me over the years. So I’m not going to try. Instead, I’m going to encourage you to explore this world for yourself if you haven’t already, and thankfully, TESV is such a modular and flexible game and is available on so many systems you can now experience it pretty much regardless of what your current setup looks like. But because all the many different releases spread out across so many different platforms can be confusing to a new player, I’ve broken down a list of every single release of The Elder Scrolls V to date, with my personal advice on which one is best for which platform. If you were interested in checking out one of the most acclaimed games of all time in spite of me never shutting up about it, but didn’t know where to start, hopefully this list has a solution that’s right for you.

If you have an XBOX 360, PlayStation 3 or low-end PC…

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Legendary Edition

This is the final, complete edition of the original 2011 classic, containing all the patches, updates and all three expansion packs: Dawnguard, Hearthfire and Dragonborn. It’s all collected on one disc, although on Steam the “Legendary Edition” is just a bundle with the main game and all its downloadable content. This version is also how Skyrim is represented as part of The Elder Scrolls Anthology, a collector’s box including PC DVDs of all five current Elder Scrolls games, although you’ll still need a Steam account to access the games anyway.
 
If you at all have the option, I do recommend the PC version as the best of the three, if only for mod support and the ability to push the resolution and texture detail above and beyond what the XBOX 360 and PlayStation 3 were capable of. After that I recommend the XBOX 360 version: The PlayStation 3 had a notoriously unfriendly development environment, and sadly many PS3 versions of third-party games like Skyrim were oftentimes the worst ones. Skyrim itself ran infamously terribly on the PS3, to the point Bethesda weren’t even sure for a scary while it would *ever* get the DLC expansion packs, particularly Dawnguard. Thankfully those issues were eventually resolved and the PS3 got both the DLC and the Legendary Edition, though as I’m unfamiliar with the PS3 I’m not sure how it’s version of the Legendary Edition stacks up to the XBOX 360 one.
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Permanent Saturday: The Call of the Wild

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Garfield is made great by the thin line it walks between comfort and banality. The strip is defined in equal parts by both concepts, and it’s impossible to have one without the other. Indeed, when it is one, it is so precisely because it is also the other at the same time. Like everything about Garfield, its running gags play into this: We expect to see them and thus enjoy the thrill of recognition when we do. And while the strip can dispense a seemingly endless series of variations on the same handful of setups, the structure itself must always remain fundamentally comforting, familiar, recognisable and, necessarily, banal.

Like the Wise Man of the Mountain we looked at last time, Garfield’s Echo Point is a running gag whose setup is based around one of our characters (usually the cat in question) interacting with an unseen aspect of Nature outside of the panel. And this time, it’s a comedic double-act built out of a literal call-and-response. Garfield reads the sign, understands that this is a place where echoes can be heard and meows into the canyon awaiting some kind of answer. Usually he gets one. In these strips then Garfield is more often than not playing the straight man again, with the punchline coming in the form of the comedic response the echo provides him with.

An echo is a captivating, almost magical thing. It’s a disembodied sound, sometimes your own voice, reverberating off of the surrounding landscape and coming back to you in such a way it seems as if it’s materializing out of thin air. Or, perhaps more accurately, as if it’s coming back to you from somewhere across the horizon. This is, after all, the sensory experience of an echo: The feeling that there’s someone somewhere in a faraway land who can hear what you’re saying, is listening, and responding back in turn. And yet, they can only respond by repeating what you yourself just said, as if they are your own ghost or shadow-self. Garfield itself has already explored this sensation, having the punchline of one Echo Point strip from a Sunday in 2011 be two cats meowing to each other from across the canyon’s expanse, with neither aware of the other’s existence. Cleverly, the Echo Point backdrop in that strip is mirrored across the divide between the final two panels, with Garfield and his interlocutor walking away marveling at the natural wonder. For of course, neither can see what or who exists beyond the boundaries of the comic strip panel’s border.

This time, the response comes in the form of a text message on Garfield’s smartphone (there is the inherent ludicrousness of a housecat owning a smartphone, but Garfield stands in for the modern human. Isn’t it just as ludicrous that statistically everyone has one of those things?). On its own, a telephone can be read as a suitable metaphor for the sensory experience of an echo: An unseen, perhaps even ghostly, presence on the other end of the line is listening to and interacting with you.…

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Commentary: BloodRayne and Bloodmoon

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I hope you’re not all sick of BloodRayne yet.

There’s a new video on my YouTube channel. It’s a rambling, half-lucid live replay of the first few stages of BloodRayne. Yes, the ones I already showed off.

There is a reason for this, as I explain in the video. Since I lost all my progress from the original filming of the first block of Bloodmoon episodes, I needed to go back and replay the opening hour to get a point to continue from, and I used the opportunity as an excuse to talk about the conceptual origins of the Bloodmoon series, why on Earth I chose to spotlight BloodRayne so heavily and my ever-deepening fodness for and connection to this silly, silly game.

If you like delerious, circuitous ramblings as points, arguments and conclusions slowly come into and out of focus, this video is for you. If nothing else, it’s a decent snapshot of how my mind works.

I do have to apologise though for the video cutting out briefly during the cutscenes. BloodRayne plays cutscenes in a different window than the gameplay, and OBS doesn’t like that.

 

You know the drill:

 

BloodRayne on GOG

BloodRayne on Steam

Mods used:

BloodRayne XBOX 360 Controller Support…

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Unreal Tournament 2004: Arena Shooters and Metroid Talk

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Come join me on a night in as I play a few rounds of Unreal Tournament 2004 and talk mostly about the Metroid series. Because that’s just how I do things.

Topics discussed (or really, rambled back and forth on) included arena shooters, my history with the genre and why I like them, the differences between Unreal Tournament and Quake, the things the genre needs to do to come back, and of course, the Metroid series. Particularly Metroid Prime Hunters, which is an unjustly overlooked Metroid-themed arena shooter for the Nintendo DS. This is probably as close as I can get to doing a real Metroid project right now, so I hope I was able to answer at least some of the questions you might have had about how I feel about Nintendo’s most fraught video game franchise.

 

Because I mentioned him, here are some links to the good work video game historian Liam Robertson has done on the Metroid series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lMLRIwiB_c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFpLm3Dg7Yg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22E5ectnU4o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7WNYpOJ0y4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoV5SbM_V8M

 

Here are the games used and mentioned in my video:

Buy Unreal Tournament 2004 on GOG

Buy Unreal Tournament 2004 on Steam

Get the Samus Aran mod for UT2004

Get an emulated version of Metroid Prime Hunters from the WiiU eShop

 

This is kind of an impromptu, experimental test for a new kind of video series I’m debating starting. If you like me being this unscripted and freeform, please let me know: I have a couple of ideas for ways I can use this approach for other games.…

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