Ben X is about a boy called Ben with Asperger’s syndrome (a type of autism). Online, he’s a powerful warrior called Ben X, but in real life he’s a shy, misunderstood bullied teenager, and the film details his struggles.

Personally, while it was ambitious, I thought it failed on a number of levels. There were a few neat factors – most notably the incorporation of the MMORPG ArchLord and it was reasonably competent, but it just wasn’t mindblowing on any level. And I expect mindblowing from my festival films dammit!

So our poor Ben is played by an actor at least 10 years too old. He’s perhaps a bit too effective in his acting his part as a scary loser, because I thoroughly lost sympathy for him partway through and starting hoping the bullies would beat the crap out of him at one point. I guess it doesn’t help that I’m used to watching Asian films, which can be pretty extreme with the bullying scenes (even in comedies like Shaolin Soccer), and comparatively while Ben’s situation sucks, I find it hard to feel sorry for him (though part of that is because I’m just a bitch). Though it was well acted – I was especially taken by the fact that the same nervous tic is repeated by both the actor playing the young Ben and the older ben – and there are other instances of similar attention to detail.

Ben uses way too much internal monologue, because the director also wrote the novel upon which it was based. I had a writing teacher who said that we shouldn’t be afraid to slaughter our sacred cows (those being special, beautiful lines we love and don’t want to get rid of), and this guy really needed that advice. Internal monologues should be saved for bad TV.

The relationship between the guy and the girl kinda pissed me off. Anti-social internet guy winds up with a girlfriend who looks like this:

I really do hate watching movies where the guy gets a girl way too attractive for him. Their relationship overall was poorly depicted. Why would she know his cellphone number but not have his photo after a year? More importantly, why would a guy like that who doesn’t understand normal social interaction find anything attractive in a normal girl? Hell, is she a normal girl? Her personality is far too poorly defined. I feel the movie didn’t establish their relationship at all beyond a cursory conventional romantic thing, so there was a major lack of believability there.

For that matter, his online life wasn’t really defined beyond being “Level 80″ which was a shame, because it’s always quite interesting to see people’s online double lives, especially when contrasted against their real lives. Basically I think the writer was bluffing his way through the entire online aspect of the film (fucking noobs), which means that the main hook of the plot was… toothless (yay mixed metaphors!). The director also doesn’t know when to show and don’t tell, and I saw the ending coming a mile away.

The structure of the film is really disjointed as it’s intercut with “documentary” type interview footage with various characters – all of this is meant to convey some sense of dread, but instead cluttered up the film with largely empty dialogue (”It was only a matter of when.” “It’s sad when kids like this do things like this.” type stuff) and the desired effect could have been achieved more subtly (though it’s possible some parts to make it make more sense were cut during editing, or were from the original novel). But instead all it did was slow the film down at strange points, and could have been cut entirely, I think.

What I did like was the visual linking of the game world to the real world – the HUD would appear, the game mechanics would be mentioned as a metaphor for Ben’s life and so on, but these are applied pretty haphazardly. There’s also a weird Christian element that meshes poorly overall.

Don’t get me wrong though. It wasn’t a terrible film by any means – it was competently done. Just it fell short of the expectations I had of it given its presence in the Film Festival, plus my standards are absurdly high. The old man sitting a few seats down from me walked out, though I think there was an element of generation gap in that. I think to its target audience, it’ll hit its mark no matter what, but personally for me I feel it was lacking.

The environments are really nicely done and ever so immersive, and I love the little touches like the multilingual voice acting – at one stage I had people chasing me and shouting in three different languages. I especially liked making random townspeople think I was crazy – all the “What does he think he’s doing?” and “He must be crazy!” (and my favourite, “If he falls and hurts himself, I won’t help him!”) dialogues never got old for me. The beggar women drove me insane though. I might go on a beggar/drunkard/crazy person killing spree next time I play *cackles maniacally*.

Bad points: the tasks get repetitive and boring, the combat perhaps a bit too easy through combos (though some of the bosses still held plenty of challenge), and there weren’t subtitles, which made things more difficult for a game with that many accents.

I didn’t mind the futuristic component so much. I enjoyed the really clean, modern urban design of it to the extent that it was a welcome break from the medieval stuff. The conceit of the Animus meant that all the stuff like quests resetting, the HUD, health bars, GPS and so on were nicely explained away, which most games don’t bother with. I actually really liked that they bothered, because it was one less suspension of disbelief I had to make on my part (and it’s also consistent with the HUD not appearing in the modern sections, which is clever). The modern section also meant the introduction of more characters, which was good. Graphically I really enjoyed the game, and the controls were fairly good – though it kind of sucked that you didn’t have much control over all the cool stuff he did.

The parkour element was excellent, though the simplicity of the controls meant it consisted of just holding down R1+[x] and the left analog stick, which compromised the sense of doing any cool shit yourself (ditto these comments regarding combat).

I would have liked more historical notes. Maybe an Altaïropedia, or something – the whole Animus conceit would have made it fairly simple to slip in as a “guide to acclimatising to the memory” or something. Or maybe as unlockable bonuses for collecting the flags – which on the PS3 version I played, was pointless apart from something in and of itself to do. Surely they’d have a shitload of source material sitting around, after all.

I did like that they went the whole PC “Kill equal numbers of Muslims and Christians” route. Fighting for either side would have just been awkward, and having both factions attack us was appropriate given Altaïr was the lone wolf outsider type. Templars as bad guys makes sense – no one likes those guys anyway (though it was kind of a pain having them lurking around in alleyways waiting to attack you). I guess you could say it’s a half-assed Kingdom of Heaven way to go about it, but I think it’s the approach that works best for the modern player.

The weapons were pretty cool, though it would have been neat to have special weapons for each major assassination or for particular missions, to make the game slightly less repetitive perhaps. But I did enjoy the hell out of the hidden blade assassinations, sword combos were fun to watch (I especially liked the computerised voice of the Animus telling you in a cool voice “Breaking your opponents’ legs then selecting the hidden blade will kill them quickly.” – paraphrased a bit), throwing blades were useful as hell and the interrogation missions were probably some of my favourites. Fighting was fairly fun, in other words. Which was good, because if the entire game had been stealth that would have bored me eventually.

I understand why you can’t enter buildings, because programming all of that would have been an insane amount of effort, but it still kind of sucks that the buildings are in effect giant blocks sitting in the environment. The roofs are wonderfully detailed though, which almost makes up for it. I also understand why you can’t interact with the background so much other than in running/jumping/killing ways, but it would have been cool to be able to talk to random NPCs and stuff. Maybe I’d been playing too much Oblivion beforehand, because I wanted so bad to pick up and examine everything as well as loot the fuck out of everyone I killed.

I’m definitely looking forward to a sequel. It went a bit Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life at the end (I paid money to see that at the movie theatre, shut up), and admittedly it did seem like half-assing it with regards to an ending. Certainly it was a blatant sequel grab, but it worked. It also makes me curious for the game Mirror’s Edge, another parkour style game (this time set in a future city). Though I don’t think I’ve played a character that looks like me to that extent before, and that includes the avatar I made for Oblivion which is based on myself (I screwed with the head settings too much so it’s a bit pea-headed). Or my Knights of the Old Republic character either, come to think of it. Though neither game makes an allowance to make an Asian avatar, which I think is the problem… and that’s a post for another time.

My most random observation is that Altaïr is actually a kind of a bad assassin. He’s really quite distinctive and isn’t too good at the whole stealth thing. Plus he can jump over rooftops, climb church towers, kill 12 men at once and is effectively the medieval Jason Bourne, yet he can’t swim? What’s up with that? They even have a nice big river in Masyaf to practice in.

Anyway, this is of course my own personal bias speaking, but I’d love to see something like this set in Japan, with ninja. I’m thinking the Sengoku period, with a variety of urban centers to travel to and with a sense of variety and conflict. Certainly running around on Japanese style castle rooftops and stuff would be exciting. The only problem being that most buildings were rarely built taller than one story due to risk of fires and earthquakes, so it might lack a bit of variety. Still, I think it would be fun.

Oh shit, this turned into an actual review almost.

He picks up on most of the bad things, though I haven’t noticed the landscapes so much because I’ve been hanging around in a reasonably small area. I don’t mind the lack of immersion too much, because I like the slightly artificial “I’m off to play a fantasy RPG full of numbers and hit points and goblins and so on” feel.

Though I’m having a rather unique problem in that I’m playing a North American PS3 version on a Japanese PS3. I hit [X] to talk to a character, then I have to hit [O] pick a menu item to say, because if I hit [X] again I exit out of the menu. Basically at times it’s [X] to use/talk/pick up and other times it’s [O] and it makes for a bit of a mess, though I guess it’s kind of my fault.

And yeah, the NPC voices do drive me a bit nutty at times.

This is just an amusing mistake:

Naruto: Uzumaki Chronicles

5.0 / 10

The game is worth a play for the diehard Naruto fan who wants further adventures of the characters,but proves an unrewarding experience for everyone else.

Ups: The game has an easy to use combat system and the ninja powers are fun to play with. The appearance of many familiar characters from the TV show gives a real sense of immersion in the Naruto series. The stats system gives a unique way of levelling up that rewards experimentation.

Downs: The random battles and the non-essential missions get repetitive and boring, and that isn’t helped by the bad enemy AI. The lack of explorable areas means the game gets quite old quickly, and there is very little replay value in the game.

I pity the unwary gamer who picks up Naruto: Uzumaki Chronicles drawn solely by the lure of ninjas. The main character is, after all, not some shadowy black clad assassin, but a preteen boy in an orange hoodie with a somewhat grating voice and an attitude to match. While there are ninjas aplenty, they draw not upon the traditional image of stealthy assassins, but rather from the ninja mythology created in the Japanese anime/manga series Naruto.

N:UC assumes previous knowledge of the original work, to the extent that it’s confusing, if not downright impenetrable to the uninitiated. What is a Hokage? Why is one of my ninja’s powers the ability to turn into a semi-naked woman? Eight trigrams 64 what?

However, if you’re an prior Naruto fan, however, you’ll be pleased to know that a large number of your favourite ninjas and favourite ninja jutsu are included in this game. The use of the voice actors from the TV show help the experience feel immersive and make the game feel like a valid extension of the world created in the anime. The game does suffer at times from some awkward English phrasing, though no translations seem downright wrong or too ridiculous.

A lot of terms are left untranslated though, which, depending on your perspective, either enriches the experience or is a result of lazy localisation. Either way, you should go into this game knowing your Sensei from your Genin. It would be ideal to go into this game having seen at least the first 20 or so episodes of the anime, as the game appears to be set sometime around the Chuunin exam story arc.

The game is split up into missions, with only a few of them being compulsory to complete the game and the rest essentially excuses to put Naruto into battle. No matter how quirky the mission descriptions can be (one mission involves fighting monkeys in order to take back a man’s gambling equipment, for example), the non-essential missions boil down to random battles with grunts, and while they increase the length of the game, they also increase the tedium.

Luckily, the controls for N:UC are assured and intuitive, allowing you to easily unleash various ninja powers at the touch of a button and enabling you to mow through packs of no-name ninjas (or monkeys). The skills, including the Clone jutsu, the Sexy jutsu, the Substitution jutsu and the Power Strike are all well implemented and easy to use during combat. Naruto powers up into his Nine Tailed Fox mode when a combo gauge is filled, which is perhaps overpowered, but the boss fights can be challenging enough to require that. The moves are all introduced at the start via a rather hefty tutorial section, which can also be accessed from the main menu. Having virtually all of the abilities unlocked at the start instead of working to unlock and upgrade them removes some of the incentive to keep playing and level up, however.

While the fights can be fought well, there isn’t much point. As mentioned before, the random battles are all against very generic, boring enemy ninjas. The AI controlling these is poor to the point where the enemy will quite often stand still and stare at you instead of fighting. The fun in the fights is instead with the boss fights against the other characters. Here they show off their signature moves, which look good and are adapted well into video game form. It’s also possible to create a party and take control of the other characters. This occurs in a tag-team format, with the L2 button switching in the alternative character. Given the scarcity of healing items, it’s probably for the best that each character has a time gauge for how long he can remain in combat rather than an HP meter. Being able to fight alongside a teammate would have been better, but there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the existing method. A two-player fight mode would have been a fun inclusion, but is only slated to be included in the sequel.

N:UC goes the Kingdom Hearts route of having the enemies burst into brightly coloured balls upon death. “Virtue” balls are dropped, which are part of a rather unique levelling up system. Virtue is used to buy pieces which enable stats upgrades, and those pieces are fitted, puzzle-like, onto a board in order to be activated. Upon filling the board completely, a bonus is obtained, and different boards can be won through completing different missions. This forces the player to play more strategically, and for RPG players who love tweaking character stats it should add an extra dimension to the game.

Despite being called an action RPG, apart from the fighting style there is little action about it. Everything takes place within tiny combat environments, cut scenes or on the world map, and none of these encourage any sort of exploration. The game was first released in Japan in 2005 and it shows. The combat arenas are mostly drab, grey-green slightly blocky forests and grasslands that look more like they were inspired by an FPS than a vibrantly coloured anime.

Unlike the fellow PS2 Naruto game Naruto: Ultimate Ninja, N:UC is not cel-shaded, and thus visually it appears out of place when compared to the rest of the franchise. For a game that relies so heavily on cut scenes, the cut scenes are awkwardly animated, with stiff movements and sharp edges everywhere. The varying levels of voice acting can also get irritating after playing for too long. As a slight aside, it’s interesting to note that Naruto swings his arms when he runs in battle, but has them stuck out like in the anime in the cut scenes. The world map is nice, but hardly a pinnacle of design.

The soundscape of the game lacks the signature sound of Toshiro Masuda, the composer for the anime. The generic oriental background music is acceptable, but means the game lacks the aural punch of the TV show. The lack of the catchy Japanese pop-rock tunes from the anime may also be a disappointment to fans.

N:UC is a game targetted purely at fans of the existing franchise. While the game has many faults and many aspects which could have been improved, it offers a reasonably entertaining and immersive extension to the world of Naruto. The game’s main strength is in the appearances of characters that fans know and love, and the way the game, for the most part, feels like it’s part of the franchise. The RPG elements are generally well handled, despite the fact that the action aspect is lacking in certain parts. Provided you have completed all the missions though, N:UC has almost zero replay value, due to unskippable cut scenes, little interactivity and repetitive gameplay.

For a while, the Naruto TV show went through a phase of playing endless “monster-of-the-week” type filler episodes where the characters never developed and nothing ever really changed, in order to allow the original author to catch up and write more plot to animate. In a similar way, N:UC is unsatisfying. N:UC is an action RPG that is both a halfhearted action game and to a lesser extent a halfhearted RPG, and the two halves do not make a whole. Overall as a game it is neither truly excellent nor godawful, and thus the deciding factor on the amount enjoyment you’ll take from it is whether you love the franchise and the characters enough to play interactive filler material.

I’ve updated and rewritten this review as appropriate – some of the links were dead, for starters. I’m planning to start offering shopping tips in future entries, so don’t fret that this entry doesn’t give you any help – the idea is that it will be forthcoming.

Anyway, here it goes.

This is a review of the book Cruising the Anime City: An Otaku Guide to Neo Tokyo. Yes, many of the links are in Japanese, perhaps even a large majority. Use babelfish (or rather, Excite) and deal. I see this book described as “essential” to any self-described otaku’s trip to Japan. Alas, I feel it only gains that epithet due to the fact that it’s the only book in its field. The best things about this book are the exhaustive maps of the Nakano Broadway complex as well as the maps of the Akihabara area. Unfortunately, these will be rendered largely obsolete in several years time due to turnover of stores. It has an extensive section on Mandarake, including information on the founder, which is somewhat creepy but will continue to be relevant due to the fact that Mandarake at least doesn’t appear to be closing down anytime soon. The small photos in the map of Nakano Broadway are very useful, however, I doubt the usefulness of including contact information for the stores, given that they probably don’t speak English.

However, even amidst all this practical information, it neglects to mention those small, yet important facts, such as a.) many of the stores at Nakano are closed on Mondays and b.) most anime stores open quite late, around 10am-12pm. It also lacks basic practical information on buying stuff, like basic Japanese phrases, no explanation of the fact that many stores don’t display prices including GST and a general lack of in depth description of the range of items available.

That’s my main problem with the book. On one hand, it assumes you’re a total anime noob by explaining terms like “Otaku” and “karaoke“, yet it assumes you know exactly what you want to buy in Japan, whether it be doujinshi, trading cards, figures, soundtracks or whatever, without giving any details of what that actually entails. A glossary of terms would have been a welcome addition. It would also have been good to have some practical bargain hunting tips (e.g secondhand doesn’t necessarily mean bad, gashapon are cheaper in sets).

The section I had particularly high hopes for, the “places in anime which exist in real life” in particular didn’t live up to my hopes. The section on Morning Musume is larger for gods sake. Demon City Shinjuku is set in Shinjuku? Who would have thought? However, as yet from what I see, there appear to be few English resources on the net in that particular vein, so I guess it’s somewhat forgiveable.

It kind of pisses me off when this book ventures into personal travelogue. I’m thinking particularly the report on Comiket 2003, which basically boils down to “It was really crowded, here are some pics of what I bought” and doesn’t give any useful information to the prospective traveller (particularly when the values of the items bought are given in US dollars rather than yen). There are two maps (one from 2003, one from 2001 drawn from memory), which is the one practical touch, but if one was serious about going, one should buy the catalogue beforehand anyway, rendering it largely pointless.

The tour of Toei studios is another largely pointless aside within the book. Pointless because the studios aren’t open to the layperson and the account segues quickly into a discussion of Toei studios in general, and then into a ramble about the state of anime in Japan, which is all well and good but what seems to be a promised first person account of the Toei Studios does not materialise.

That’s the main problem with the book; it doesn’t know whether it is a travel guide, introduction to otaku culture or a collection of anecdotes. Thus it tries to cover all bases in a paltry 200 pages and overextends itself. Yet despite that, it’s curiously devoid of content. I’m disappointed at the total omission of the Ghibli museum (which IMO is a must visit for any anime fan visiting Tokyo, however it’s a bitch to get to and buy tickets for, and details on how to do that would have been excellent) and for that matter, any details about the Animate chain of stores.

That’s one thing I’d do to improve the book; while the in depth info on the Mandarake and Tora no Ana stores was useful, I’d expand it to include other rather prominent stores like Laox, K-Books and Animate. For that matter, there was no section on Book-Off (a great source of second hand manga), which was weird, considering they wasted a whole 2 pages rambling on about the Ramen museum in Yokohama and nostalgia in general.

Basically, for a book with “Anime” in the title, it doesn’t actually have that much on anime.

I would have liked to see a write up of Akihabara in as much detail as the one on Nakano, more information on the various events and anime museums they have in Japan, more features on stores and chains of stores, a wider range of shopping districts covered (I’ve heard there’s some anime shopping in Shinjuku for example, but I’ve never seen any) and a bigger “landmarks in anime” section.

While this book is somewhat useful for a first time traveller to Tokyo and to the armchair traveller with little Otaku knowledge, I feel that it lacks content for everyone who does not fall within these categories. Oh yes, and women too. It’s male-centered to the point of making me despair, with pages dedicated to hostess clubs, bishojo games and cosplay cafes, written with relish. I understand that most otaku are male, however I still think the book doesn’t have to quite so aggressively alientate a portion of its prospective readership.

Don’t get me wrong, I think a resource like this is important. I just wish they’d done a better job with it (or rather, I think I could have done a better job, given the same resources). I know I’ll be returning this book, rather than taking it with me overseas.