DragonFreak's Review Thread

DragonFreak

DragonFreak

Everything that drowns me makes me wanna fly!
So, I review everything. Movies, books, entire series, single episodes if they are interesting. The reason for this is: I forget a lot of whatever I've watched/read, and can only sustain the information long enough to read it. I write reviews to remind me of how I viewed it. So I will start posting my reviews on here.
My review style is half summary and half opinion in that order. I don't usually say any sort of spoilers, and if I do, I will specify it.


Anime:
Angel Beats
Black Butler (first season)
Death Note
Martian Successor Nadesico
Pokémon: Origins

Books:
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Inferno Revealed: From Dante to Dan Brown by Deborah and Mark Parker
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

Individual Episodes:

Movies:
Catching Fire
Ice Age: Continental Drift

Western Animation:

Video Games:
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Blue Rescue Team
Wario Land 4

Reviews coming up:
Pokémon BW
Pokémon movie: Extremespeed
 
Angel Beats Series

Everyone in this Anime is dead. Their souls are trapped in some sort of afterlife. The only thing each person has in common is that they all died young and did not fulfill their greatest desires. The only thing the members know of this place, is that a girl named Angel is pure evil. Apparently, anyone who sides with her disappears. Where? No idea, but whatever that place is, it cannot be good. Because of this and blaming God about the injustice in their life, Yuri Nakamura founded the Afterlife Battlefront or the SSS. The members of this group cannot enjoy their afterlife, or they will disappear.
Yuzuru Otonashi is the newest member of the SSS. When he first entered the SSS, Yuri pressured him into joining and convincing that Angel was their enemy. Otonashi wanted to talk to Angel about all this, and she stabbed him in the chest. Luckily in the afterlife no one can die. He agreed to join the SSS.
Yuri hopes that in fighting against Angel and God she will have her revenge for her pity life. And then after that, who knows?

I thought that this anime had a very interesting concept. I always heard that it was very sad, which it was, but more so towards the end, and a few times in the middle. The plot, since it is only 13 episodes, progressed quickly to the point where every five episodes or so, the goal of the anime changes.
The characters of the show, especially Yuri, constantly chides God for what happened to her. Just saying this, if you are a very religious person, it may anger you. Although, having God being an enemy is interesting, but suitable for these kids, who feel like they have lost everything and wound up in a place where there is little hope but the SSS.
There's many character developments throughout the series. Many characters reveal to Otonashi how they died, which reveal things about them that many other methods could not come close to achieve. For being a 13 episode series, the amount of character development impressed me.
I was enthralled from the first to last episode with and very satisfying ending. Also, the opening theme song is very beautiful.
Rating: 8.5/10
 
Ice Age: Continental Drift

This is the 4th installment in the Ice Age series and takes place several years after Dawn of the Dinosaurs. It opens as Scrat, once again, tries to claim a nut. He follows it to the core of the Earth, and causes Pangea to break apart into continents, which provides the problem of the movie to begin.
This movie is centered around Manny and his daughter Peaches, who was born at the end of the last movie. Peaches, in human terms, would be a teenager, or at the very least a pre-teen. Peaches is frustrated but Manny's overprotection, and just wants to have freedom to do whatever she wants.
Much to Manny's horror, they get separated by quickly moving continents, stranded at sea with Diego, Sid, and Sid's grandmother, who was ditched by the rest of their family. Now Manny must get back to Peaches, while trying to survive the cruel ocean and the even crueler band of pirates.

I was glad that they made this movie. I just wanted to see what kind of mammoth Peaches was going to be, which ended being a sort of rebellious one. Figures. Even though the separation of father and daughter made for a great sense of purpose the drives the plot through. And, once again, Sid provides the non-seriousness side of the move. That and his grandmother voiced by Wanda Sykes.
Overall, it was OK. Not as good as the first movie, definitely better than the second, but not even close as good as the third. Although, the 2-4 Odyssey references throughout the movie (depending on how lenient you are) helped how I viewed it.
Rating: 5.5/10
 
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

The narration is told through a man named Jonah. He, at one time, collected information for his book The Day the World Ended, which he was doing for most of the novel. His book was to be about what important Americans did when the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The first people he wanted to interview were the three children of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the creators of the atomic bomb. Newt was the youngest child and a midget. His mother died giving birth to him. He was the first to contact Jonah. Frank is Dr. Felix's oldest son. He was a an odd child, and the last that was heard of him, he was wanted by the Florida police. Angela effectively became the family's mother, and she kept the family together and working. Jonah travels to their hometown of Illium, New York to learn about the Hoenikkers.
Jonah travels from place to place learning about the Hoenikker's mysterious past, a substance called ice-nine that can freeze anything instantly, and a lie-filed religion called Bokononism, created by a Calypso singer, only known to the citizens of the Republic of San Lorenzo in the Caribbean Sea. All the while realizing what life means.
See the cat? See the cradle?

There's really not a lot that I can say more about this novel. It was definitely an interesting read. The mood is pretty grim and pessimistic. I probably wouldn't have read it if I haven't read a short story of Kurt Vonnegut. I'll recommend it to anyone who is a fan of Vonnegut, or wants to read one of his works.

Rating: 7/10
 
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Charlie Gordon is a grown adult with an IQ of 68. He has tried all his life to become intelligent, working hard in special classes to improve his reading and writing. Because of his motivation, he was selected to undergo surgery to drastically increase his IQ. The operation was successful once, performed on a a mouse named Algernon.
Charlie's operation was also successful, and everyday he grew more intelligent. His reading and writing improved, along with his speech. he found himself doing things he could never imagine like learning numerous languages.
Charlie also realizes as his IQ increases, so does his problems. His personality changes from lovable and kind to arrogant and self-absorbed, and people resent him for it. Memories from his ugly childhood are recalled, causing him grief. Scientists don't refer to him as a human being, but rather as being created by an experiment. Intelligence may be mankind's greatest gift, but that intelligence may lead the Charlie's downfall.

Surgically raising intelligence. This is one of the greatest concepts I've heard in a long time. Just thinking about it leaves me in awe. Think of how it would help the world.
The novel is told through Charlie's progress reports. You can see through his writings the change in his intelligence. In the first sentence in the book is this: "Dr Strauss say I should rite down what I think and remembir and evreything that happins to me from now on." A couple of weeks after the surgery he writes: "I know I shouldn't hang around the college when I'm through at the lab, but seeing the young men and women going back and forth carrying books and hearing them talk about all the things they're learning in their classes excite me." To me, the transition was really cool and added realism to the novel.
Flowers for Algernon is simply amazing. Do yourself a favor and go read it. It's well worth it, and it may change the way you view the world.
Rating: 9.5/10

Mature warning: contains mild sexual content.
 
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov


I, Robot was originally a collection of short stories published separately. These stories were combined and told by the robopsychologist Dr. Susan Calvin. Every robot in the collection are different, with their own purposes and personalities.
All robots must follow three rules:

1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm
2) A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.​

The book starts off with Robbie, a robot bought to be a nursemaid for a young girl. SPD-13 (AKA Speedy) has disappeared from a mining site on Mercury. QT1's (Cutie) view of the world is just a little off. Problems occur when the robot DV-5 (Dave) and its six subsidiary robots stop producing ore. RB-34 (Herbie) was created with a error, allowing it to read minds, which causes more problems than anyone could predict. NS-2 (Nestor) was commanded to "get lost", and lost it became, as it had fled to camouflage itself with dozens of identical robots. The child-behaving "The Brain" tries to find error in other's work with the most interesting results. A man named Stephen Byerley runs for mayor of an American city, but is instantly accused of being a robot, leading to the entire political campaign on doubt on his humanity. Lastly, powerful machines that runs the Earth's economy have "glitches" to could possibly do harm.

Individually, the stories are quite good, but I don't like it how they were assembled in some halfway continuous story. They should've been kept separate. That being said, the plot of each individual story was quite good. Each one had something to do with humanity and variations of situations of the three laws of robots. Which some of them, like the story about Speedy and The Brain, were pretty interesting.

I never seen the movie before, and I particularly don't plan to. I can't imagine it being at all like this book. It was decent, and a nice read.

Rating: 8/10

Reviews coming up:
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Blue Rescue Team
First season of Black Butler
Pokemon: Origins
Death Note
Professor Layton and the Curious Village (maybe)
Something Wicked This Way Comes

You could say I'm backed up.
 
DragonFreak said:
I never seen the movie before, and I particularly don't plan to. I can't imagine it being at all like this book. It was decent, and a nice read.
Click to expand...

reading the rest of your post, it sounds like there's virtually nothing similar, apart from the 3 laws
 
Yeah, evidently a series of independent but interconnected stories wasn't appealing (maybe the "powers that be" didn't want another Animatrix).
 
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Blue Rescue Team

You wake up as Pokemon. You remember being human, but you have no idea why you are a Pokemon. You meet your partner and you decide to start a rescue team, to save or help Pokemon everywhere. Very noble. And at a good time too. As soon as you arrive, natural disasters happen everywhere without explantation. You want to know why you are a Pokemon, how this connects to the natural disasters, and learn about the mysterious legend of Ninetales. All the while, rescuing Pokemon in need in the countless dungeons.

I will start out by saying I really did not like the gameplay at all. For me, the controls were all weird and awkward. The rescue missions became repetitive and boring almost instantaneously.

However, I loved the plot of the game. You get to be a Pokemon. How sweet is that? It has a very touching ending that did make me cry. The characters were well defined and held important parts of the plot.

In short, the plot is exponentially times bette than the gameplay. If you were to decide to play this, and I don't say this often, play it for the plot. Or just look up the plot on Bulbapedia and save you the time of falling asleep while playing this due to sheer repetition.

Rating: 4/10
 
Pokémon: Origins

Normally here I would write a brief summary, but anyone who would have interest in this anime would have played the original Red/Blue or Green/Yellow or any of the remakes. This anime is essentially an animated version of those games. Because of this, as I stated in the spoiler warning above, I will mention the whole plot.
There are four episodes to this series with about twenty minutes to each episode. There's no way they can fit the entire game into eighty minutes. Instead, they only animated the most important or prominent parts of the game. Those four parts are: Beginning of the journey to Brock, Lavender Town, final battles with Giovanni and Blue, and battling Mewtwo, each one of these interpreting the game slightly different than what most people normally do.
With Brock, it is revealed that according to how many badges the trainer has, the gym leader changes the number and toughness of Pokémon. This explains why gym leaders has spent their whole lives training their Pokémon, but have low-leveled Pokémon.
I'm glad they chose Lavender Town as part of the animation. In the game, it's probably the saddest part of the game. There's Cubone who's mother, Marowak, was killed by Team Rocket. Depressing if you think about it. The anime focused on Cubone and Marowak, and they did a great job on it. Unlike in the game, Cubone and the ghost of Marowak reunite, and it's very touchy.
The fight between Giovanni and Red were very good. I should note here, that the battles in this anime are exponentially times more violent and destructive. It's actually more realistic in my opinion. Red's battle was even better, and came down to Red's Charizard and Blue's Blastoise, with Red obviously being the winner. Professor Oak came in and said his exact quote from the game about how he came to see Blue, but Red won, and he asked Blue if he knew why he lost.
Now comes the last episode, the least cannon part of the anime: Mewtwo. It was cannon in one way: Mewtwo's existence. Now, in the game, there are journals in the mansion on Cinnabar Island that tells of Mewtwo's birth from Mew. To me, I always favored that Mewtwo was born from Mew instead of cloned, so this made me pretty happy that they decided to stay with that. And the fight with Mewtwo...completely not related to the original games, but was nice indeed.
This entire series is nothing but pure nostalgia. The producers did a great job on it. What I hope is that they will make a short series like this for the rest of the regions. Lightning may not strike twice in the situation, but I hope that it does.

Rating: 10/10

Reviews coming up:
First season of Black Butler
Death Note
Professor Layton and the Curious Village (maybe)
Something Wicked This Way Comes
 
Black Butler: First Season

It all started on Ciel Phantomhive's 10th birthday. The fire that killed his parents scarred him for the rest of his life and started him on a long path of misery. That's when it appeared. A demon named Sebastian Michaelis appeared to Ciel and made a contract. Ciel's soul, for revenge. The demon became his butler with demonic strength.
Ciel's new role in live is being the head of the Phantomhive Cooperation as well as working for the Queen of England in underground cases. These cases deal with terrible murders that, as no one could accurately guess, are works of supernatural powers.
Ciel and Sebastian face otherworldly creatures as grim reapers, an angel, living puppets, a hellhound, and other sinister beings. Ciel searches for one thing through it all: who was behind his parent's murder.

I realize that the summary is kind of...boring. I wasn't really sure how to make it more exciting. Saying that, the anime itself is more exciting than what I make it seem.
However, I think this anime has too much hype. Well at least where I am there's a lot of hype. I know about five people who are obsessed with Black Butler. If you're a lover of otherworldly beings and fantasy, and just so happens you love British accents (if you're watching the English dub), then this anime is perfect.
For me, there wasn't much of a "wow" factor. It was entertaining and exciting, but it didn't leave me with a sense of prolonged feeling of amazement.

tl;dr (because of complete mumbo-jumbo): The anime is good, but not great. The second season is actually sort of separate from the first, which is why I did these separately. I'll watch the second season....sometime else.

Rating: 7/10

Coming up next:
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
Wario Land 4
 
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

Will and Jim are not twins, but they might as well be. Their mothers are friends and neighbors, and gave birth on almost the same day. Will was born one minute before midnight on October 30th, and Jim was born one minute after midnight on October 31st. Their lives, it seems, are interconnected.
Halloween, as they learn, has came early that year. A seemingly delightful carnival called Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show arrives in their hometown of Green Town, Illinois at the ominous 3:00 AM, the devil's hour. Carnivals almost never come this late in the year, but with rides and shows of all kinds, who cares?
This carnival is not all fun and games. It's pure evil. Its mission: to destroy the souls of every single person in the town. But who can stop them, when all there is to fight them is Will and Jim?
By the pricking of my thumbs
Something Wicked This Way Comes

First of all, I would like to mention how much I love how Bradbury plays off of Will and Jim. It is described the Will is the essence of light, while Jim is the essence of dark. The theme of Will and Jim represent light and darkness respectively is played over and over again, to which I really enjoyed.
Second, the style of writing of Bradbury is not exactly typical. It's dark and gloomy, and sort of vague at times. I love it, but other people may find it difficult to comprehend. Just putting that as a warning.
Lastly, my own real complaint is that the carnival wasn't, how should I put this, evil enough. Strangely enough, I was expecting that all the rides of the carnival were going to be deathly, but that wasn't necessarily the case. I would have liked to see something more in that department.
In all, it's a great read, and Bradbury did well on this novel.

Rating: 9/10
 
I guess you could say Wario Land 4 next review! :dk:

It does deserve it, though. Wario Land games are fabulous.
 
Wario Land 4

In a newspaper, Wario reads an article about a pyramid owned by Princess Shokora. Sensing treasure, Wario races off to the pyramid with his convertible. Wario is stuck inside the pyramid and has to navigate through four chambers in order to escape, with treasure of course.
In every level, Wario must collect four gem pieces and a keyzer, a bird shaped living key, to unlock the next level. Also, there are CDs that you can collect to unlock cool music. And, of course, there are tons and tons of coins and gems scattered throughout the level.
Wario will face insane bosses. There's Spoiled Rotten, a baby, evil eggplant. Cractus, a giant venus fly trap that can turn you into a Zombie. Aerodant is a mouse on top of a giant, floating teddy bear throwing enemies at you. Cuckoo Condor is a bird inside a clock with two deadly phases. Catbat is a flying cat that uses toges to waste your time or hurt you. And lastly, there's Queen Diva, a spirit of literal many faces.
Help Wario escape the pyramid, and more importantly, take off with the treasure!

There are so many reasons why this game is great. First of all, it is beautiful. There may only be 24 stages including the boss stages, but each stage is so uniquely different and well made, that it completely makes it up. The music in wonderful. The first real, non-tutorial stage, Palm Tree Paradise, the background music, is an actual Japanese-singing song. And the music keeps getting better from there. Third, it is unlike any other video game of its kind. The game is so bizarre and weird at times, because Wario is bizarre and weird. It's a nice change where everything must be the same level of "classiness" from game to game.
Next, the controls. Wario's abilities and powers all come from the prequel Wario Land 3 (minus the Frog Prince's Gloves sadly), which is also another great game. The controls are very easy and smooth for the most part. The levels require you the get five things (gem pieces and keyzer) and a bonus item, the CD, which features a random, usually ugly, sound. Getting these items are not difficult, although when you unlock Super Hard mode, they are placed in the most outrageous spots.
If you have a Game Boy Advance, or something else with a virtual copy of this, you must play it.
This is the game which I loved Wario briefly more than Mario. This game looks and plays wonderfully. Trust me, it won't disappoint at all.

Rating: 10/10
 
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