A Boy And His Moeblob
by John on Oct.24, 2009, under Main Stuff
No, not that moeblob. This one. (okay, so you have to use your imagination on that second link)
After spending a little more time with the remake of A Boy And His Blob, I have to confess that I’m in it mostly for the puzzles. WayForward took a pretty straightforward PC-style adventure game from the NES and redid it from the concept stage on up; while it’s certainly different from the old game, the old game just wouldn’t work in this day and age. The NES original relied a lot on obscurity: you didn’t know where to go or how to accomplish getting off the planet. A quick trip to GameFAQs nets you a precise set of instructions, with sometimes video links to speed runs. So, instead of a single challenge, the new version presents the game as more of a puzzle-oriented platformer: Get both characters from the start of each level to the finish, using specific tools. It sounds like an oversimplification of the concept, but in all honesty that’s what makes it work; by removing superfluous elements, you give the player a bit more guidance without feeling like you’re hand-holding. (The numerous signs in the backgrounds of the gorgeous levels do offer heavy-handed assistance, but it’s not always clear how their advice could work, and nothing’s stopping you from trying something different.)
Oh, one word of caution. If, like me, you have a strong reaction to seeing hurt children, you may want to be very, very, very careful playing this game. Seeing the boy collapse after a hit will mash that particular emotional button. Hard. Like a frigging jackhammer. Fortunately, equilibrium is only as far as the “hug blob” button. Which will get a lot more use than you might expect.
On the other side of the emotional manipulation scale, we have To Heart. A ten-year-old anime series that seems at times to have been scripted by a ten-year-old, possibly one who has never left the house and isn’t allowed near sharp objects. I’ll grant that being old means you have to accept certain concessions to the state of the art, but honestly the visual aspect of the series is not at all what I’m complaining about– quite the opposite, I found it to be rather well-animated and with good character designs. It’s just that those character designs are completely wasted on lifeless, soulless caricatures whose approximations of living, thinking human beings are about as accurate as I would be with a longbow twice my size. There’s no character development, the conflicts are weak when they even exist, one episode was so mind-numbingly boring that the characters themselves made mention of it– and the sad part is, that episode was supposed to be dramatic evolution of the two characters supposedly at the center of the romance! Instead we got the twenty most inane minutes of homework-doing ever put to celluloid. There was a punchline at the end of the episode, almost as if the production staff wanted to apologize to the viewers for the preceding atrocities, but a gag about a sick girl wanting her friends to bring her pudding kinda works better when the ill girl in question isn’t an annoying, irritating bi*AHEM* I think I’ve made my point. I stopped watching after the series went the bog-standard “we have a robot girl now and she’s going to be deactivated and mind-wiped soon” route… even for 1999, the robot girlfriend was a little overdone.
Still, I have to admit, this is just an outlier on the whole scale of anime that I’ve watched and given up on. Certainly there’s series out there that do romance properly (any given Key series, Ai Yori Aoshi, etc), so this is just one of those ones that got hyped up a little too much and wound up falling flat. Anyway, next on the list is Stellvia, which I have it on good authority is far better (and not a romance, so double points already).
Your last thought for the night, and this is more of a weird dub-actor-following thing than anything else. I haven’t heard Lia Sargent doing much of anything since Xenosaga Episode III ended, which is a shame because I always thought she was a good actress on top of being a talented voice artist. Did she retire, or has she just not done anything because other people are doing stuff?
