The Obscuritan's Desk

Okay so I finally got round to watching The Legend of Korra last week. Not because I'd been putting it off, you understand, I just didn't realize it had started until the Fandom!Secrets and Capslock!ATLA comms had gone from saying "Korra's gonna be so cool" to "Korra is so cool". Plus being psyched about it is what egged me into finally getting the artbook for The Last Airbender and somehow reading through it it didn't occur to me that "wasn't there some other big Avatar-related thing going on?" Bravo Rob, bravo.

So anyway, what did I think? Well...

Korra
I saw the 'first ten minutes' preview of ep1 and thought to myself "there's a good chance this is going to suuuuck". Maybe I'm just a bit too jaded but having Korra know three different types of bending (her native Waterbending and Firebending, and Earthbending IN A LAND WITH NO EARTH!) without any need to be taught rang my "mary sue" alarm bell good and hard. With the benefit of a few episodes they mentioned it's about which element her personality is opposed to (laidback Aang = Earth, active Korra = Air), but still. Thankfully she's turned out to be just as well-rounded a character as most of the Avatar universe and I know a lot of people say this but I really do like how non-typical a heroine she is in the same way you could tell Katara was. Maybe it's something about Waterbender gals? Plus... D'awww, she's such a dork! I just wanna give her a big bear-hug! I dunno about Kiyoshi but avatars Roku, Aang and Korra seem to have all had the same personality, perhaps that's a hereditary thing, too?

And while nothing trumps "last of your people" in the aangst stakes (see what I did there?) the crap Korra's dealt with in the last episode really made me feel for her. Yes she was afraid and cried, but since that's how Aang got into the whole "century in an iceberg" thing in the first place, it feels good to have that out of the way so that Korra can go all badass training montage (I also watched Rocky for the first time recently, can you tell?)
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You might remember a long time ago I had a good gush about Yume Nikki. Well, since then I read a little more into the series, discovering its fandom (who mostly lurk in places like 4chan rather than here) and learned a little bit more about the fanmade games. Since YN is an indie game (Dojin Soft), and its creator(s) prove to be pretty elusive themselves, the fans both here and in Japan made their own free games using the same RPGmaker program that YN did. So they're dojin dojin software? Woah, meta. There's mixed results, but two of them looked promising - Yume 2kki, which is unfortunately untranslated as yet (since it's also the fans who translate these games) and .flow. So I figured that, like last time, i'd talk a little about it and maybe you'd want to check it out.( Read more... )

So overall? It's hard to approach this as someone who didn't play the original first, and if you did it can seem a bit samey. However it does have all the same charm and atmosphere as the last one. Once again you can find yourself playing this into the night without realizing it. In fact I'm going to be charitable about this one and say you could as easily jump into the YN experience from this one as the original, and if you got a kick out of Yume Nikki itself and like free games this one is worth downloading.

Next up I'm going to talk about possibly one of my favourite new horror games Corpse Party. Stay tuned.