Last week a man named Omar Gonzalez jumped the fence surrounding the White House and made a dash toward it. He managed to reach the North Portico entrance, push aside a Secret Service agent, run into the East Room, and then head toward the Green Room before being tackled. This incident has directed scrutiny toward the Secret Service and several mistakes it's made in recent years: a person shot at the White House and no one realized it for four days, an armed person entered an elevator with the president. Today the director was grilled on Capitol Hill very harshly.

But there's actually something I really appreciate, even though it was probably what the Secret Service considers an error: Gonzalez wasn't shot and killed. Many people are questioning that considering there should be snipers on the roof and each agent should have a gun, but no shots were fired. Considering he could've had bombs strapped on him, it probably would've been understandable if he was gunned down, but I'm still breathing a sigh of relief that for once an incident like this didn't have a fatality. Of course there are major lapses in security here — the alarm on the fence didn't go off, the dogs weren't unleashed because they could've attacked the Secret Service agent (what's the point of them then?), and somehow he took down the agent by the door — and they need to be addressed, but I'm glad for once security isn't so trigger happy, especially with the climate nowadays.

When the Founding Fathers sat down at the Constitutional Convention, one of the problems that bedeviled them was leadership, i.e. should we mimic the two Roman consul model or just have one dude on top? The argument was perhaps there would be too much responsibility placed on one person: As you can see today, Obama not only has to juggle ISIS and Russia, but he also has to face the economic malaise and racial tensions at home. Perhaps it would be better if we had one person handle foreign affairs and another domestic issues. Ultimately the Founding Fathers feared eventual clashes between the two figures would weaken the country and made the president responsible for everything.

That is not the case for every country. Some did chose the two-leader route, and France is one of them: To this day the prime minister is in charge of the home front and the president meets with world leaders. But the delegates at the Constitutional Convention were correct and fights do erupt between the two. Case in point: Poincaré and Clemenceau, two major figures during World War I, hated each others' guts. I'm reading a book about the Paris Convention of 1919, and this is what it had to say:

"There are only two perfectly useless things in the world," [Clemenceau] quipped. "One is an appendix and the other is Poincaré!" ... Clemenceau had been attacking Poincaré for years and even spread rumors about Poincaré's wife. "You wish to sleep with Madame Poincaré?" he would shout out. "OK, my friend, it's fixed." During the war, Clemenceau, who like many leading French politicians had his own newspaper, criticized the president, often unfairly, for the failings of the French military. L'Homme Libre ... carried editorial after editorial, written by Clemenceau himself, castigating the inadequate medical care for wounded soldiers and the shortages of crucial munitions. The conduct of the war was a disaster, those in charge utterly incompetent. Poincaré was outraged. ^*

I fucking love every sentence of this. It's so fucking insane. We often quip about how we've lost our innocence and look fondly on our genteel past, but there is no fucking way anyone nowadays could get away with this. Just put a comparison to today's politicians. If Boehner even attempts to say he can set up a one-night stand with Michelle Obama to anyone who asks, he would be slaughtered by the press and social media. And can you imagine Obama actually owning his own newspaper where he just writes everyday about how much the Republicans suck? People would complain about propaganda in a flash. When people complain about the viciousness of politics nowadays, I just scoff. Our guys are not even on this level, never mind the actual duels people used to do a generation or two before Clemenceau and Poincaré. It's not about truculence; it's intransigence. At the end of the day, people like Clemenceau and Poincaré were able to come together and work things out, something we can't do with this current congress, which isn't even making comments about their wives!

^* Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 33-34.

When my parents first bought the house, they would hear strange noises. For example, there was the distinct sound of someone walking up the stairs, but no one would be there and everyone was in their bed. It took a little while to realize it was the neighbor; anyone who's been to my house can see we're attached to theirs, and like an apartment the noise filter through the wall. In my upstairs bedroom, I could even hear the closet door opening and closing. We moved in about six months ago, but next door has remained empty this entire time until last week. Suddenly they started up again, and it's throwing me off. See, after growing up here I could immediately sort out which sounds were ours and which were theirs. But with the new house, all those creaking and groaning frequencies have changed and I can't fucking tell what's what anymore. Before I could even figure out who was on the steps depending on the sound it made. Now I don't know if it's dad coming to bother me or my neighbor minding his business.

In case you're wondering what's going on in the Naruto universe:

Nova is a famous series on PBS that covers a wide range of topics from archaeology to mathematics. I've been watching episodes on Amazon that are made within the last decade, but suddenly I found one from the 1970s about the Maya. To be honest I found it more fascinating to see how they portrayed the information than the information itself. For example, if they're interviewing an archeologist today, he would say the earliest Mayan settlements are from 80 B.C. or even C.E. However the archeologists here consistently said the phrase "Before Christ," which most today would shy away from due to cultural insensitivity.

They also constantly compared the Maya to the Roman Empire. Nowadays you'd hear, "It seems the height of this city was in the early 300s," but the dude here said, "The height was around the time that Constantine founded Constantinople," as if he expected his entire audience to know that off the top of their heads. Or, "We think this settlement began right when the Social Wars were happening in Italy." I definitely know most people nowadays would go, "What the fuck is a Social War? Is that Facebook versus MySpace?"

In a way I think it reflects our current education system. I don't know the curriculum for about fifty, sixty years ago, but I'm going to assume it's more Euro-centric. Is it that our knowledge of history has declined because not only are we aware of Europe and America, but now we have to learn about everywhere else on the globe? We're given the same total amount of time to study, so consequently we just acquire a little knowledge about everything instead of one thing intensely. I'm actually not really certain whether this is better or worse. I've heard people decry how the American school system has gone down the drain, but I've talk with old people all the time and I can assure you their education doesn't impress me either. Still, I think it'd be cool to make an offhand comment about how this is similar to Scipio Africanus at Carthage and have people know what the fuck I'm talking about.

[12:54:55] Dun 4 Hire: Beanbag chairs are fucking dangerous, son.
[12:55:04] gattsu456: Shit.
[12:55:06] Dun 4 Hire: I just passed out for about two hours.
[12:55:08] gattsu456: Did it finally start attacking you?
[12:55:13] Dun 4 Hire: It is gaining sentience.
[12:55:20] gattsu456: It is slowly stealing your soul.
[12:57:57] Dun 4 Hire: That is its method; it makes you sleep and then quietly sucks it out as you are unconscious.
[12:58:16] gattsu456: In week, it will be Riva, and you will be the beanbag.

I was watching a show on butterflies tonight and it just brought huge feelings of guilt in my heart. Over the course of a month in first grade, we had a class project concerning butterflies. Our teacher managed to acquire some caterpillars, which we were supposed to observe and note about its transformation into a chrysalis and butterfly. We actually had a class book with each student illustrating a page: One kid shows the caterpillar eating a leaf, another kid draws how it crawls about. Finally they all became chrysalises inside a cage we kept near the front of the class.

Every morning we would enter the classroom and play around for about ten minutes until the teacher called a meeting at the front of the room where there was a large carpet. We would sit on it and she would discuss her plans for that day. I remember the teacher asked me to get something for her, and I stood up, got it, and turned around... accidentally knocking over the caterpillar cage. Right in front of everyone. Their gasps of horror still ring in my ears to this day. The images of those destroyed, nearly-born butterflies are still burned into my retina. I just murdered about a dozen butterflies. The ones we all working on together. Giving them nicknames. Wondering which one would hatch first. How we'd tag them before letting them go into the wild so scientists could research their migration path. They were our babies. With one movement I just ruined all of that.

To this day I wonder if my teacher told my parents about that. I asked them once, but they can't remember anymore. What would she have said? "Yeah, I made this wonderful group project for the class and all the kids got emotionally involved until your daughter fucked that all up."

Did you know the actual plural of "chrysalis" is "chrysalides?" I didn't use that because I'd sound like an asshole.

I think dad is worried if the house is left to me:

Dad: Were you talking in the driveway when you came home a little while ago?
Me: No.
Dad: Because I heard someone in the driveway.
Me: Yeah, I hear it too. There's a person at the mouth of the driveway talking in her cellphone.
Dad: Oh, did you check who it is?
Me: No.
Dad: Why not?
Me: I don't really care.
Dad: You don't care who's standing at the entrance to your driveway?
Me: No, not really.
Dad: Why don't you?
Me: I really don't care enough to get up. I just want to look at pictures on the internet.
Dad: (sigh)

I often say if I ever became rich I would extend the subway system, like having a line go across the Bronx and end up at Jamaica Center. Or maybe finally bring service into the huge swaths of Queens without any. Or maybe just put some elevated lines underground so they're no longer creating a nuisance on the street down below. But doing so would be a pain in the ass because now there are people living in those places. Major streets would have to be closed to dig them up. Parts of sidewalks would be requisitioned to create subway exits. See, in the early days the subways actually developed those areas simply because people could now actually travel to them. Many places were just empty before. Here's a picture of the 207th street station on the 1 in the early 1900s:

There was nothing in my fucking neighborhood before! It was literally dirt roads and grass! So building a train line wouldn't be an issue because you're not bothering anyone.

But what about downtown where it was developed even back then? It did encounter many of the problems that I mentioned above. In the 1910s the IRT line was being extended into the Village and at the time a five-story apartment was in the way of construction. Using eminent domain, the city took control of the property and tore it down. The owner David Hess was only left with about 500 inches of land, which the city asked him to donate. Considering he already felt fucked over, he angrily refused and created this mosaic on the small bit of land he had left:

You can see it now outside of the Sheridan-Christopher Street station on the 1 train, a testament to one pissed off man.

If I had to pick one medieval event I particularly dislike, it's the War of the Roses, a fancy name for an English civil war that took place in the 1400s. The cause of this dispute was succession: Edward III had a ridiculous amount of children, but the ones of interest are Edward, Lionel, John, and Edmund. Edward was the Prince of Wales, heir to the throne, but he died before Edward III. His son became Richard II, but he was a particularly shitty king, and several nobles in the kingdom rebelled and deposed of him. Now according to the line of succession, we have then to look at Edward III's next son, Lionel. He died about thirty years prior, but his great-grandson Edmund was alive... unfortunately as a nine-year-old kid. And no kingdom wants a child ruler with its regent and council fighting amongst themselves. But the leader of the rebellion, Henry, said Lionel only had a daughter, Philippa. So Edmund gets his claim through his grandmother. And women don't count unless there's no other resort. However Edward III had other sons, so let's move onto son number three, John. John's also dead, but his son is alive... who happens to be the leader of the rebellion, Henry. So Henry took the throne and everyone ignored Edmund. In case you're confused, here's a little chart to explain shit:

To recap, Richard II sucks, Henry IV kills him, says Edmund doesn't count because Lionel only had a daughter, Henry IV takes kingship because if you ignore Lionel he's next in line. His family is known as the House of Lancaster because he's the duke of Lancaster. He has a son who becomes Henry V, and Henry V has a son who becomes Henry VI. Here's another chart to keep you on point:

The problem is Henry VI was also a child king, about eight months old to be exact. England entered the same situation they were trying to avoid two generations ago. After experiencing a terrible time during his minority, the English thought they'd finally get a respite when Henry VI came of age. Unfortunately like Richard II he was a shitty king too. So once again nobles started rebelling. This is when it gets complicated. Edward III's fourth son, Edmund, had a grandson named Richard. Remember poor little Edmund, great-grandson of Lionel, who got passed over? He had a sister named Anne, who married Richard:

Richard said, "Wait a second. I don't care what we decided generations ago. Edmund was supposed to be king! And because he's dead now, I should be king because I'm married to his sister!" He died during the uprising, but his son eventually won the war and became Edward IV. Because they were the dukes of York, their family became known as the House of York. It's called the War of the Roses because (supposedly) the House of Lancaster had a red rose on their family crest and the House of York had a white one. When Edward IV died once again only children were left behind, Edward V and Richard. They were placed under the care of their uncle, also confusingly named Richard. We can't prove it, but it's most likely both of them were killed under Richard's orders so he could become King Richard III:

In case you're completely lost right now, I can assure you it's about to get a lot worse. Once everyone realized what Richard III did, he received condemnation from huge portions of the kingdom, although he retained a good portion of loyalty from the north. At some point a guy named Henry Tudor said he was the last heir to the House of Lancaster, meaning he'll retake the kingdom from those Yorkist bastards once and for all. Well, his claim was flimsy at best. Henry V married a woman named Elizabeth, and when he died she remarried a dude named Owen Tudor. Owen is Henry's grandfather. As I said, flimsy at best. "My dad was Henry VI's half-brother" doesn't really cut it, especially since Owen Tudor was a nobody from Wales.

But all that mattered was Henry beat and killed Richard III in battle, so by right of conquest he became King Henry VII of England. And being the last "heir" of Lancaster, he married Edward V's sister Elizabeth. The Tudor family usually displayed a white and red rose as their symbol to show how the House of Lancaster and York united with Henry and Elizabeth.

Do you understand why I hate this conflict? Because it's so fucking confusing remembering who's related to whom and how. And this is just the bare basics. Do you remember way back in the beginning I said Edward III had a lot of kids? All the descendants of those siblings were involved, and it turns into a giant clusterfuck. This genealogy from wikipedia barely scrapes the surface of the players. It doesn't show the Beauforts, the Nevilles, Warwick the Kingmaker, or any of that shit. Just the people directly involved with the royal family. Every single time I read a book about this, I need to keep copious amounts of notes to remember who is who and what their allegiance is. It doesn't fucking help that people were unimaginative and only had about ten names to choose from for their kids. After the fortieth Edward you kinda want to shoot yourself in the foot.

I would like to deeply apologize for my poor MS Paint skills.

I've now become that asshole who falls asleep on strangers' shoulders on the train. What the hell happened to me?

This commercial was shown only once on television in 1964 election between LBJ and Barry Goldwater, AKA Mr. Conservative, who favored reducing social programs and increasing military might. LBJ provides the voice over here, implying that if we aren't careful and start a nuclear war, all of us will die. And with trigger-happy Goldwater, this could very well happen.^*

If you talk to any expert in the industry, they will cite this commercial as the beginning of visceral campaign ads. No one had made this insane juxtaposition of an innocent little girl and a nuclear bomb going off before. The following morning everyone was talking about it. Parents were calling in to complain their children were mentally scarred. Newspaper Op-Eds were filed with commentary. Which is pretty much what the LBJ campaign wanted: free publicity. Because it worked so well, later presidential elections would copy it and descend into the hell we are in today.

I was listening to a radio show commemorating this commercial's fiftieth anniversary last Sunday, and panelists questioned why no one mentions what came before that. Although it is celebrated as a pivotal turning point, we all forget that this still happened relatively early in television's history. There literally were only two elections before this that television existed in. Eisenhower ran commercials and actually was criticized for it; television was too base and was sullying the act of running for president. So what were Eisenhower's commercials like? Here we go:

I'm not certain if this is better or worse than nowadays.

^* I actually don't know much about Goldwater, so I have no idea whether this was feasible for him or hyperbole.

In the original Wind Waker Tingle gave you a "Tingle Turner" when you freed him from his cell, which allowed you to connect your GBA to the GC and on it he would help you with the game like give you temporary invincibility or something. I thought the GamePad would be the substitute in the Wii U version, but it replaced with the Tingle Bottle, which allows you to "put a message out to sea," i.e. you can basically send something to a random person in the Miiverse. I immediately thought that is a terrible idea. Knowing the internet, this would devolve very quickly. Sure enough I was almost immediately informed I got a message. It was a screenshot of the backside of a moblin with the message, "Dat ass."

Well, it's great to know the internet did not disappoint me.

I need Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun to end so I can stop wasting my time reading/watching it and move on with my life.

I'm reading a book about presidential speechwriters from FDR to George W. Bush, and for me it's fascinating to see how it evolved. It begins with FDR sitting with two other people working late into the night together on a speech whilst drinking cocktails. Right now I'm on Reagan, and there's a whole fucking committee of speechwriters who are begging the chief of staff to let them see the president and ask him what he wants to say and to learn his speech patterns. That I find to be an incredible difference. How the hell does it go from the president being one of three to the entire staff not being able to see him for months? If there's one group of people who should have access, you'd think it's those who are responsible for the communication between the president and the nation.

If you take an intro to art history course, the textbook will probably be Helen Gardner, E. H. Gombrich, or H. W. Janson, and I got Janson's History of Art for mine, and very few books can match it as a comprehensive book for western art. Back when I was in school we used the seventh edition, but since then the eighth has come out and that's what I bought after the fire. As I perused it the other day, I noticed something that definitely wasn't there in the seventh edition: pixelated pictures. I have no idea how this passed the editing process. This is not acceptable in any way. It's motherfucking Janson and I expect a level of quality, especially since this book is $231. I think pictures with proper detail is the least you can do. It's not like these are obscure pieces of art with barely any photos taken of them. Are you seriously telling me you couldn't find a good picture of the stele of Hammurabi's Code that's at least 3x4"? There. That took me ten seconds. There is no way in the world I beat the editng team of the most famous art history book in the world. They're just being lazy. And I don't know why; people buy this book specifically for the pictures and you'd think that be would on the list of "things we must not fuck up."

After completing Skyward Sword, Jen and I started up Wind Waker because we never beat it together. I personally wanted to see what the HD version would be like, and at the moment the sun is producing so much glare that it's washing out the colors. Anyway, I started thinking about the plot and I realize it fucks up Ocarina of Time. Link went into his sleep for seven years because he physically could not wield the Master Sword; he needed to mature his body to be able to carry that shit around, much like how he could only wear the Hylian Shield on his back like some sort of demented turtle as a kid. However the Link in Wind Waker is the same age as Child Link from Ocarina, and he can use the Master Sword just fine. Which means there was no fucking point in sleeping for seven years. All that anguish from Ganondorf ruining the world could've been avoided if Link just manned up and dealt with the situation then and there.

I beat The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword over the weekend, three years after its release. Because half the fun is figuring out the puzzles in the dungeons, I swore I wouldn't play it except in the company of friends, i.e. Jen or Paul, so that's why it's taken awhile. I feel it's a solid addition to the series. According to the new Nintendo timeline, this is chronologically the first game in the series (I'll write a post about that shit some day), so they tried to intertwine of the Zelda back story with the goddesses this time around. In the end it doesn't really matter because all Zeldas are more or less the same shit with different flavors. There's Link, you've got the Master Sword, and there are dungeons you have to beat. And really, that's why we're playing this shit. Ultimately though I feel this is a step back from Twilight Princess.

Since Ocarina of Time, more often than not Link has some sort of companion, probably as a method to deal with him being a silent protagonist. There's Ocarina of Time's Navi, Majora's Mask Tatl, or Minish Cap's Ezlo. I've ranted about Skyward Sword's Fi before, but there's also the problem that she's completely emotionless. If you're serving as Link's voice, give me some sort of personality. I don't care if it's a bitch like Tatl or Midna, but give me something. Instead Nintendo created some sort of machine that can only generate lines that are either completely obvious or annoying. Unlike other games where your heart would break a bit at parting, I was so fucking glad when Fi was gone. Leave and never come back.

The second is the controls. They really tried to utilize the Wiimote this time around, and Link will swing his sword the same way you would the Wiimote. Consequently half the enemies had to be hit a certain way, like vertically or horizontally. Okay, that's fine. But then there were some enemies that you had to trick; you had to move your sword in one direction so that they'd guard themselves that way, and then hit them in another direction. Actually accomplishing this was a goddamned trial because as far as I could tell that sword was going all over the place. This is normally when I start whining about the Wii, but when Moham tried it he had no problems at all, so perhaps it's just my inability to play video games.

Fuck those sneaking sections. I actually had to put the game down several times because they frustrated me so. I don't know why they keep on insisting on putting this shit in Zelda games. I hated it when they started in Wind Waker and it's never gotten any better.

A lesser complaint is the upper and lower world; each time you wanted to enter another area, you had to launch yourself into the sky and fly yourself to it, which reminded me of a shitty version of Wind Waker. I was actually okay with the sailing because there were interesting islands to explore in it, but here's nothing. The game is literally wasting my time making me go from place to place like this. Yeah, there are small islands but there's nothing of interest in them so you just fly past them.

Besides that, the dungeons were fine and there were new additions to Link's repertoire that were fun. In particular I liked the timestones that could change the landscape and trying to work around them was always a challenge. Graphics were... okay. They were trying to aim for an impressionist type of feel with the backgrounds, which I'm still on the fence about. Music was fine but not amazing. The character design is keeping with the fine Zelda tradition of being hideous as possible. I actually like it. It's as if you're in some sort of freak show and I approach each character from each angle to get full blast of the ugliness.

Overall I think it was a good game, but I have no desire to replay it just because of the sneaking sections. They did horrible things to my heart, but I don't think it would affect other people the same way. So once I get 100% on this, I'm done. That's it. Never again.

When did groups stop translating anime openings/endings? I remember even speed groups like Dattebayo would have everything prepared with the first episode of a new song. Sometimes they got special and had each syllable change color, change size, or disappear like it's a karaoke. Actually, I can't think of a single group back in the old days that didn't translate them. Sure, a lot of the times they would be shit (I remember someone translated それでも僕等シンプルな想いを伝えたいだけなの to something along the lines of "I wanted to show my sakura feelings," which even with my non-existent Japanese knowledge I knew couldn't be right), but they existed. They were there. I first noticed this negligence with Horriblesubs, and I figured it's the first episode and they weren't ready yet. Nope. Even at episode 174 there still wasn't anything. I'm not saying every group does this, but it's enough for it to be noticeable. I wonder why groups stopped caring to begin with.

I saw the recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with my cousin's daughter, and it was... okay. I think we were reaching the age of awareness (e.g. four to six) right at the tail end of its popularity, so we didn't get the full blast of it if we were born about five years earlier. In its stead there were shows like Animaniacs, Batman: The Animated Series or Disney Afternoon. But considering it was still running until '96, we still could experience it in some way. Harlan had boxes of tapes he'd recorded the episodes onto, and we loved watching the '90 and '91 movies together. He also had some of the comics, which were very different from the animated series, but I wasn't really literate at that point.

And if you're a fan of the original, you're going to be disappointed. Let's start out with my most subjective complaint: When I think of the 80s, I think Michael Jackson, 8-bit systems, Reagan, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Unlike Batman or Superman, which continued way after their creation dates, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ended with the 80s. Yeah, they continued on in other forms and would have a resurgence of popularity, but it wasn't the same craze as back then. So the upgraded version is just... jarring. We're living in a post-Giuliani and Bloomberg world. The city's cleaned up. I see the Foot running around with semi-automatic machine guns and wondering how the fuck they can pull that off when the police would just storm in with their Department of Homeland Security-bought goodies and kill them all. Back in the '80s this seemed more plausible with urban decay, high crime rates, and the inability of the city to keep control of the situation. The Turtles were the heroes who stepped in where the government couldn't. Now New York is happy and tourist-friendly, and quite frankly I don't think grimy enough for the Turtles.

But that's just me whining nostalgically. Where you can actually complain is on two points: The first is they should've changed the name of the movie from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to April O'Neil. Most of the focus was her journey through writing an article about the Foot, finding out the truth about her father's death, and how she's somehow directly involved with the birth of the Turtles. Fuck that. If I wanted to look at some hot chick's adventures I could've gone to any other movie. Here I want to see giant turtles kicking ass. I'm not saying the original movies didn't have their own tangents — I remember Danny and his problems with his father in the first — but they were always subordinate to the Turtles. I think you can make the case here she had more screen time than they did.

The second is who the fuck is Eric Sacks, the main antagonist? What the fuck happened to Shredder? He became Sacks' strongman, like some voiceless bodyguard. Yeah, there were cool scenes of him fighting, but he and the Foot became almost a faceless entity whereas Sacks stole all the intriguing scenes. Why was he even necessary? Shredder by himself is awesome and doesn't need any help. He didn't need to stand on equal grounds with some pussy scientist. In the second movie in fact he fucking kidnapped one, tied him up, and forced him to do his bidding. That's the Shredder I expect.

And the plot didn't make any goddamned sense either. Sacks created a poison to sic on New York City, but for some reason the cure was destroyed in a fire and he was too stupid to figure out how to recreate it. He finds out the turtles he was experimenting on are alive as these terrifyingly huge ninja fighters, so he captures them and wants to drain them of their blood for the cure. Then he'll unleash the poison onto the city and conveniently have the remedy ready, get paid by the government, and be filthy rich. ...And for some reason the Foot will gain control of New York like this? I don't know, the Foot seemed insignificant in this situation. My favorite part is they start releasing the poison before they even make the cure. You don't even know if it'll work or not! Science requires lots of tests first before you can figure out anything. You just can't pull out some blood, mix in some green stuff, and get a cure magically. Even if it did work like that, the citizens of New York people are going to know you're the culprit! The poison is coming from the top of your tower! You think people won't notice that? That the government will just give you money instead of arresting your murderous ass?

I'd recommend sticking to the old movies. If you're going to travel down the science route, I'd say put Krang in there because we haven't seen him in a live action yet, but considering whoever wrote this script seems to be incapable of making a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, I don't have my hopes up. And hey, the original has Casey Jones too!

I just noticed the OST cover for Wild ARMs 2 says, "An Awkward Rush & Mission Savers." Is that what ARMs stands for? In the original it was Ancient Relic Mechanism, referring to what we would call "guns." In that world, they were an old technology recently rediscovered and was causing alarm in the general population. ARMs in the second game was the name of the group saving the world, but they never explained the acronym. If it is indeed Awkward Rush & Mission Savers, then I understand why no one felt it important to mention it.

Yay, Wild ARMs 2 completed. Oh wait, I'm sorry, Wild ARMs 2nd Ignition completed. Why they decided to call it that I don't know, but I can place it along other stupid names like Dissidia Duodecim. Unfortunately I kept on mentally comparing this game with the first and considering I placed that as my fourteenth favorite game of all time,^* that meant I was using high standards. I'm trying really hard not to be biased, but I think I can make the case why the first game was better.

Let's begin with the plot. The first disc is fine. There's a major terrorist organization trying to rule the world, so this man creates a special group called ARMs with no national allegiance to fight against them. So you spend time thwarting their plans, tracking them down, and eliminating the members. It's when the second disc started up that the madness began. From what I understand, this dimension is being attacked/absorbed by another dimension called the Kuiper Belt, which if you know anything about astronomy is the exterior of our solar system where lots of ice and terrestrial debris are, and I honestly interpreted this situation as Pluto getting revenge on us for downgrading it to a dwarf planet. Anyway, this really came out of nowhere. No one was mentioning this at all for the first half of the game. I think somehow the Dragon Dimension was absorbed by it and now it's attacking us, but that's as best as I've got. To solve this crisis, we had to somehow transform this dimension into a "being" (and they used quotation marks in the game for this) because you can attack a "being" and not a "dimension." By opening up the mana points in the world, it created this trapezoid dungeon that turned it into a "being," and... Yeah, I started losing it after a while. I'm trying to figure out if this is just poor translation work or if the plot is really this fucking screwy. And that's honestly why the first game was better: I fucking knew what was going on. There are demons, they're trying to kill us, we're going to take those fuckers out first. That's it. Easy to understand.

And I'm not covering all the other crazy shit I have to keep abreast of, like the main character having a demon inside of him (that randomly dominates your body at the final moment so you have to turn into a woman to defeat him), this nuke that was launched into the sky by the terrorist group that turns out to be a dragon, and these aliens that have some of the best fucking lines I've ever seen ever:

"Being impatient is a waste of energy. Be that as it may, the Shooting King's background has no close relationships. Let's go, Ard! The friendship cross."
"Don't leave me here! How about having a party to boost morale? The alternating events of joy and sorrow will taint future developments."
"I gave him a nosebleed, but no 'friendship' developed. My calculations on how something vital is missing? Could it be 'poetry'?"
"Gentlemen don't like violence but love the violence of words. Prepare for word torture! I can't keep quiet. I'm full of dangerous phrases that should be censored."

Phrases that should be censored indeed, because I could only understand what the hell they were saying half the time.

I feel like the developers were trying to expand from the first installment but were still stuck to it. I actually skipped this game and went straight to Wild ARMs 3 years ago, and I remember being completely thrown off by the fact there's four characters because the balance in the first game was absolutely perfect. Throwing in one more character completely destroyed it. So when I saw the cover of this game—

—I thought it would be similar to the past. Boy, was I fucking wrong. It turns out there are six characters in all, which is really confusing. See, this series starts out with all the protagonists separated, so the player has to first direct them through a dungeon by themselves and then group them all together. So this game did that with the three on the cover, and then late in the game gave us the other three. I've formed a deeper emotional attachment to the initial guys and girl since I've seen them grow and develop for longer. Plus these other guys seems superfluous in battle; I rarely used the assassin chick, the summon mage, or the vampire. The people on the cover were enough. I guess in terms of plot they're important (except the vampire), but I think they took the model of the first game and tried to develop it without doing it fully or successfully.

I mentioned before my hatred for lack of invisible walls, but that actually wasn't upset me most about this game. It was that you couldn't find towns or dungeons on the world map by sight. You were required to walk around, use a radar, and if you were close enough the town/dungeon would appear. It sounds okay in theory, but in practice that meant you were canvasing the landscape for twenty minutes, pressing the radar button every three steps, and hoping this was finally the time you'd find it. Why the hell can't I fucking see the thing with my own two eyes? I understand why the developers were trying to do: Oftentimes you'd go back to the same area but different dungeon and they didn't want you to be aware of its existence until then. But plenty of other games have the same situation but dealt with it. Many times someone's guarding the door, or there's a tree in the way, or you can't leave the town by a certain exit. Why waste my time making me look for something? They must've thought this shit was fun because that feature was in the third game, and that's the reason why I put it down and stopped playing it.

One thing I can say I fucking love is they still have the old school dungeons. Instead of just walking forward and occasionally have a split in the road, one of which is a treasure and the other to progress, this shit has actual puzzles. Even as an adult I frequently became stuck and had to really contemplate the solution. THAT is what a dungeon should be about. Admittedly not all games back in the day were like that, like Chrono Trigger, but I haven't seen anything like this in an RPG in a long time.

For what it is, I guess it's okay. The ultimate message was unique and interesting, that being a hero isn't a positive because you ultimately sacrificing yourself when everyone as a community should face problems together. The graphics for the time were pretty good (seeing youtube playthroughs blew me away because it's all pixelated on my TV), and the music was done by the same composer and of the same caliber. There definitely were better RPGs of that time period, but I guess if you wanna see how the series evolved this definitely is important to play to show how it moved on from its beginning.

^* In case you've forgotten (I did), at the time my rankings were

1. Ōkami
2. Tales of the Abyss
3. Chrono Trigger
4. Final Fantasy VII
5. LocoRoco 2
6. Myst / Riven
7. The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap
8. Diablo
9. We ♥ Katamari
10. Total Annihilation
11. Super Metroid
12. Starcraft / Warcraft II
13. Harvest Moon DS
14. Wild ARMs
15. Quake

That was back in 2010. I'd change it a bit now.