Let me get something off my chest. I’m not a reviewer, I don’t like to be called one, and I don’t think I’ll ever quite want to take such a job in the public marketplace. Why? Because it’s a god-awful, soul-sucking, self-demeaning trap. Reviewing anything for money immediately places you in a very awkward position as a fan, because you’ll have an endless slew of everything everywhere to mull over in as much time as it takes to drink a small espresso, and also because the entire bloody marketplace (including the readers) have all been brainwashed by the companies into demanding something new and glorious every five bloody minutes.

I for one feel sick to my stomach whenever a reviewer of any stripe goes on to say “it doesn’t do anything new”. New is the least of my worries when picking up a game, a movie, or anything else. Consider this: I don’t want my salt and pepper shakers to do anything new, I just want them to work, and if some dandy added feature bungles that up I’m not going to be interested in the product. But fair enough, we’re talking about entertainment, not basic kitchen essentials here (though being a cook I might argue that point given a different newspost), so the needs and wants are slightly different.

Let’s instead look at toys. My least favourite kind of toy is the Transformer. I love the idea of the Transformers, I love the comics, animated shows (well, most of them), and just about any cultural reference to them, but I hate those bloody toys. Unless you’re a toy hobbyist with rosey-red sunglasses the thickness of Ron Jeremy’s dick, it’s hard to call ninety-nine percent of all Transformers toys pretty. Awful, horrifying, hideous, ugly, fugly, Bugly, Fangry, Bumblebee… Well, you get the idea.

It’s because with every new mutation of Transformers the toys get more and more complex. That’s not to say there haven’t been certain improvements over the years, but the consistent problem with these things is that they’re easy to break, difficult to transform (especially the Beast Wars toys), and overall not all that pleasant to look at. A quick perusal of any Transformers toy-based message board will return you at least a hundred bajillion different complaints about the colour of plastic, which is where everything begins to go wrong.

But back to the fandom and the problem of reviews. I would love for Transformers toys to be simple and only joss it up once in awhile. I don’t need a billion different hideous versions of Optimus Prime (Primal Prime is one of the most disgustingly silly forms yet), I just want the damned truck. Make the hands pop out of the arm slots so you don’t lose them anymore and we’re done. The original toy was pretty good, just revise the materials, add the pop-out hands, and we’re done.

Now I’m sure I’ve lost some of you on where I’m going with this. My whole point is that I want a quality toy that doesn’t demand a background in linear algebra before I can make use of it. Similarly I don’t want entertainment that either requires me to read a manual the size of a cinderblock (re: The Witcher), nor set up five different video conventions (RGB/VGA/SVideo/HDMI/NAMBLA) before I can get to the bloody content. The fact is that the product does NOT need to be that complex to keep me happy. In the end I will just be sitting there wishing I was playing Tetris. On my Game Boy. The original black-and-white version.

But reviews have this giant stick up their arses that demands a game or television show that can juggle sixteen plates, kick a small animal, give them fellation and cunnilingus at the same time, and do their homework for them before they’re happy. I for one am sick of all the bloom on everything in the current generation of everything. Even anime has too much damned bloom. There’s a reason the mid to late 80’s is my favourite period of anime. It didn’t try to be fancy, it just prettied itself up, got into the missionary position for a round of hot passion, and was really damned good at it. I mean like being tied up and whipped as much as the next sexual deviant with a penchant for really disturbing allegory, but not all the time.

The other major pitfall is the gigantic overlooking some reviewers do. If the graphics aren’t good or the music annoys you, fine, but these are the only things you should overlook as a general rule. Everything else is pretty essential to what’s going on. If there’s a major issue to the gameplay don’t try to feed me the idea that this title is playable merely because you used the words “if you can overlook this…”. Stand up for what you’re trying to promote! Get a bloody opinion and stop being so wishy-washy. It’s either enjoyable or it isn’t. This isn’t a field where you have to practice a high degree of amicability or politically correct diddling the reader’s balls/clitoris in order to get your job done.

Conversely some reviewers also have a hard time overlooking unnecessary criticism. It’s no secret that I adore Final Fantasy XII like some sort of pop-star demigod. Every time I think of the game something primal in me rises up and moves my package, even if for just a moment. There, see? It did it just now. Anyway, the whole shebang of “why should I need to learn how to wear hats before I can wear them” is one of the most ridiculous conversations I’ve ever heard float around the internets. Who cares? Is it any less arbitrary to have it determined by level? Allow me to get very angry for a moment and bold everything.

Level based equipment caps have been around since before your balls dropped or breasts sprouted and you’ve been just damned find with them all along. To begin bitching now about a slightly more obvious but much more open-ended system of equipment advancement is on the same level of stupidity as complaining about Coke vs. Pepsi. Just drink your damned soda and shut up.

Moving right along. I’ve spent some time dwelling on games, now let’s go back to anime (this is an anime blog after all, or so I hear).

While most of my above comments actually apply to game reviewers, the anime industry is suffering an utterly converse problem, which is too much sameness. Now before someone calls me a hypocrite for what I’m about say, let me be clear on my stance: I want GOOD, QUALITY products, that don’t get bunked down in too much complex innovation, but I also want GOOD, QUALITY products that aren’t relegated to the lethargy of too much sameness.

Shoujo (re: girl’s and girly men’s) manga is perhaps the worst offender when it comes to sameness. Everything is romance, everything has the same eyes-the-size-of-small-astroids features, and everything is coloured in pastel. Even the basic plots are the same: Boy meets girl, girl meets boy, girl hits boy and pretends she doesn’t like him until they inevitably realise how much they love each other and finally kiss after three hundred issues of doing dick-all. It’s sweet (in a sickeningly artificial way), it’s touching (like a thirty-year-old after your daughter), and it’s been done a hundred billion times (like your mom).

That isn’t to say there aren’t good shoujo manga, and often it’s because they do something unique (and do it well). Here is Greenwood is my routine favourite example because of just how damned funny it is. I found the series via its anime adaptation (re: really cool but horribly short advertisement) and eventually picked up the manga. It eschews a lot of the boy-likes-girl tsundere/yandere bickering and instead throws four young men together in a dorm and lets fate have at it. While I’m sure fangirls have gone to town on the boys love fanfiction, I for one am willing to ignore all that, because there is absolutely no homosexual tension in the entire comic.

There is an actual homosexual relationship, one which I feel is rather well-handled and deals with some interesting social pressures (including feeling dehumanised for being ‘different’ and being rehumanised through acceptance of those differences). But it’s not even between two pretty boys. It’s between two regular boys, one of whom is slightly effeminate (but not in the typical sense). It shows the author has a degree of integrity about the whole thing and isn’t willing to degenerate the entire story into a gigantic fanservice comic.

But let’s be honest, there are plenty of shoujo manga about boy groups too. Look at Gravitation. Oddly enough, that isn’t a bad series either, but having not finished it, I can’t really say much overall. Here is Greenwood manages to impress because of its good writing, clean art, and some of the odder characters it plays with. Shun for instance was raised as a girl because of the high amount of matriarchy in his family, and his story is more about self-determination, etc etc. But rather than let him be the cute-but-mysterious type, or a giant cross the series has to bear, Shun’s a lot of fun. Well, Kazuya probably doesn’t think so, but that’s only because he was the butt-end of a practical joke about it all.

Anyhow, rather than let this become a giant Here is Greenwood review, let me get to the point: Here is Greenwood does some things differently, and most everything well. That much is important to an anime or a game. But reviewers are the main issue — game reviewers need to stop asking for each new game that comes out to be the second (third, fourth, seventeenth) coming of Christ, and anime reviewers need to stop being so damned complacent about the insufferable sameness.