romdocitizen
Got bored of this real quick and tapped out, gf loved it but honestly.......it's mid the haters missed nothing.
The Communists tried to create a society based on total equality for all.
In the end, this philosophy proved too much at odds with reality. Outlawed by his government and shunned by the people he'd purported to save, Plekhanov went to his hanging with these final words--
As long as the crux and the cross rule the earth, mankind shall never know peace.
-ittetsu narahara, full metal daemon muramasa
...
"You kill them and you're no better than they are! You just demonstrate your extremist contempt for democracy!"
"What sort of democracy requires the services of scum like these? I'll tell you, Ms. Valetti: a bourgeois democracy, which wears a thin skin of human rights to keep out the cold, but when things hot up, when the rotten plots of the ruling class have failed to silence our demands, when they put half the population on the dole queue, and squeeze the other half dry with wage cuts to keep themselves in profit, when they have run out of promises and you reformists have failed to keep the masses in order for them, and there are riots on the streets, then they shed their skins and they dump you, don't they? Just as they did in Chile, and they set their wildest dogs loose on us all."
"What has the tragedy in Chile got to do with all this?"
"It's a prize example of the failure of the peaceful road to socialism! You know, the absurd idea that bourgeois democracy can be gradually transformed from within."
"Rubbish! Allende's failure proves exactly the opposite! He tried to force the pace of the revolution before the people were fully prepared!"
"YOU MEAN HE DISARMED THE WORKERS TOO FAST. AND LED THEM LIKE THE PIED PIPER INTO SANTIAGO STADIUM. Look at them, Ms. Valetti: the political police armed against the people. You seriously suppose you can disarm them with a ballot box? What the hell do you think they're there for?"
- dario fo (adapted by gavin richards), accidental death of an anarchist
/
"Why do you want this revolution? What good do you think it will do?"
The milk-coffee coloured shoulders tossed back the yellow satin scarf in a shrug.
"What good? None, possibly. One does not await a revolution as one awaits the grocer's van, expecting to be handed packets of sugar and tapioca. My river in spring flood brought dead bodies, a hand or foot dismembered, a clot of entrails. So will this flood, maybe. But for all that it is the spring flood."
- sylvia townsend-warner, summer will show
/
"Peace? Is it peace we’re working to protect?
What has peace meant for this country, for our city, for us?
All the effort and passion Japan put into the war ended in Hiroshima in defeat. Then the Americans came, bringing their nuclear deterrent, their cold war, their Hollywood chewing-gum war. And now all over the world there are bullet wars, civil wars, suffering, misery, death.
We’re a rich country. And what is our wealth built on? The bloody corpses in all these wars. They’re the foundation of our peace. We now put the same effort into indifference that our parents put into war. Other countries comfortably far away pay the price for our prosperous peace. We’ve learned very well how to ignore their suffering."
"No matter how repulsive the peace, it’s still vital to guard it. It may be an immoral peace, maybe an unjust peace, but an unjust peace is still better than a just war."
"I share your revulsion about “just” wars. If there ever was such a thing it was the war against the Nazis - our allies Goto, our allies! But how many millions throughout history have died in the cause of what their lying leaders called 'just' wars?
And yet it seems to me that the line between a just war and an unjust peace is very faint indeed. If the just war is a lie, is the unjust peace less of a lie? We are told there is peace, but we look around us and even if we cannot give it words our lives tell us we cannot believe what we are being told.
In the end every war gives way to peace so-called, and every so-called peace is the dormant seed of war.
So it’s only a matter of time, 'til the hard reality of war sweeps away our illusion that the absence of war is peace. So I ask you again, what are we working to protect?
We enjoy peace on our T.V. screens while just outside the camera shot the war is raging. We forget we’re just a camera angle behind the battlelines. No, we don’t forget–we quite simply refuse to remember. That cannot go on. Sometime, somehow, we will be punished."
"Punished? By who? By God?"
"Anyone in this world can be like God, most in a universe no bigger than their own minds, all-present, all-knowing, and yet impotent outside the confines of their heads. And what God cannot do, men will attempt."
- patlabor 2: the movie (1993, production i.g.) dir. mamoru oshii, script by kazunori ito (adapted by george roubicek for manga entertainment)
/
"I would like to send a message from the frontline to the comrades in Japan. We are hoping to see the fire of revolution burn in the world. Guevara once said he hoped to see the entire world become like Vietnam, and that is the same hope we have. That is why we hope from the bottom of our hearts that by maintaining constant communication between us, as we have learned much from your struggles, you will learn from our experiences and learn the lessons we have learned. With our collective struggle, we can decisively defeat the imperialists who oppress and exploit our people. The will and emotion of people cannot be expressed by newspaper reports, but only by the commencement of armed struggle."
(THE BEST FORM OF PROPAGANDA IS ARMED STRUGGLE)
- red army - p.f.l.p: declaration of world war (1971) dir. masao adachi & koji wakamatsu
...
"Peace is the noblest pursuit!"
...well, sure, but what peace and whose?
one of the most simultaneously deeply serious and terminally unserious works of fiction i've ever encountered, a closed circle of violence entrapping a group of people pathologically incapable of resolving the dialectical tensions with which they are faced and all hope of escape for anyone foreclosed from the jump. it's not necessarily wise to read muramasa (the work) as fully sharing or endorsing the ideological zealotry of kageaki's utterly moronic dril wise man tweet philosophy, one born of a quintessentially chuuni disconnect from material social reality in favor of a totalizing system that obliterates nuance or meaningful historical analysis - muramasa is such a formidably coherent piece of genre fiction that the dissonance this produces lends itself to an interpretation that doesn't take the law of balance as read, even if none of the cast are ever able to find a means of escape. it's still a reactionary work in many respects, as well as racist in ways that work against what it's attempting to do and misogynistic in ways that (surprisingly) do actually dovetail with its thematic concerns effective/interesting ways whilst still making for largely wholly uninteresting pornography (kanae and the first muramasa sex scenes being the only remotely good ones), but...still absolutely 100% peak, even if not quite enough to dethrone fatomoru for me. need me some ginseigo and avenger kits expeditiously!!!
In the end, this philosophy proved too much at odds with reality. Outlawed by his government and shunned by the people he'd purported to save, Plekhanov went to his hanging with these final words--
As long as the crux and the cross rule the earth, mankind shall never know peace.
-ittetsu narahara, full metal daemon muramasa
...
"You kill them and you're no better than they are! You just demonstrate your extremist contempt for democracy!"
"What sort of democracy requires the services of scum like these? I'll tell you, Ms. Valetti: a bourgeois democracy, which wears a thin skin of human rights to keep out the cold, but when things hot up, when the rotten plots of the ruling class have failed to silence our demands, when they put half the population on the dole queue, and squeeze the other half dry with wage cuts to keep themselves in profit, when they have run out of promises and you reformists have failed to keep the masses in order for them, and there are riots on the streets, then they shed their skins and they dump you, don't they? Just as they did in Chile, and they set their wildest dogs loose on us all."
"What has the tragedy in Chile got to do with all this?"
"It's a prize example of the failure of the peaceful road to socialism! You know, the absurd idea that bourgeois democracy can be gradually transformed from within."
"Rubbish! Allende's failure proves exactly the opposite! He tried to force the pace of the revolution before the people were fully prepared!"
"YOU MEAN HE DISARMED THE WORKERS TOO FAST. AND LED THEM LIKE THE PIED PIPER INTO SANTIAGO STADIUM. Look at them, Ms. Valetti: the political police armed against the people. You seriously suppose you can disarm them with a ballot box? What the hell do you think they're there for?"
- dario fo (adapted by gavin richards), accidental death of an anarchist
/
"Why do you want this revolution? What good do you think it will do?"
The milk-coffee coloured shoulders tossed back the yellow satin scarf in a shrug.
"What good? None, possibly. One does not await a revolution as one awaits the grocer's van, expecting to be handed packets of sugar and tapioca. My river in spring flood brought dead bodies, a hand or foot dismembered, a clot of entrails. So will this flood, maybe. But for all that it is the spring flood."
- sylvia townsend-warner, summer will show
/
"Peace? Is it peace we’re working to protect?
What has peace meant for this country, for our city, for us?
All the effort and passion Japan put into the war ended in Hiroshima in defeat. Then the Americans came, bringing their nuclear deterrent, their cold war, their Hollywood chewing-gum war. And now all over the world there are bullet wars, civil wars, suffering, misery, death.
We’re a rich country. And what is our wealth built on? The bloody corpses in all these wars. They’re the foundation of our peace. We now put the same effort into indifference that our parents put into war. Other countries comfortably far away pay the price for our prosperous peace. We’ve learned very well how to ignore their suffering."
"No matter how repulsive the peace, it’s still vital to guard it. It may be an immoral peace, maybe an unjust peace, but an unjust peace is still better than a just war."
"I share your revulsion about “just” wars. If there ever was such a thing it was the war against the Nazis - our allies Goto, our allies! But how many millions throughout history have died in the cause of what their lying leaders called 'just' wars?
And yet it seems to me that the line between a just war and an unjust peace is very faint indeed. If the just war is a lie, is the unjust peace less of a lie? We are told there is peace, but we look around us and even if we cannot give it words our lives tell us we cannot believe what we are being told.
In the end every war gives way to peace so-called, and every so-called peace is the dormant seed of war.
So it’s only a matter of time, 'til the hard reality of war sweeps away our illusion that the absence of war is peace. So I ask you again, what are we working to protect?
We enjoy peace on our T.V. screens while just outside the camera shot the war is raging. We forget we’re just a camera angle behind the battlelines. No, we don’t forget–we quite simply refuse to remember. That cannot go on. Sometime, somehow, we will be punished."
"Punished? By who? By God?"
"Anyone in this world can be like God, most in a universe no bigger than their own minds, all-present, all-knowing, and yet impotent outside the confines of their heads. And what God cannot do, men will attempt."
- patlabor 2: the movie (1993, production i.g.) dir. mamoru oshii, script by kazunori ito (adapted by george roubicek for manga entertainment)
/
"I would like to send a message from the frontline to the comrades in Japan. We are hoping to see the fire of revolution burn in the world. Guevara once said he hoped to see the entire world become like Vietnam, and that is the same hope we have. That is why we hope from the bottom of our hearts that by maintaining constant communication between us, as we have learned much from your struggles, you will learn from our experiences and learn the lessons we have learned. With our collective struggle, we can decisively defeat the imperialists who oppress and exploit our people. The will and emotion of people cannot be expressed by newspaper reports, but only by the commencement of armed struggle."
(THE BEST FORM OF PROPAGANDA IS ARMED STRUGGLE)
- red army - p.f.l.p: declaration of world war (1971) dir. masao adachi & koji wakamatsu
...
"Peace is the noblest pursuit!"
...well, sure, but what peace and whose?
one of the most simultaneously deeply serious and terminally unserious works of fiction i've ever encountered, a closed circle of violence entrapping a group of people pathologically incapable of resolving the dialectical tensions with which they are faced and all hope of escape for anyone foreclosed from the jump. it's not necessarily wise to read muramasa (the work) as fully sharing or endorsing the ideological zealotry of kageaki's utterly moronic dril wise man tweet philosophy, one born of a quintessentially chuuni disconnect from material social reality in favor of a totalizing system that obliterates nuance or meaningful historical analysis - muramasa is such a formidably coherent piece of genre fiction that the dissonance this produces lends itself to an interpretation that doesn't take the law of balance as read, even if none of the cast are ever able to find a means of escape. it's still a reactionary work in many respects, as well as racist in ways that work against what it's attempting to do and misogynistic in ways that (surprisingly) do actually dovetail with its thematic concerns effective/interesting ways whilst still making for largely wholly uninteresting pornography (kanae and the first muramasa sex scenes being the only remotely good ones), but...still absolutely 100% peak, even if not quite enough to dethrone fatomoru for me. need me some ginseigo and avenger kits expeditiously!!!
2017
A shmup/bullet hell-cum-arena fighter is a helluva pitch and G.rev delivers - this is a blast and after running through arcade mode I'm v pumped to try out the rest of the cast. Popping off your special to turn into a shmup boss and rain hell on your opponent is terrifically satisfying, though actually dodging attacks in that mode is a motherfucker when the placement of fire being thrown at you is not consistent by design. Still, you're never entirely without the means to dodge around and the options for regular combat (main shot and subweapon, with different effects depending on whether you're attacking while guarding or dashing) are streamlined enough to be fairly easy to get a handle on while still offering decent variety, at least at first blush. This is such a rad idea for a game and I'm glad it exists!
Pure fabulous id-scratching meathead spectacle. Rewards the same bullheaded daredevil style of play of a Ketsui with a significantly lower skill ceiling overall. Not one for those who come to shmups for strategy or "challenge" per se, but balancing how much of your regenerating life bar to use for your souped-up laser sword in any given situation is still thrilling enough to make up for it. Great entry-level title and definitely recommended for the curious.
EDIT: Echoing BeachEpisode's observation that this desperately needs an epilepsy warning up front btw
EDIT: Echoing BeachEpisode's observation that this desperately needs an epilepsy warning up front btw
2010
"Justifies the existence of games as a popular art form/medium"-tier good, and tied with KENTICKY ROUTE ZERO as my all-time fav AND genuine greatest of all time pick. That it got a sequel almost but not quite as good is a miracle.
Sadly mid as hell despite the strength of the premise and gestures in more interesting directions - feels oddly undercooked for something with around 2-3years development time so far as I can gather. Carried along by the strength of the presentation (shout out Hiro Kiyahara for some v cool but not overworked character designs and Izanagi Games for genuinely impressive spritework), performances of the voice cast (Yu Kobayashi giving it 200% as Binko the easy MVP), and G.Rev, but the VN mystery/death game portion feels like a minimal effort first draft and the shmup segments, while occasionally gorgeous for the least interesting segments, are solid but unexceptional. Would be interested to see a sequel that develops some of the ideas here further tbh.
2023
ignore the haters this shit is tight, iori one of the best type-moon boys
2021
(S01E02: FRIDAY)
I don't think I've ever been moved by a game as deeply as this moved me, save maybe KR0 and Nier. Opening section captures that overwhelming feeling of gratitude and relief upon meeting a friend in a dream, like seeing a friendly familiar face in a city you've never visited before, like no other piece of art I can recall. I'm all the way the fuck in on this even if it's likely to break my heart in half.
I don't think I've ever been moved by a game as deeply as this moved me, save maybe KR0 and Nier. Opening section captures that overwhelming feeling of gratitude and relief upon meeting a friend in a dream, like seeing a friendly familiar face in a city you've never visited before, like no other piece of art I can recall. I'm all the way the fuck in on this even if it's likely to break my heart in half.
2002
Played co-op with a friend on a cabinet at my local arcade, fucking loved it.
1999
Game fucks but also I'm pretty sure some of these bullet patterns are Actually kinda bullshit, like with e.g. CAVE I can p much always immediately tell how I've fucked up and what I could/should have done instead but here I genuinely cannot discern what actual strategy could possibly be developed in response to some of the shit they throw at you in the later stages. Still fun tho!
2009
It's the best one, no contest.
2003
barely scratched the surface of this but it's really fucking cool and deserves to be pulled from obscurity - bit finicky to play with a controller but there might be a way to tweak that [bgm selection - "pure (energy)" by g.t.o.]
It's just the first one again with minor tweaks and therefore insufferable and vapid in the exact same ways lol.
Almost 1cc'd Super Easy Mode while my gf was watching but had to continue once at Evacaneer Doom lol. Anyway game fucks and is basically perfect, def gonna get that SEM 1cc next time.