juliko25 | Entries tagged with garden

Rating: 45/100

Hey, kids! Remember a few years ago, when I played a cute little game called Pretty Princess Party? Well, guess what? It got a sequel! Pretty Princess Magical Garden Island is a direct sequel to Pretty Princess Party, even right down to taking place immediately after the events of the first game. After your characters restore the castle back to normal, Asbel and the princesses decide to head over to a place called Carrot Isle for some fun...but they find that it's completely deserted. They decide to stick around and do all they can to return Carrot Isle back to its former state...most of which involves farming! You have to plant crops, raise animals, and collect materials to make whatever the residents of Carrot Isle need. If you're gonna go into this thinking it's going to be anything like Story of Seasons or Stardew Valley, you're out of luck. Seriously, for a sequel to a fairly cute game that nailed its interior decorating gameplay, the producers for this really dropped the ball with Magical Garden Island.

I mean, Pretty Princess Party as a game itself wasn't anything special, and it was very clearly aimed at kids what with how easy it is, but I still got some enjoyment out of it even as a 30-year-old adult. Magical Garden Island, while also being super easy, not only cuts out some features from the first game, but seems to go out of its way to be as tedious as humanly possible. Rather than just interior decorating, you manage a farm where you grow crops, raise animals, and make buildings that allow you to put in materials to make processed goods, from craft shops to restaurants. You have to grow certain crops and receive eggs and milk from livestock in order to make items that the citizens request. In the previous game, you could easily get the in-game currency, Lumina, by greeting the townspeople or the mini-games. While the former is still around, Magical Garden Island wants you to fulfill requests on a bulletin board, and the more requests you fulfill, the more recipes you'll unlock. Unlike games in the Story of Seasons series, everything from crops growing to goods getting process runs on a real-time system, meaning everything in-game takes literally 5-10 real life minutes to grow. Some facilities you build allow you to process five items at a time, and some let you net all five items at once when time passes, but most of the facilities will process one item every five minutes, which can border on annoyingly tedious unless you grew hundreds of the needed item and have several of the exact same facility. Not only that, a lot of items you really need to finish the game are made from facilities that process one item every five minutes! This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that once you build something once, you can use it over and over again and not need to make another one, but it doesn't do anything to make the grinding and tedium any easier to deal with.

Magical Garden Island carries over a lot of issues that the first game had: One-note characters, uncannily creepy designs for the humans, an unmemorable soundtrack, and sluggishly slow pacing. But if you can believe it, Magical Garden Island comes with a whole new set of issues that really bog the game down, including the ones I mentioned above. Remember the mini-games from Pretty Princess Party? Magical Garden Island has no mini-games whatsoever. Yeah, the mini-games were repetitive, but I still found them fun, and I can't fathom why the producers got rid of them. Secondly, harvesting crops is needlessly hard in this game. You know how in most Story of Seasons games, when you get to a certain point, your MC can gather multiple crops at once? Magical Garden Island has no such feature whatsoever! You have to manually harvest crops one by one, and when you do so, your character is always walking slow by default. There's no feature to make them run while you harvest. I had to press both the A and B button at the same time to speed up the process, and it made both my fingers hurt. Say what you will about, say, Stardew Valley also making you manually gather crops one by one, but you could still harvest them while walking simultaneously, and it had the option of making your MC run all the time if you set it so! Farming games are supposed to be cozy and soothing, not tedious and annoying.

The game even manages to royally screw up its best mechanic, the interior decorating! Or in this case, exterior decorating. How does it manage to do so, you ask? You can still customize your farm however you want, and a lot of the items from the first game carry over to this one. Unlocking items is a lot harder because they require certain ingredients that take a long time to produce, many of which come from the facilities that only produce one item every five minutes. The first game remedied this by cutting down processing time if you paid Lumina, but Magical Garden Island no longer has that option. That in itself would be annoying enough, but get this: Magical Garden Island no longer allows you to place items on things like tables or desks! Seriously, I've tried doing so multiple times, and MGI just flat-out doesn't let you put anything on tables or desks anymore, thereby making a lot of the items it has completely and utterly useless! Nippon Columbia, how the hell did you manage to screw up your game's best gameplay mechanic so badly?! Whose bright idea was this?! If you're not gonna let people put anything on tables or desks, where the hell are we supposed to put stuff like books, food, or tea sets?! Outside, on the grass?!

Good lord, I really wanted to enjoy this. And believe me when I say even with the issues I had with Pretty Princess Party, I found it far more enjoyable than Magical Garden Island turned out to be! I'm sure people who liked the first game will probably enjoy this one, even with the flaws I mentioned above. But unless you want to introduce your daughter, niece, or sister to video games, I'd avoid Pretty Princess Magical Garden Island, especially if you really hate grinding that forces you to invest a lot of time into it.

Current Mood: groggy

Rating: 49/100

One time, a few years ago, I mentioned to some people in a fandom that I wasn't a particularly big fan of a show because I felt that it came across as too treacly and saccharine, with the main character embodying a lot of those qualities. But apparently a lot of people didn't like this and proceeded to accuse me of only liking tragic edgy shlock and claiming that I hate it when kids shows have an optimistic tone. If anyone's seen some reviews I've done for the various seasons of Pretty Cure, I can attest that that's not true. I just prefer the shows I watch, books I read, and games I play to actually have substance to them, and not just lean too far into both extremes, such as being too sugary and saccharine or being too morose, dark, and bleak. Unfortunately, Vampire in the Garden, a new Netflix anime made by Wit Studio, is the latter. If anyone is looking for a good example of a show that's absolutely drowning in pointless edginess and misery porn, Vampire in the Garden pretty much embodies all of those qualities, and not for the better.

Basically, the story focuses on a world where vampires and humans are locked in endless conflict, and because vampires have heightened senses of hearing, humans have forbidden music of all kinds. Momo is a young girl living in one of the few human strongholds left, and while she's had experience with killing vampires due to her mother's job as a military general, she grows weary of all the fighting. When she gets into a fight with her mother over a music box, she runs away and encounters the supposed queen of vampires, Fine, and the two escape together. Although their initial encounter is rough, the two slowly become friends and bond over a shared love of music. But their newfound friendship is considered taboo by both humans and vampires. Momo and Fine hear an urban legend about a paradise called Eden, where humans and vampires supposedly live in peace, so they decide to try and find it, hoping to escape the conflict that they're embroiled in. But their journey is not a happy one.

Yeah, the whole premise feels like a cookie cutter YA novel trying to capitalize on the vampire trend, similar to what the Twilight books wound up doing years ago, only here there's no romance. But the premise like this can be done well, and others have managed to pull it off well. But Vampire in the Garden is not one of them, and there's so much wrong with it that it's not even funny. For one, the series is fairly short, only going for about 5 half-hour episodes, so the pacing is very fast, having very little in the way of breaks and quiet moments. Now, I know a lot of series that have less episodes and even shorter episode run times, but have managed to make optimal use of them in order to do what they wanted, with some examples being Yoru no Kuni, the various PokeToon shorts, and even Pokemon Twilight Wings. But here's the thing: All three of those short series I mentioned have one thing in common, which is the reason that people like them show much, that reason being that the three shorts managed to make you, the audience, care about the characters and their plight, mainly because the shows themselves cared about them enough to show how they grow and achieve their goals in the end, even when the roads to getting there weren't exactly pleasant. Which leads me to the main reason why Vampire in the Garden fails as an anime: It's so obsessed with being as bloody, violent, edgy, and downright miserable and morose as possible that it's completely impossible to care about the characters and the situations they're in.

Honestly, watching Vampire in the Garden felt like I was stuck in a bloody mud pit and couldn't get out. Everything about it feels like whoever produced this wanted to make it the most miserable, morose, unnecessarily angsty anime possible. For one, none of the characters save for the main two are even remotely likeable, and even the two leads are bland as hell, barely changing much throughout the show, and any changes they do go through are so predictable you can see them coming from a mile away. The show makes absolutely no effort to develop its characters or give them any depth beyond their most basic archetypes or short flashes of their backstories that just are just there for more forced drama. Most of the characters end up dying anyway, and the show thinks it's good at making you care about them, but its method of doing so involves shoehorning in a LOT of melodrama, a lot of it in the form of characters constantly screaming, crying, angsting, and being angry with no end in sight. Any moments of levity and quiet are really short and often followed up by, you guessed it, more fighting and blood and angst, leaving practically no time to catch your breath. Also, can I just say how much I hate Momo's mother Nobara as a character? Most of her screentime consists of being a hardened military leader and yelling at or slapping Momo around. The show is trying to make the case that she wants to save Momo from the vampires, but with the way the show presents her, it never felt to me like she truly cared about Momo and was only trying to save her for her own benefit. And even if Momo did act willful and ungrateful during their argument, does that really justify Nobara slapping her and treating her like shit over really petty things? Any time Momo and Nobara are seen together, Nobara is either angry at her or pulling a gun on her, and any attempts she made to apologize to her all felt shallow and fake as a result of her inconsistent characterization.

Which leads me to Vampire in the Garden's biggest flaw: Momo and Fine's journey winds up being rendered completely meaningless and pointless as nothing in the show ever changes from when it first started. From beginning to end, Vampire in the Garden shows nothing but the vampires and humans at war with one another, and any solutions to the problem are rendered either too good to be true or wind up never having existed in the first place. Combine that with all the blood, gore, violence, and characters being absolutely nasty to one another, this makes the series feel completely meaningless, as the characters we're supposed to care about never manage to achieve their goals, with their whole journey being in vain, nothing ever gets better for them, and any happiness they find winds up being an illusion. The war between the vampires and humans never gets resolved, and most of the cast dies at the end, making Vampire in the Garden nothing more than a painful slog of nothing but seemingly endless misery and tragedy porn. Actually, Vampire in the Garden is literally just relentless, neverending misery porn, nothing more. Honestly, the only good things Vampire in the Garden has going for it are its detailed backgrounds, animation reminiscent of early 2000s stuff, and the soundtrack which consists of mostly classical music and opera singing, and even those can't save the show from just being a relentless angst fest with no light at the end of the tunnel. The whole series feels like it's constantly beating you with a hammer while screaming "FEEL SAAAAAAAD!!" and it just doesn't work because it has nothing else to offer.

Look, I like my fair share of tragedies and bittersweet endings every now and then. But making a show be literally nothing but non-stop angst, drama, and misery, without any meaningful reason for the audience to care about your characters and story, and have it end with basically nothing changing in the end, really doesn't work. At all. I just watched a French movie recently called Long Way North, and while that movie had plenty of tragic moments, it at least had the characters accomplish what they wanted to do in the end, so everything they went through wasn't in vain. The movie In This Corner of the World took 70% of its screentime to establish its story and characters and make the audience care about them first, knowing to save the tragedy and sad moments for later, making it hit harder than it would have had the movie used it earlier. One of my favorite movies of all time is the 1997 Dog of Flanders anime, and it starts off happy-go-lucky and sweet but slowly becomes more tragic as it goes on, and it also has a sad ending, but it actually had a point to its tragedy, to establish how classism hurts both the privileged and the working class people. Hell, what many consider to be one of the best video games ever, Mother 3, is universally praised as being one of the saddest games ever, and didn't need to rely on having absolutely nothing but constant sorrow and drama for 30 hours straight. My point being, if you're going to make your story a tragedy in some capacity, don't make the tragedy all there is to story, and have more to offer than just that. Vampire in the Garden has literally nothing to offer except endless angst that's ultimately pointless in the end. I once wrote a fan fic years ago that many people claimed was pointlessly dark and edgy, and some of their complaints about it are valid, but if there's one thing I can say about it, it's that I at least TRIED to have there to be more to it than just angst and drama. I made sure to at least develop the characters and throw in moments of needed levity, even if I didn't always succeed, and stuff like this and Magical Girl Site are way worse and edgier than my old fic could ever be.

Vampire in the Garden is on Netflix right now, and maybe it can be something you can use to introduce a teenager to and have them transition to watching anime that's more mature than stuff like Pokemon and Naruto. Otherwise, Vampire in the Garden doesn't have anything to offer unless you're masochistic enough to endure seemingly endless angst, gore, and melodrama.

Edit, 5/22/2022: I found out I was admittedly wrong about one thing. Apparently there was a stinger scene at the very end of episode 5, after the credits, that I didn't see on my first watch. Because I didn't see this stinger, I thought that Momo's journey wound up being completely in vain, making the series feel completely pointless, but it turns out the stinger has a much happier outcome for Momo than I thought. Because of this, I've decided to be a little bit generous and bump up the rating slightly. That being said, my overall feelings for Vampire in the Garden remain the same, and had the series been longer and bothered to put in some more moments of levity and flesh out all its other characters, it might have been something good or even great.

Current Mood: aggravated
Current Music: Kokia - Follow The Nightingale

Rating: 89/100.

One genre of media that I've never really gravitated towards was romance, namely because many of the plots for romance were always very melodramatic or formulaic. It wasn't that I inherently hated romance as a genre, I just never found any romance media that really appealed to me. That would get rectified later in my life as I began to read and watch more things. I'm also not really into yaoi or yuri manga or novels, mainly for the same reasons, along with many of them having very questionable ethics in regards to things like consent. Many of them tend to idealize and glamorize toxic relationships, and I'm not down for that kind of stuff (Though this is coming from someone who unironically likes Sakura Gari). Honestly, I never even heard of Goodbye My Rose Garden before coming across this article here, but when I read it, my interest was immediately piqued. I requested it at my local library, and was quick to rent it and read the entire series in one sitting. I'm glad I did because I'm really, really surprised at just how great this manga turned out to be, especially since the last manga by Dr. Pepperco that I read, Bang Dream: Girls Band Party Roselia Stage, was decent at best but had a lot of problems in regards to its artwork. Seven Seas, thank you for bringing this manga to the US, because I love it!

In the year 1900, Japan is in the midst of mingling with the West and adopting a lot of its cultural practices. Hanako Kujo, a teacher still reeling over being unable to help one of her students, travels to England in order to find the author of one of her favorite novels, along with finding a job. Unfortunately, she hits a roadblock and is unsure of what to do. Thankfully, a young noblewoman, Alice Douglas, notices Hanako and offers her a job as her personal maid. The two of them bond over their shared love of novels and literature, but for some reason, Alice wants Hanako to kill her. Hanako is unable to comprehend why Alice would ask her to do such a thing, but she's determined to not only befriend her mistress, but to make the best of her new surroundings.

One thing I really respect about Goodbye My Rose Garden is that it really makes great use of its setting. Rather than simply using it as a backdrop, the manga takes great care to embed itself in the history of the period, through the social and hierarchal norms the characters are expected to uphold to using real events that are happening during the time, such as the very heavily publicized trial of Oscar Wilde. It's made very clear throughout the manga that Dr. Pepperco really did a lot of research on Victorian England, and when wanting to write a story taking place in the past, you really need to make sure you get all your facts straight, because if you don't take care to portray the time period as it was, or take too much artistic/creative license with it, you run the risk of either making it feel too modern/contemporary or falsifying facts. Like, you won't find the characters here saying things like "The elephant in the room," knowing about the internet, or owning cars. It'd be one thing if Goodbye My Rose Garden was trying to go for an alternate history route, or go for a more fantasy/sci-fi like depiction like what the video game Code;Realize did, but the manga makes it clear it's trying to be just slice-of-life historical fiction, with no fantasy or sci-fi elements in sight.

Another thing that impressed me was the artwork. I mentioned in my Bang Dream Roselia manga review that I felt that the artwork could be lackluster at times, especially for the backgrounds. There, it felt like Dr. Pepperco didn't put in an effort to make the world of that manga feel alive, or only did the bare minimum. That manga came out several months before Dr. Pepperco would go on to make this, and it's amazing to see how much she learned from her mistakes, because the backgrounds here are not only very lavish and detailed, especially when it matters, but feel much more alive. Everything, from the designs on book bindings, to the period-appropriate dresses and hair styles the characters wear, to the exterior and interiors of the mansions the characters inhabit, is given a lot of care and attention, and I didn't notice any significant issues or anachronisms. Even the usage of English text is very cohesive, and I didn't notice any jarring grammar errors or awkward sentence structure, something that even most World Masterpiece Theater anime struggle with from time to time.

Of course, no matter how much research you put into the setting, you can't have a good story without a cast of characters to make you care about them, and thankfully, Goodbye My Rose Garden has a great ensemble to hold it together. The main duo are a joy to watch, as they both have equal amounts of depth, strengths, weaknesses, and contributions to the story and its progression, and Dr. Pepperco really worked hard to make sure they have good chemistry, and I found their budding friendship and later romance to be very believable. Other characters, such as Susanne, Marie, and Alice's older sister Jane are also pretty likeable and serve their purposes well. Even the antagonistic characters are surprisingly down-to-earth and aren't evil for the sake of it, as the manga is careful to show that they are products of their environment and are expected to uphold the Victorian-era values and social norms that have been drilled into them all their lives, and a lot of the conflict comes from their wanting Alice to be happy but wrongly assuming being the submissive wife of a noblewoman and upholding the family's reputation is the best thing for her, since that's what women of the time were expected to be. Edward, Alice's fiance, isn't a cackling supervillain and does love her to an extent, but is a product of Victorian era sensibilities, thinking Alice will be happy if she becomes a mother, being openly suspicious of Hanako's relationship with her, and even displaying period-appropriate (But still unacceptable by modern standards) racism towards Hanako. My only real complaint is that other characters, such as the other maids working in the Douglas estate and Edward's unnamed friend who tells him about Alice's scandal and warns him about Hanako, don't get developed or utilized enough, to the point where Edward's friend doesn't even have a name. Plus, Susanne, a maid that Hanako encounters, is said to have left a bad situation in France, but we never see it. Dr. Pepperco has mentioned at the end of volume 3 that she'd like to make a sequel manga that goes deeper into exploring other characters and the consequences of their actions, but so far, nothing's set in stone.

For what it's worth, though, I'm happy with Goodbye My Rose Garden as is. It knows what it wants to be, doesn't drag itself out longer than necessary, and doesn't overstay its welcome. Now I wish I hadn't written off Dr. Pepperco back when I reviewed the Bang Dream manga she made. Goodbye My Rose Garden was clearly made with a lot of love and passion, and I can only hope she's able to make more stories like this. It helps that it's fairly short, too, only clocking it at three volumes, and Seven Seas released the whole series in the US, so you can read through it pretty quickly if you have a few hours to kill. So for anyone wanting to read a historical shoujo-ai/LGBT manga that doesn't have a tragic ending, definitely give Goodbye My Rose Garden a try. It's sweet, short, riveting, and I would honestly love for someone to make an anime out of this. I know that probably won't happen, but hey, a girl can dream, can't she?

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Peter Gabriel - Heroes

I give one of Makoto Shinkai's shorter movies...an 84/100!

Makoto Shinkai is a director who has made a name for himself in recent years. He started out doing short movies before dipping his toes into longer feature length films, and then his movie Your Name came out and basically became the most popular anime movie ever. I've been following some of his work since Children Who Chase Lost Voices, and I only just now saw a short movie he made in 2013, The Garden of Words, thanks to Netflix. Now, I did see Your Name, and I have yet to finish my review of it, but I found it just...okay. It had some good ideas, but it suffered from trying to be too big for its own good and combining ideas together that mix like oil and water. I find that Shinkai is at his best when his movies aren't trying to be big and ambitious. As far as his movies go, I think this is his personal best and my favorite Shinkai movie (Though my favorite short goes to Dareka no Manazashi, which I need to rewatch one of these days).

The story centers on a young high school student, Takao Akizuki, who knows what he wants to do with his life but feels alienated and stuck. School hasn't done much for him, his mother isn't around, his brother isn't the most supportive of his dream of being a shoemaker, and he regularly skips classes whenever it rains. He wants to become an adult as fast as possible so he can make his own living. One day, while skipping school, he comes across a young woman, Yukari Yukino, at the gazebo he frequents. Although Takao isn't very fond of authority, the two of them form a friendship over the course of their rainy day meetings. Yukari has some problems of her own and sees her meetings with Takao as an escape from her own hardships.

I admit to only having seen a few of Shinkai's movies, not all of them. But one thing that many anime fans know about Shinkai is his penchant for absolutely breathtaking animation, especially on the backgrounds and environments. There's no denying that his production team really goes all out on the backgrounds. Every frame is packed to the gills with detail, from the ripples in rain puddles to sunbeams through glass, it really feels like the world Shinkai makes for this movie feels alive, even down to the sound mixing and usage of ambient noise to set the atmosphere. It also really goes for "show, don't tell" at every possible time, like conveying how Takao wants to be a shoemaker by showing how he always sketches feet and shoes. I don't have as much to say on the soundtrack. It's good, though I can barely tell you anything about it except that I didn't like the ending song. I found the singer for that to be too obnoxious for my liking.

I like the characters well enough. The main two are pretty good, and they both have aspirations, strengths, and weaknesses people can relate to. They're not going to bring the house down or anything, but with the setting being as realistic as it is, and not trying to make them big and bombastic, Takao and Yukari fulfill their roles pretty well. The side characters on the other hand...really don't get to shine as much, as many of them are just there to either dump exposition or cause the main conflict in the movie, not much else. We only get one line of dialogue in regards to Takao's mother and she's only in the movie for one scene and that's it. I feel like if the movie had been longer, it could have gotten the chance to expand on them a lot more, as they shouldn't be relegated to just props to move the story along. But the main two really carry the movie on their shoulders, and I liked them perfectly fine.

Now, people who aren't huge fans of Shinkai often point out that he often either rehashes the same story over and over in different ways, or bites off more than he can chew. Considering this is a 46-minute long movie, he opted for a more realistic setting here, which is fine. Having seen some of his work, I can understand where some of his detractors are coming from. I saw Your Name, and I feel that it tried way too hard to be too many things at once when it could have just stuck to one plot and made the most out of it. Garden of Words is just that, a simple story of two people finding solace in one another in the face of their own personal hardships...but there is one part of the narrative that I'm sure people are going to have an issue with: Takao is a high school student, and Yukari is a teacher, and the story implies that Takao is in love with her. Japan has a...weird fascination with age gap romances (CardCaptor Sakura is one of the more egregious titles in regards to this), and I totally understand why people would be put off by it, as this kind of thing would absolutely NEVER fly in countries like America. If a teacher or a student got together romantically, the teacher would get arrested for sure. But without spoiling anything, I think Garden of Words handles the subject very well. It doesn't try to condone or encourage a romance between a teacher and her student, and the way the plotline is resolved, while not upfront about its answer, does subtly imply that any romance between them would never happen, something I greatly appreciate. The movie doesn't necessarily end happily ever after, but it does still have a sense of hope that things will get better for Takao and Yukari in the future.

That being said, the actual ending does, unfortunately, come across as very cheesy and melodramatic. Again, I won't spoil how it plays out, but it does involve a lot of dramatic yelling and crying, overly triumphant music, and usage of light rays that make the ending feel like it came right out of a sappy Hallmark movie. That's really the only dark spot I feel the movie has is how cheesy the final scene before the credits played out, and Shinkai does tend to go for the melodramatic when he feels like it. But yeah, that's pretty much it for my feelings on Garden of Words. Is it a perfect movie? No, but how do I like it? Out of the few works of his that I've seen, this is my favorite of his movies. It stumbles near the end, and at other points, but the things it does well, it does really well, and any person looking for a low key, somewhat realistic, relaxing movie should definitely check out Garden of Words at least once.