(Well Past) Midnight Suns - Reviewed

I am looking forward to getting more painting and reading done now that I have finally finished playing Midnight Suns on the PlayStation.

Even though I am still using a past-generation console, I still dislike getting my video games upon release and prefer to pick them up on sale later...often much later. This is why I only finished 2018's Red Dead Redemption 2 last fall, and I also tend to play them kind of exhaustively (all the side missions and anything story-related) whichh is why it took me 11 months to finish.

Midnight Suns is not an open world adventure game like RDR2 though, it is more of a...well, let's just say that to call it a comic-book inspired, turn-based, tactical card RPG wrapped around a dating simulator would not be inaccurate.

Set in the Marvel Comics universe (the original MCU!), the titular Midnight Suns are a group of established, supernaturally oriented characters from a variety of titles: Blade (the vampire hunter), Nico Minoru (the blood witch of The Runaways), Robbie Reyes (the most recent Ghost Rider), and Illyana Rasputin (Magik from the X-Men).

Facing an unprecedented assault from Lilith, the Mother of Demons and her new Hydra allies, they resurrect the last person to defeat her three centuries earlier - her child, known only as The Hunter, which is the character you will play. Such is the level of threat that Avengers Doctor Strange, Iron Man, and Captain Marvel have joined you as well, and the two groups' differing approaches will lead to friction between them at times.

I love turn based games, and having been wanting to play this ever since I found it it was developed by the same crew who made XCOM, and it has been almost exclusively awesome time.

Typical combat encounters feature three characters (some you choose, some chosen for you to fit the story), each of whom as their own deck of 8 cards. On each turn, you can play three, and the order you play them in can be very critical. You can also redraw two cards per turns, franticaly trying to trade your heal card for something more damaging early in the fight, or vice versa later on.

You can also move your characters around the battlefield, which helps you align certain attacks that can hit everything in a straight line, or knock enemies back into obstacles or hazards for addtional damage.

In between missions, you can turn captured 'gamma coils' into random new cards. In addition to newer, different abitlies or attacks, you can also combine two of the same card into an improved version. Eventually you even get the ability to build your own copies of cards or modifying them in other ways.

The role-play aspects occur as you explore the mystical grounds of the Transian abbey that is the headquarters of the Suns, finding various artifacts and eventually the spell ingredients used to create still more resources and items that can be combined in seemingly limited ways. Special challenges enable Hunter to use words of power from the Elder gods, which open up even more of the grounds for exploring.

If I am being honest though, as much as I enjoy the tactical challenges of the combat, what made me love the game is the way it handles downtime. After missions, you are often given the opportunity to 'hangout' with another character, your talk guided by familiar but well-written dialogue trees. You may also have the opportunity to share a gift with them, and finding the right gift for the right individual becomes almost a game unto itself, as does choosing an appropriate activity for the hangout. Glory mocked me mercilessly for taking Wolverine on a picnic later in the game, but it turns out the dude loves some quiet time and chow away from the crowd.

Between these activities, other dialogue opportunities and sparring sessions, you can eventually 'level up' your friendship. Doing this unlocks a few ornamental gewgaws (like wardobe choices for both Hunter and the other hero), but more importantly friendship enables aboslutely brutal hero combo cards that allows two heroes in a fight to combine their attacks. The higher the team;s friendship level, the more of these combos present themselves to you.

Generally good writing and excellent voice acting (Matt Mercer and Laura Bailey from Critical Role as the male voice of Hunter (who can also be female) and Illyana Rasputin), Michael Jai White as Blade) made the story elements most compelling for me - which is why I found the abrupt ending I experienced at 2 am Friday night to be a bit disappointing.

The final fight is a protracted, multi stage affair, without the additional selection and equipping stage I had becoem used to. I also encountered a number of bugs that appear to be kind of commonplace (where the Counter I selected (to aoutomatically attack those who attack me) didn't work on two different occasions) and which at one point told me I had lost the encounter without explaining why. Thankfully the latter only happened once, and online chatter suggests reloading a saved game can mitigate the other glitch, but it still soured me a bit.

Before heading into the final fight, you are given the opportunity to converse with any other character you wish, and knowing it to be the final fight, I of course spoke to all of them. This probably took me twenty minutes, given how large the roster is by game's end, so perhaps this is meant to take the place of an epilogue anyways.Maybe they need some appendices like Lord of The Rings, and I know there's some DLC I will want to try at some point.

Despite these shortcomings, there is an awful lot to like about Midnight Suns: creative, turn-based combat, room for creative combinations and a tremendous variety of things to do, even between missions.

Most critically for me though, is seeing such a well-established universe from such a different perspective. It was touching watching Hunter discover Magik's tragic origin story, a true loss of childhood, as well as seeing him help develop the confidence of Ghost Rider and Spider-Man. Discovering Blade started the Abbey's book club as a means of interacting with his crush, Captain Marvel was fun, as was listening to an embittered Tony Stark refer to the Midnight Suns as the 'spooky teens club.' And the in-game chat board that let's characters converse with each other is worth the price of admission.

And sadly, the game's critical successes but commercial failure works in our favour as it can nowbe found for less than $20 on many platforms; consider checking it out!

Trio and Error? - The Marvels, Reviewed

As the weekend winds up, it has become clear that the MCU's latest venture, The Marvels, has not been a commercial success. I guess an ad hoc team featuring an underappreciated and possibly underutilized film character as well as two who made their debuts on Disney+ streaming shows just didn't have the draw that people were looking for?

Everywhere you look, people are ringing alarm bells on behalf of Marvel Studios. A recent Variety article entitled "Crisis At Marvel" outlined a number of concerns including lackluster responses to many of the recent Disney+ shows, visual FX challenges, and the possibility of recasting or pivoting away from their current Big Bad, Kang the Conqueror due to possible criminal charges against actor Jonathon Majors. And Stephen King, despite not being a fan of the MCU, called out the gloating of many at The Marvels' box office collapse.

But you know what? Fans of comic book movies are pretty likely to have a good time at this film.

That is not to say I don't have problems with this movie; to be honest, I didn't really start enjoying it until maybe a third of the way into it, and both the plot and the villain left me pretty cold. 

Thankfully Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel was there to carry me through until I realized that the villain and plot were secondary to the actual story, which was about three female characters coming to grips with their powers, roles and legacy (all while the 'quantum entanglement' of their powers have them swapping places from across the universe.

Vellani is just straight-up adorable, and her precociousness, combined with her character's fangirly exuberance, is a perfect antidote to cynicism. When Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) asks Khan how many chapters of Captain Marvel fanfic she is getting from one memorable interaction on an alien planet, the look of pure rapture on Vellani's face is not even acting, as far as I can determine. 

Rambeau is still getting used to the powers she gained in WandaVision (and I loved how they glazed over her origin story as "you got your powers walking through a witch hex?") and is not really interested in heroics or even having a code name - but has unsettled business with her Auntie Carol from Captain Marvel.

Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), on the other hand, has added another nickname to her repertoire as the alien Kree now call her "the Annihilator." This eventually makes sense in context, but the fallout from the Kree civil war might have had more significance to us if a) we had heard about it before this movie and b) Captain Marvel's significant actions in precipitating this event weren't revealed to us solely through an underwhelming flashback. 

Once the three principals get together though, the film really started to click for me. Khan's apprehension and excitement about meeting her namesake, Rambeau's resentment at reuniting with Danvers, combined with Captain Marvel's own compulsion to clean up the mess she feels responsible for as the Annihilator makes for a decent game of rock, paper, scissors, hero, artifact.

Zawe Ashton as Kree Accuser Dar-Benn is not given a whole lot to do. She is primarily there as a plot focus - a talking MacGuffin and resolute heavy - which feels like a real missed opportunity. And I don't think they even use her cool title even once in the film or do any sort of callback to Lee Pace's Ronan from Guardians of the Galaxy.

On the plus side, for me at least, they lean into the comic book weirdness, bringing Khan's delightful family (along with Carol's not-cat, Goose) up to Nick Fury's S.A.B.R.E. space station from Secret Invasion. And this is before introducing an alien culture who communicate through song and who may have inadvertently cemented Captain Marvel as the newest Disney princess...

In the end, despite its imperfections, you have a perfectly reasonable and moderately entertaining little film that not only carries the MCU flag forward a little bit (or more? stay for the mid-credits scene!) but also gives us our first superhero flick with three female leads, two of which are persons of colour and one of whom represents Hollywood's first Muslim superhero. And it isn't like you need to be a feminist or woke or whatever to have a good time at this movie, but maybe being open-minded helps?`

So in some ways, the barely concealed glee manifested by many of the same trolls who review-bombed Captain Marvel and are bellyaching about the lack of white male representation in these films (give me strength...) because this film is underperforming is not so much surprising as it is disappointing.

The sad truth is though, as the Variety article suggests, on top of needing to use less-recognizable heroes than the lunchbox stalwarts of The Avengers, Marvel has also put quantity over quality since the end of Phase Three, and people are beginning to notice. Some of this was a pivot to online entertainment during the pandemic lockdowns, but as a result, the MCU is building on a less sturdy foundation now, and the moviegoing public can be fickle.

Superhero fatigue is not a concept that resonates with me personally - as long as Marvel keeps faithfully adapting or even homaging the source material that I am a fan of, I am likely to keep showing up. Which I suppose kind of undermines the credibility of my MCU reviews a bit...but whatever. Reasonable people can agree to disagree.

The MCU can't really be all things to all people, and the bigoted mouth-breathers trying to chalk up an 'I told you so' can go pound sand as far as I am concerned. 

I saw The Marvels with seven other people ranging in age from eight to 50+, and we all had a wonderful time. Most of us agreed that the movie was at its best when it pushed the plot and villain to the back burner and focused on our trio of heroines, and for the first time in a while, I am also excited about what Marvel Studios are trying to build to, despite the challenges they face.

All the Feels - Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Reviewed

In terms of release dates, Guardians of the Galaxy is the longest Marvel trilogy, with nearly nine years between the release of the original in 2014 and Vol. 3 this weekend. It's funny to think back about the skepticism around the first movie: "Marvel's lost their minds! Do they expect to make their money back on a sci-fi picture with no superheroes, no stars, and bookended by a walking tree and talking raccoon? Sell your stock!"

Obviously, Marvel's tenth movie went on to do all right, with the characters appearing in two Avengers movies plus their own Holiday Special. Having read and loved the source material I was never worried, but as the MCU gets bigger and almost prohibitively interconnected, there is a worry about diminishing returns.

But let me say this about that: I will need to see it again to be sure, but I think Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the best entry in the trilogy. It is also unquestionably the most emotionally impactful Marvel movie since Endgame.

I recognize nothing is more subjective than emotions, but the story is so empathetic and the characters are so emotionally grounded that I have a hard time finding another adventure film to really compare it to.

Despite an expansive and expanding cast of characters, everyone is given a chance to shine, even ones like former first mate Kraglin (Sean Gunn), space-dog Cosmo (Maria Bakalova). And all our favourites are given a chance to do something new, from Drax (Dave Bautista) providing legitimate insight to Mantis (Pom Klementieff) asserting herself beyond providing support to her teammates.

Most impressively, James Gunn does a fantastic job of establishing Zoe Saldana's alternate universe Gamora as a new and distinct character from the original she replaced in Endgame, and the relationship between her and Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) is handled deftly.

But the lynchpin of the story is Rocket (Bradley Cooper), whose origin story and links to the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji) provide not only the plot but emotional hub for the rest of the yarn to revolve around. Cooper peels back the cynicism and displays tremendous vulnerability in Rocket's tragic, younger self.

Looking in the eyes of the animal subjects of the High Evolutionary's experiments reminded me of my own pets, but never felt excessively manipulative. Likewise, Ikuji's performance is less maniacal and more monomaniacal; someone so convinced of the legitimacy of his perspective that he will go to any lengths to pursue it - the fact that lives are lost along the way are not the goal, like Thanos, but an incidental consequence. 

As a comic fan, I appreciated having Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) in the film (as teased by the cocoon in Vol. 2), even if his naive demeanor is very different from the composed and nearly omniscient character from the pen of Jim Starlin.

And James Gunn's dialogue has never been better; funny, poignant, and with only a handful of pop-culture references. Well, outside the soundtrack, which has now progressed to the 90s, courtesy of Star-Lord's Zune from Vol. 2.

But while the laughs are great, the real highlights are the increasingly personal moments of truth shared between characters. Some of these play up relationships established in the Holiday Special, so it helps to have seen that, but there are very few connections to the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe, if that is a concern. In fact, they do a great job distilling the complex time travel shenanigans into just what is needed for new viewers to follow along.

But if you have watched the previous movies and have been looking for something to shake off the dust of the Phase IV films, and familiar characters treated in new ways but with heart and respect and full appreciation of their background, Guardians Vol. 3 is a film that scratches a lot of itches, at least for this nerd.

And is certainly the best MCU film since Endgame.