I’ve been watching the live stream of Evolution, the biggest fighting game tournament series in the US. Today was the first day, and it was kicked off with live coverage of Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom, an arcade fighter only recently released in the US on Wii this past January.

There’s not much I have to say about it, to be honest. I just wanted to point out that in my review, I said that while the game was absolutely stellar in terms of fun, ease of use, and overall game balance, the game was in danger of having a really short lifespan due to two things:

1. Having to unlock playable characters, i.e basic functionality of the game,

and/or

2. Lack of a strong online/matchmaking component.

The pool play for TvC at Evo demonstrates this point to be clearly true. In particular, the second point.

Consider this: Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom’s big selling point are the clashes between characters from the two different companies, but how many people really give a damn about Tatsunoko in North America? When quite a few arcades had Street Fighter 4 before its U.S release, hardly any carried Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom.

Thus, the vast majority of players  playing this game were ones who bought it at the time of its U.S Console release. A few lucky people had arcades nearby with it, and a few hardcore players ported the import console version.

So, if you didn’t live somewhere with a strong offline following, either by way of an arcade cabinet or a group of friends who get together and play the console versions (i.e almost nowhere), how do you play TvC: Ultimate All-Stars?

Online.

To give an abridged version of how online TvC works: You have no control over who you face, either by proximity (other than same country or worldwide…not good enough options) or by skill level. There’s no lobby system to speak of whatsoever; players simply choose to search for matches, and they have to patiently wait for the game to pair them up with someone at random. The quality of online matches is completely random – usually leaning towards unplayable – and latency is dealt with using input delay, the cardinal sin of online fighters.

This is a big deal. In this day and age, where arcades are more-or-less dead except a few big ones here and there, there’s no way to deny the extreme importance of solid netplay. In Street Fighter 2 and 4 – two other games played at Evo – the netplay is good enough that people can learn and get decent competition online. The lobbies allow them to play people with good connections, and seek out skills players to learn against. There are far greater volumes of high level players who have gotten to the highest level of play using knowledge gained from online play exclusively.

However,  if you were to watch the TvC tournament, pool play consisted almost entirely of total blowout matches; there were a few remarkable players beasting on a relatively larger number of players who had nowhere near enough experience to compete.

The Top 8 for TvC have already been decided, and as a member of the fighting game community, I can tell you that every single one of them were either high level players in many games (including Justin Wong who made it to the Top 8 in losers), or people who are lucky enough to live in areas with dedicated offline TvC scenes. Everyone else stood a snowball’s chance in hell, and watching pool play was pathetic.

To think that all of this could have been averted by good Netplay. I hope the next time a big-name release is coming, you guys contact the publishers, by way of e-mails, letters, or message boards, and let them know that you want absolutely excellent netcode and that anything short of the best is unacceptable.

The smug, argumentative jackass in me is satisfied to see that my prediction was completely on point. The part of me who loves the competitive fighting scene and wanted desperately for TvC to survive as a competitive fighter desperately wanted to be wrong.

Our courageous editor-in-chief, Chris Carter, recently wrote a guide on how to buy games on a budget, and has also reported on several deals he’s found.

Well, I have another tip to add to his sweet guide: Check out SlickDeals.net.

My friend recently dug up this little gem for me, where Dell if giving away:

1 Year Subscription to XBox Live for $30 ($20 savings)
4000 XBLA Points for $37 ($13 savings)
Wiimote & Wii Motion Plus for $35 ($25 savings)

Getting any combination of these is a good deal, but in particular, getting two years of subscription to XBLA or two Wiimotes+WiiMotionPlus is almost cutting the price in half. You’re welcome.

http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/xbox360/portalstillalive?q=portal

Gee, can anyone find anything in the abstracts about this game being too short for its pricetag? Me neither. Alright. My rage is finally done, I promise.

Also, go buy Rocket Knight.

As usual, I wrote a review, as I do with every RPG I play. But, I won’t post that here – we already have a review of FF13. So, here’s the abridged version:

- The story is ridiculous. The first half is spent ‘fleshing out’ the characters, but it does little more than demonstrate their motivations and restate them over and over again. Speaking of ‘over and over’, the characters also spend the first half reassuring each other that they’re GONNA kill the bad guys. Not only does it waste our time, but it’s kind of patronizing. This is the first twenty hours of the game we’re talking about. Sheesh. I loved Sazh, though. Fuck FF13 Versus and Agito – I want FF13 Sazh.

- Linearity? Uh, yeah. FF13 is no more linear than any other JRPG. If this bothers people, then I assert that they’ve never played a JRPG that wasn’t made by Square-Enix. What I think people mean is not “linear” but “it’s a dungeon crawler.” I mean, think about it: no towns, 95%+ of your game time is spent in dungeons,  and there’s only enough dialogue to give you an excuse to fight battles for hours and hours. FF13 is a dungeon crawler; that’s what people are mad about.

- Combat is really fun until the second half (Chapter 10). At about this time, you can choose any party you want, and this ruins the game balance. Before this, you were given very specific parties and leaders, and had a limit to the Paradigms you could use.  The game can be carefully balanced around this. When you can choose ANYONE, the game is much harder to balance and I don’t think S-E came through on this. Battles at this point were either stupidly easy or stupidly difficult, usually difficult because I refused to use a Sentinel. And, why should I? If I can have the option not to have a certain Role in my party, I should be able to win that way without grinding endlessly.

And, there you go. But, you know the worst part about Final Fantasy 13? With WRPGs on the come-up and JRPGs under heavy scrutiny from most people as a static, unevolving genre, this will just be proof to them that JRPGs are incapable of going any further, of changing into something other than monotonous nightmare of grinding, with a poorly made, superficial story.

After all, if this is Final Freaking Fantasy – the pinnacle of JRPG design – what else can anyone offer, right?

It might also ‘demonstrate’ to Japanese developers that there isn’t any reason to try and think outside of the box and do something new with the genre. I fear that it will reaffirm their beliefs that JRPGs should just try and do the exact same thing that they’ve been doing for the past few decades.

After all, you saw what happened when FF13 tried to do something crazy, right?

I recently wrote an editorial on how game reviews need to further embrace subjectivity. You probably didn’t hear about it.

I just read another article with a similar sentiment. In it is a quote from my freakin’ idol, Roger Ebert, which pretty much sums up my entire editorial (and this other one) more gracefully and concisely than I could ever hope to:

“I have quoted countless times a sentence by the critic Robert Warshow (1917-1955), who wrote: “A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man.” If my admiration for a movie is inspired by populism, politics, personal experience, generic conventions or even lust, I must say so. I cannot walk out of a movie that engaged me and deny that it did. I must certainly never lower it from three to 2.5 so I can look better on the Metacritic scale.

I cringe when people say, “How could you give that movie four stars?” I reply, “What in my review did you disagree with?” Invariably, they’re stuck for an answer. One thing I try to do is provide an accurate account of what you will see, and how I feel about it. I cannot speak for you. Any worthwhile review is subjective. If we completely disagree, my words might nevertheless be useful or provocative. If you disagree with what I write, be my guest. If you disagree with how many stars I gave it, you can mail your opinion to where the sun don’t shine.”

Is it any wonder that this guy is my hero in the field of criticism?

Have you ever been on a date with someone who, every time you brought up stuff that you were interested in, replied with something neutral like “Oh yeah, I like that too,” or “Yeah, (such-n’-such thing) is alright”? They made no attempt to really rock the boat or disagree with you. Maybe you’ve been that person – don’t be shy to admit it to yourself; I’ve certainly done it before. How did you feel about them as they made no attempt to create any difference of opinion? I bet it was probably the most boring date you’ve ever been on in your entire life (unless you’ve been on multiple dates like that, I suppose).

Here’s the reason: your date was trying very hard to be OBJECTIVE. They were so afraid to disagree with you, or say anything you might disagree with, that they ultimately said nothing at all. How much did you really learn about the person (not that you need to on a date, but I’m not trying to play date doctor over here)? Did you find their company to be enjoyable and entertaining? Did you find yourself respecting and appreciating what was truly different and unique about them? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say probably not.

Virtually no one finds it fun to keep someone like that in their company, because they’re boring as all get out. And yet, when it comes to video game criticism, this seems to be exactly what is expected of us. Things like ‘bias’ and ‘subjective’ are treated as dirty words in criticism, or like deadly sins. As for me, I think the opposite should be true; objective people are are wholly uninteresting to be around, and objective reviews are equally tiresome and uninformative.

Before I continue, allow me to establish a few things: I don’t think that objectivity is useless in all walks of life. If you want to buy a car, one would probably want the facts more than anything: Miles per gallon, how many people can it seat, how large the car is, trunk space, or whatever is important to their personal needs (even still, these are not the be-all end-all factors in a car purchase for some people, but I digress). For a product that serves a specific function to to a person, the facts are important above-all; whatever can be discussed subjectively is probably negligible anyways.

Video games are not one such thing. Sure, they are a product that serves a specific function to a degree; however, their function is to illicit an emotional response from their consumer. When I say ‘emotional response’, I’m not necessarily talking about games which are driven by narrative, but the most important emotions a video game can bestow upon the player: fun and happiness. On the other hand, something like a car is meant to help transport a person and their belongings more quickly and easily – in other words, a function where feelings are pretty irrelevant.

How on earth does objectivity help in matters of emotion? Recall your terrible date; if you had to give them a review and post it up on the internet, what would you write? “Leslie was very nice, had good hygiene and did not disturb the other patrons of the restaurant/theater/bar. She was respectful of my opinions. I give Leslie a 10/10″? Or, would you say something like “Sweet holy mamalo, Leslie made waiting in line at the DMV seem like a thrill ride at Disneyland. I looked at my watch at least once every two minutes, and prayed that someone – no, ANYONE – would come hit on me and whisk me away from her boring ass. 1/10″? Which one of these two reviews was more entertaining to read? Even more importantly, which one of these reviews was more INFORMATIVE – the review which told you a few facts you would hope to be a given? Or the one that had actual opinions?

Hopefully, this is enough to convince anyone that the idea of a subjective critique on a game is worth considering. But, moving past the analogy of video games to dating, a critique of any medium of entertainment needs to be subjective to be ultimately informative and entertaining to read. Allow me to discuss a few things which I imagine that critics of other entertainment mediums are already privy to.

First things first: the very notion of someone being completely objective is ridiculous. Everyone has their preferences and their biases. It’s strange to me that video game critics are held to this inane standard of being completely objective at all times, when true objectivity is such a phony idea. To me, the trick is to recognize your biases, both for and against things, and strive to avoid them or even use them to your advantage.

An example of using a bias to your advantage: Reviewing a game from a genre you particularly enjoy, so that you can discuss things that a critic who enjoys the genre casually may not deem important/lack the experience to discuss in depth.

An example of bias working against the critic: Giving a game a bad score when they know that they tend to dislike the particular genre/series of games in the first place. Possible solutions: Avoid reviewing the game in the first place; make well-constructed points as to why the game doesn’t feel fun, while acknowledging your bias. This should be a rare instance in the first place, though.

Secondly, “objective” reviews are not interesting to read in most cases. They state the facts of the game – most of which can be found in news pieces or previews on the game – and then stating whether these facts are positive or negative. When I some reviews, I feel like I’m reading the instruction manual with adjectives like “excellent/compelling/amazing/poorly executed/sloppy” written in the margin.

This is just downright boring, and sometimes, and more importantly, it’s LESS informative than a subjective review, because it doesn’t really offer any insight into how the game FEELS to play. It is important to bring up unusual or extremely unique aspects of a game; however, if a critic mentions in an RPG review that “characters have maximum HP, MP, and stats which go up after battling monsters in a turn-based combat system by attacking them with a devious combination of physical and magical attacks”, they insult the reader’s intelligence and simultaneously waste their time by telling them nothing they couldn’t already guess.

At the risk of sounding hypocritical, I want to wrap this up by saying that there is indeed a place straight fact in video game reviews. Because video games are interactive products, there are issues to be addressed in video games that other entertainment mediums such as music, film, and literature will never have to deal with. These factors, however, are minimal: how long should one expect to play a game to complete it? Are there glitches in the game which make it prohibitively difficult to play? Are there significant differences between the same game on different hardware? These are things that should be approached with objectivity.

If I had to pull a statistic out of thin air, I’d say that game reviews in our day and age are 70% objective facts and 30% opinion and emotional response. I fear that game criticism will not really evolve or improve unless we reverse that statistic. Unfortunately, game reviews are still approchaed like an automobile review. Until product recommendation becomes the SECONDARY goal of a critique, handing the primary seat to discussing how a game feels, I fear we’ll still be reading a lot of instruction manuals in the meantime.

Okay, so. Sonic the Hedgehog 4. It’s coming. People are getting really hyped about it.

I have not played a single Sonic game to the end since Sonic & Knuckles, unless you count that abysmal RPG that come out a while back. Otherwise, I’ve played the very beginning of Sonic Adventure, and a demo of Sonic Heroes. So, while I don’t have a lot of perspective on what went wrong with the series (besides what other disillusioned Sonic fans tell me), I do know something that would really excite me to see make its return – something that hasn’t been ruled out yet (like the appearance of Tails and Knuckles in playable form).

I was listening to Michael Jackson in the car today – as most people on the GL staff who’ve ever talked to me know, I’m a pretty big fan – and Sonic the Hedgehog 4 popped into my head at random. I began to think about the whole “Michael Jackson may have wrote the music for Sonic 3” fiasco. I then remembered reading once that one of the members of some random J-Pop band, Dreams Come True, wrote the music for the original two Sonic games.

(EDIT:  after doing a little more homework, Dreams Come True are apparently _the_ J-Pop band to end all J-Pop bands. So, I guess they’re quite a far cry away from being “some random J-Pop band.”  Shows how much I know about international pop music, I guess.)

Then it hit me: What really needs to come back to Sonic the Hedgehog is freakin’ pop music. Now, a lot of you may not like pop. If you’re one of those people: oh well. In any art, style is very important, and pop music really contributed to Sonic’s “cool” persona, if you ask me. When Sonic came out, there was such a push in the advertising campaigns to demonstrate how freaking awesome and edgy Sonic was compared to Mario, that lame fat plumber (this doesn’t reflect my personal opinion, just the impression I got from the old Sonic ads and commercials).

When I think of Sonic, I think of “cool”. I already am very familiar with Michael Jackson’s music, so I looked up a little bit of the music of Dreams Come True on Youtube. A lot of their music is slower ballads and stuff, but I found a few songs that reminded me a little of the original Sonic games:

What should really make a comeback in Sonic games is not just popular musicians working on Sonic music (I understand that a lot of rock artists have contributed to recent Sonic games), but a return of Pop music as the prominent musical style of Sonic the Hedgehog.  Rock is kind of cool, but – whether it’s fair or not – Pop is the ‘coolest’ musical genre. It’s a match made in heaven! Right?

So, to any fans of the Lunar RPG series; Lunar: Walking School (the Game Gear version, not the Saturn version) finally got translated into English some time in the middle of December. I was almost done with the game before I went on a crazy-long vacation, so now I’ve wrapped it up.  Here’s my review, so you can decide if you want to spend the short amount of time playing the game; if you’re a fan of the series, I’d recommend it.

–

I wonder what compelled Game Arts, after two successful installments of the Lunar series on Sega CD, to release a third one on Game Gear. Sega CD was likely one of the most powerful pieces of gaming hardware at the time of its release, and the first two Lunar games took advantage of the superior audio, graphical, and storage capabilities that the Sega CD had to offer. Suddenly downgrading to a portable version of an old 8-Bit console seems like the worst way to deliver a new experience that could equal or surpass its predecessors.

And yet, for all my whining about it, it happened; Lunar: Walking School was the third game in the series – the only one to not receive a North American release in any capacity – and it was released on the Game Gear in 1995. Also, regardless of how inane the idea is to me, Walking School wasn’t half bad. I guess that’ll teach me that just because I think something is stupid doesn’t make it a bad idea. …Probably not.

Lunar: Walking School is a pretty huge departure from it’s older brothers in the way that it’s not of a particularly epic scope; while the other Lunar games wound up being huge ’round-the-world, save-the-world adventures that deal with personal growth, Walking School’s story is episodic and of a minor scope. We start out with the two main characters, Ellie and Lena, being invited to study at the school of magic, Iyen (for all you Lunar fans, this is NOT Vane; Iyen floats around on the water, not the sky. Vane is specifically referred to in the game a few times). They reluctantly accept the invitation after talking it over with their parents, and head off. After one of the most bizarre, contrived entrance exams ever, the two begin their adventures at Iyen.

About 99% of the game takes place on Iyen, so naturally, the game’s story is mostly about Ellie and Rena’s crazy hijinks. Together, they find a magic teacher to study under, after miserably failing several of the teachers’ entrance exams. They blow up an entire building, hilariously them the moniker “The Freshman Bombers.” They even investigate absurd urban legends about the school. This is mixed in with some random episodes concerning long-time series bad guys, The Vile Tribe, to make a complete story.

To the game’s credit, the game has wonderful character interaction (as did the first two games, I suppose). Ellie, the main character, is boring out of necessity, so that the hyperactive Lena can play her foil. It’s fun to see them plan out their excursions, argue with their rivals – the decidedly brash Ant and his cronies, Rick and Kule – talk about boys, and other assorted things. In fact, the funny situations and funny reactions are the main reason to play the game; it certainly isn’t the random, tacked-on nonsense about the Vile Tribe, which gets in the way of the really entertaining stuff.

The gameplay is quite a departure from the Sega CD games, but that is likely out of necessity more than anything (the fact that Walking School’s Sega Saturn revamp has the classic gameplay style lends credence to this). Sadly, the game’s combat winds up being most like your standard, vanilla turn-based RPG. On the bright side, the game does a lot to make combat go as quickly as possible, and there are a lot of neat conveniences. The two big things which caught my attention were the fact that, if you fail to run away, you don’t forfeit a turn, and the fact that, when a character dies before performing their action for a turn, they’ll do it as soon as they’re brought back to life. These neat touches made me slap my head and think, “Man! I wonder why other RPGs don’t think to try this?”

There are other cool little things, like the system where combining items with special concoctions can make even better consumable items, or that spells are learned by talking to various magic professors after leveling up. However, it’s sort of irrelevant in the end, because the gameplay ultimately holds no challenge whatsoever; ironically, this is because of the importance of magic in combat. Physical attacks are useful early on, but become completely obsolete about halfway through the game. So, you need to make sure you get stronger attack magic and use it all the time.

The game designers must have realized this, because they made sure that recovering MP was as easy as possible; buying MP-restoring items is very cheap, and creating powerful MP-restoring consumables is equally easy. Even worse (better?), Ellie and co. can restore their MP at any time by standing still and waiting. This practically negates the need for any consumable items whatsoever, because at any point in a dungeon, you can heal your party to full HP with magic, let the game sit there for a minute or two while you make a sandwich, and come back to a fully-restored party. This touch made me slap my head and think, “Man! Of all the things to take from this game! Why did Golden Sun choose the most terrible original idea?”

Even if that weren’t the case, though, the need to rely on magic attacks hurts the game’s difficulty because the power of magic spells do not scale as the characters level up. To that end, if you don’t level up and remember to get the new magic spells, you’ll fight bosses with magic spells that don’t even hurt them. However, if you have the most current magic spells, you’ll make quick work of them; so, any point in time, the game is either mind-blowingly hard or mind-blowingly easy – choose your own adventure!

While I do lament the lack of challenge, let’s face it: one probably won’t be playing this game for the challenge. Hell, even the old Lunar games weren’t THAT damn hard. Someone that plays Lunar: Walking School will probably be doing so because they’re a fan of the Lunar series, and want to check out the only game in the series that never made it to U.S shores, now that it’s finally been translated to English. For those that try the game out, it may be a nice surprise – it’s not made of all the things that made Lunar: Silver Star and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue the outstanding gems that they are. But, it’s quick, short (and I mean SHORT, like ten hours, tops), painless, and very entertaining. When I first found out about this game at the age of fifteen, I thought I’d die waiting for it to be released in English; I thought I’d be completely content. But, now that I’ve played the game, I feel the same excited sensation as I wonder if anyone will ever translate its Sega Saturn counterpart. I suppose, with that in mind, Lunar: Walking School is a success.

I already made a thread in the message board asking about what people got for Christmas, particularly, what people got for Christmas that did NOT pertain to video games. At the time of writing it, I had bought two used games for myself, but I got a lot of money for Christmas, and the extended vacation meant I didn’t have to pay for food and groceries, so I helped myself to a few more. Here’s what all I took home for video games this Christmas:

1. Castlevania: Lament of Innocence (PS2)
2. Saints Row 2 (XBox360)
3. Super Paper Mario (Wii); though, to be honest, I already owned the game. I left it with my brother and he finally found it. Good thing too, cos I almost bought another copy…
4. Obscure: The Aftermath (PS2)
5. Suikoden V (PS2); no box, though…
6. Bayonetta (XBox360); there’s a wonderfully awful tale of bad customer service to go with this one, I’ll tell it tomorrow.

My friend also let me borrow his copy of Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift, but I have a feeling I’m already over that game; it’s pretty awful.

Still, I made out with some good stuff. I got Bayonetta on the cheap, and I found Suiko V for only 20 bucks. Not bad at all. Did anyone else get some random cool games this Christmas?

Funny story: I lent my copy of Final Fantasy 7 out to a friend, whom in exchange lent me another RPG called SaGa Frontier 2. I bought my own copy of SF2, intending to give my friend’s copy back to him. But, I never was able to get in contact with that guy again when I finally tried to get it back. That was about nine years ago, and it had been even longer since the last time I played FF7.

At the moment, I’m at home on vacation, and my friend who is really into RPGs tells me, “I wanna play through Final Fantasy 7, I’ve never beat it.” He wants to beat the game while I’m down at home, and my vacation has less than a week left. After taking two days to drill into his head that FF7 is a LONG-ass game, and that he better be ready to shut himself inside his house for a few days, he finally agreed to buckle down and really do it. Thus began the first time I’ve played Final Fantasy 7 in about eleven years.

One big thing that I’m doing differently from all the previous times I played FF7 is in the sidequests; that is, I’m doing verrry few. There are far too many good incentives in FF7 to simply forego doing ALL optional quests (two playable characters, for example), so I’m trying to pick and choose what stuff I do. The main point of this is that I don’t want to waste time (I mean, hell, we’re trying to beat FF7 in SIX days), and also that I don’t want to do any grinding. Not that FF7 is a grindey game or anything, but I’ve never played FF7 without doing a lot of grinding for levels, materia, and limit breaks. I’d like to see how the game’s balance holds up without buffing my characters to outrageous proportions.

And, so far, it’s working out pretty well. After just two days of playing, we’re at the Corel Prison (near the Gold Saucer), so that’s about halfway through disc 1. I have not needed to do any ‘grinding’ other than a few spots where you need to buy an item to progress the game (which never takes more than a few fights), and sitting around for about fifteen minutes to recruit Yuffie. Surprisingly, the game’s balance is not bad at all; random battles are pretty easy, even though the enemies hit pretty hard, and the bosses are kind of challenging, too. I’m surprised at how many boss fights I’ve almost died on (none yet, though!). I used to boast that FF7 was easy, but I guess when your strategy for victory is to grind your character until all that’s left is powder, you lack the perspective to make an honest assessment of a game’s difficulty. I’ve felt like this for quite some time, and this is why I tend to stay far away from grinding and sidequests in RPGs.

I’m also really surprised at just how fun the game is to play. In addition to being pretty challenging (or, at the very least, challenging for a Final Fantasy game), FF7 does two other things that so many traditional RPGs fail to grasp: Low encounter rate, and combat moves very fast, thanks mostly to the fact that characters have really high max MPs, encouraging the player to use powerful spells in battle. It’s funny that FF7 is the butt of jokes where summon spells take like 20 minutes, but Knights of the Round is like the only one. This game makes combat really speedy and convenient, without shoving it down your throat. I wonder how this is so hard for other RPGs, especially when a near perfect model on how to handle these things exists?

I do bemoan the lack of individuality in characters sometimes (though it’s moreso than I remembered when I was young), and I do think the system for getting Limit Breaks are stupid. Finish off sixty guys to get the next level? So, in other words, that means Cloud is going to be miles ahead of everyone cos he has the strongest physical attack, and one of the strongest magic attacks. I got to Lv.2 Limit Break with Cloud before some characters even got their second Lv.1 Limit Break. It’s nuts.

I’m happy, though, to see that FF7′s combat aged well after all. At least, in that respect, FF7 really withstands the test of time. In the graphics department? Not so much. I’ll probably do one more playthrough journal about the story, when I’ve had a chance to play through the majority (or all) of the game, and have formed a better opinion about it. While it’s true that I still remember the gist, it’s hard for me to critique a story when the last time I ‘read’ it, I was like twelve years old. Stay tuned.