The Righteous Gemstones – Season 1 Review

The Righteous Gemstones is a Danny McBride show, someone who I’ve never really found funny. After finishing Gemstones, I tried watching Eastbound & Down next, and McBride’s narcissistic shtick was pretty much the same. It actually works here, though, because it clashes so elegantly with the religious personas he and his family members are trying to put on. This initially felt like it could’ve been a “Breaking Bad for televangelists,” given that the first episode ends with Jesse (McBride) purposefully running over people with his car. That was a great hook, but the main thread isn’t the blackmailing storyline so much as it is just general family dysfunction. The Gemstones, as it turns out, aren’t necessarily criminals. They just don’t always practice what they preach.

Thus, the show is more about lampooning hypocrisy than it is lampooning religion. The season ending with Jesse in Haiti—picking up a shovel to help dig a trench without so much as a word—made me rethink the negative review I was formulating mid-season. It was a really strong finale that shows these characters do have room to grow. Well, except for Judy, who is maybe beyond repair. But I love that the wildcard character was given to an actress for once, as Edi Patterson does a great job in being so hilariously intense and inappropriate. She is definitely the highlight. I also thought Adam Devine was perfectly cast as the pastor meant to appeal to the youth. Like McBride, his usual acting doesn’t do it for me, but The Righteous Gemstones seems to be where these types of personalities can finally shine.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD Review

Skyward Sword was the only home console Zelda game I hadn’t played, so I was pretty excited for a Switch port, especially since it meant getting to play the game without the original’s off-putting motion controls. Unfortunately, the non-motion controls feel more like a “here, are you happy now?” half measure. Nintendo took the laziest way out and just mapped the motion controls to the right analog stick. This works fine for some things, though it creates a direct conflict with the camera. It doesn’t mitigate the finickiness of situations that require immediate (and correct) directional input, either, like in pretty much any sword fight. I also hate how clunky it is just to switch between items, but that’s not even a motion/non-motion issue.

The thing is, Skyward Sword is inherently flawed, regardless of which control method you use. There are just some really poor design decisions at play here. For instance, you have a very limited stamina meter that can never be upgraded. The overworld feels really empty, and not in a good way a la Wind Waker’s realistically vast ocean. There’s so much backtracking and recycled gameplay, too. Like, every new dungeon requires you to return to a central hub to reveal its location. You have to go through the first temple twice, and you have to fight two different bosses multiple times in almost identical ways. It doesn’t help that those are the worst bosses in the game.

All things said, this is probably the least I’ve enjoyed a Zelda game. In fact, the only reason I bothered to keep playing it is because I have so much respect for this series. If Skyward Sword were a new IP by a different studio, I would have given up on it hours ago. That’s not to say the whole game is bad, though. There are some really memorable dungeons here. The Ancient Cistern and Sandship dungeons are both cool locations that you normally don’t see in a Zelda game. And while the Lanayru Mining Facility is annoying (mostly because you’re still struggling with the controls at that point), the timeshift stones are an interesting gimmick. Alas, this is one Zelda I don’t think I’ll ever be tempted to replay.

Guacamelee 2 Review

I played the first Guacamelee game a long time ago, but I do remember really liking it. I’m pretty conflicted on this sequel, though. The main thing I was looking forward to was the co-op mode, but this game is not co-op friendly. There’s just too much tricky platforming that ends up falling on only one player to do. My wife gave up after the first hour, because she felt like she wasn’t contributing. And it’s a good thing she dropped out, because the difficulty ramps up very early on. I get that you want to provide a challenge for people who’ve already perfected the first game, but it often feels like too much. Arena fights grow increasingly convoluted with monsters and hazards, and a lot of the platforming sections require split-second use of several skills at once.

To the game’s credit, it never feels impossible. I’m pretty used to difficult platformers and only got stuck in a retry cycle a few times. Even then, it was usually an arena fight that was giving me trouble versus a platforming section. The combat feels fine when you’re up against smaller enemies and manageable crowd sizes, but the flaws in the controls become all too apparent as the difficulty scales. It doesn’t help that the dimension-swapping power—which came pretty late in the first game as far as I recall—is introduced almost immediately and relied on heavily for the sequel. A typical platforming challenge ends up looking like this: jump, swap dimensions, grab an eagle hook, swap dimensions, grab another eagle hook, power dash, uppercut, swap dimensions, etc.

While it can be rewarding to execute these command chains successfully, it’s also annoying how frequently moments like this pop up. I could never decide if I should feel empowered for navigating a difficult room or annoyed at the developers for putting so many hair triggers in there in the first place. At times, you wonder if maybe the purpose of this game is just to troll you. The Guacamelee series gets a lot of flak for its humor that relies mostly on memes and references. In Guacamelee 2, it was still lame but didn’t bother me that much… until you find a cave where the NPCs literally complain about things people said about the first game. It came across as incredibly tacky and served as one final reminder that the first game is the better experience overall.

Schmigadoon – Season 1 Review

I don’t care for musicals, but I’ve always wanted to see a story where 1-2 characters know they’re in a musical and aren’t part of the act. That’s kind of what you get with Schmigadoon, at least in the early episodes. Keegan-Michael Key is particularly good at expressing annoyance whenever a song starts. There’s also a great gag where the other normie, Melissa, walks out on someone doing a song and dance number, and you can still hear him going at it inside. But that’s pretty much all you get in terms of anti-musical comedy, because this show is more of an homage than a parody. They still want you to like the songs that they obviously put a lot of work into. And you know what? The songs aren’t bad. My only complaint is that several of them go on for a little too long.

The other issue I have with Schmigadoon is how rushed the story feels in the end. The penultimate episode, for instance, is much shorter than the other episodes and ends so abruptly that I thought I’d missed something. Jane Krakowski shows up out of nowhere in the same episode and is never seen again. That might have been a joke itself based on her character’s Sound of Music inspiration, though I’m not familiar enough with The Sound of Music to get it. Clearly, I’m not the target audience here, but I was still invested in the humor and premise. So it was a pretty big letdown how quickly the normies got back together, even though things were going well with their own romantic interests. It really feels like 2-3 episodes are missing. That, or the brevity is another musical reference I’m too uncultured to understand.

What the Golf? Review

What the Golf? is a really funny game… for the first five minutes. It does a great job of initially subverting your expectations when different objects fly towards the hole instead of the golf ball you thought you were aiming at. But that’s the game’s only good joke… and they use that “joke” a lot. Well, that and video game references. Referencing another game is like the laziest form of humor, especially when it’s things like Portal references. We haven’t grown sick of those yet, have we? The sound design also tries to be very Katamari Damacy but ends up more annoying and repetitive than anything. You will get so sick of hearing “Waaaaah” every time you fail a challenge.

I don’t mean to be so down on this game, though. While it’s certainly not as funny as it thinks it is, the actual gameplay isn’t bad. It’s a series of fast-paced, golf-like challenges that span a multitude of styles and gimmicks. Some are in 3D, others 2D. Some are puzzles, others straight-up races. The variety is definitely fun, but it barely qualifies as golf. And yeah, I get that was the point. However, the game often feels like a platformer with wonky controls instead of any sort of golf game. What’s even weirder is that you can play most of the game with a controller, but a handful of challenges at the end can only be completed by switching to a mouse.

I did like that every level was broken up into three increasingly difficult challenges, and you only need to complete the first one to proceed through the campaign. Naturally, I wanted to 100% the game, though, and that’s where a lot of the frustration lies. The second challenge is almost always to get par, even if you already got par the first time around. And why does completing the first challenge kick you back to the overworld but the second challenge leaves you in the selection menu? The overworld is a pain in the butt to navigate, because you still move around as a golf ball. Like everything else in What the Golf?, it’s a cutsey idea that wears out its welcome super fast.

Mythic Quest – Season 2 Review

Similar to Season 1, this season has another spin-off episode that takes place in a different time and with mostly different characters. This time around, it’s about a young CW becoming an author, so it’s not as out of place as A Dark Quiet Death, though A Dark Quiet Death is the better short. But I still enjoyed CW’s backstory episode. It reinvigorated what was turning out to be a dud of a season overall. I feel like Mythic Quest would have worked better as an anthology show that followed different people’s journeys through the video game industry. I honestly don’t care about Mythic Quest or its employees anymore. Like, the video game influences are bordering on the cringey side, and the office antics feel like a discount sitcom.

It doesn’t help that I hate pretty much all of the characters now. Poppy went from my favorite character in Season 1 to my least favorite. She’s started yelling every line and became a pretty mean boss to her subordinates. I don’t know why they went to the “wring comedy out of people being rude or pathetic” well, but it’s not a good look. I do commend the showrunners on playing it safe with F. Murray Abraham and COVID, even though it relegates his character to a bunch of “old people can’t use Zoom” jokes for the first half of the season. At least Backstory and Peter give him something more meaningful to do and are naturally the standout episodes. Those two episodes don’t feel like Mythic Quest at all, and that’s the problem. The core Mythic Quest story is just not that good.