Are Ewoks Too Woke?

This time, we have one movie, one television show, and one made-for-TV movie, all with SPOILERS.

The Mist – Based on a Stephen King story, this has a pretty claustrophobic premise. After a severe storm, many of the residents in a small Maine town go to the grocery store to get stuff they need. A mist comes up outside, and when someone reports that he saw a guy mysteriously killed in it, they’re all pretty much stuck there. This leads to a lot of tension, and one religious extremist basically starts her own cult that wants to sacrifice children to prevent the disaster. There’s also a supernatural aspect, as it turns out that there are tentacled monsters and giant bugs within the mist, although it’s somewhat downplayed to focus on the human interactions. There’s also an indication that the monsters arrived due to a government experiment to communicate with alternate dimensions. Eventually, the main character, a painter who’s gone to the store with his son, escapes with a few others in his car. When he runs out of gas and has been unable to escape the mist and the monsters, he kills the passengers, including his son, out of mercy. He then finds out that the military had been able to drive away the monsters and evacuate people, so he didn’t really need to do the killing after all.

Baby Reindeer – This is a quite disturbing miniseries that Beth really wanted to watch. It stars Scottish comedian Richard Gadd as Donny Dunn, a fictionalized version of himself, and is based on several traumatic events in his past, mostly a woman who stalked him after meeting him at the pub where he worked. He later reveals that he was also repeatedly sexually abused by a guy who promised him a writing job, and he blames himself somewhat because he kept coming back. While he learns that his stalker, Martha, has a past of stalking and can be quite dangerous, he feels bad for her and becomes almost as fascinated with her as she is with him. The fact that he never told anyone about the earlier abuse also makes him reluctant to report Martha either. There are some weird details in the series, like how Martha’s messages to him always include “Sent from my iPhone,” even though she never brings an iPhone into the pub, and it’s sometimes misspelled, suggesting she types that in every time for some reason. She also correctly guesses that he’s an abuse victim, although he’s never admitted it to anyone. It’s also worth noting that the protagonist sometimes acts pretty shady himself, lying and withholding information, but people tend to forgive him. His ex-girlfriend remains a close friend and confidant, and another woman he starts dating stays with him for a while even though he met her under false pretenses. He says at one point that he’s embarrassed to be dating a trans woman, even though he meets her on a dating site specifically for that. It’s hinted that some of his hang-ups are due to his father being somewhat intolerant, hence his being reluctant to come out as bisexual and as a rape victim, although his dad is pretty supportive, if rather prone to outbursts, when we see him on-screen. Donny eventually breaks down during a comedy show and admits to everything. The ending suggests that a lot of trauma remains, however. He tries to confront his abuser and is totally unable to stand up to him, and still remains obsessed with Martha despite not having heard anything from her in a long time. But then, I’m sure trauma like that never goes away just because you come to terms with it, even if that does help to an extent.

Ewoks: The Battle for Endor – I partially chose to watch this on Saturday as it was May the Fourth. Is the whole “May the Fourth be with you” thing older than I think it is, or just something that seems obvious in retrospect? I also watched two Bad Batch episodes earlier in the day, but I would have done that anyway. The follow-up to Caravan of Courage rather disturbingly starts by killing off all of the family that had been stranded on the moon of Endor, except for the girl Cindel, although I didn’t find it entirely clear that this was what happened. Only her father is shown, and he doesn’t die on-screen. I wonder if the other actors not wanting to return was part of why they decided to kill off the characters. Anyway, the killers are a bunch of ape-faced reptilians supported by a sorceress who can turn into a crow and cast illusions. This character seemed pretty typical of eighties children’s fantasy, but not so much of Star Wars. Anyway, Cindel and Wicket escape from the invaders and meet up with Noa Briqualon, a curmudgeonly old hermit who turns out to be much more soft-hearted than he appears. He’s played by Wilford Brimley, but he does not eat any oatmeal.

He also crash-landed on the moon, many years ago, along with a friend who was captured and killed. He and his companion Teek, who’s sort of like a monkey and a squirrel, join Cindel and Wicket in journeying to the enemy base to rescue the other Ewoks. Noa and Cindel then leave the moon on his repaired starship, promising to return to visit. It definitely went hard on the cuteness factor, but I thought it was pretty solid. I do wonder how Wicket was able to make a functioning hang glider so quickly out of spare parts.

Madam Lucifer, You Never Looked So Sane

Something About Eve: A Comedy of Fig-Leaves, by James Branch Cabell – The books in this series that I’ve read so far are pretty formulaic, usually about a somewhat sleazy guy who philosophizes a lot without doing much of anything, and has multiple women fall for him. This one largely follows the pattern, with a magician named Gerald Musgrave, who’s a descendant of Dom Manuel, but lives in the United States in the early nineteenth century instead of in Poictesme itself. A demon offers him the chance to separate from his body and go on a journey to the magical land of Antan, where he’ll take over the country from Freydis and the Master Philologist. And he declares himself a god pretty much just because he can, naming his horse after Kalki, the steed of the future avatar of Vishnu. Along the way, he runs into a bunch of women with names that are varieties on Eve, starting with his cousin Evelyn, and resists most of them. He ends up marrying a woman named Maya, who gives the two of them a son with magic, and the child goes on to destroy Antan. So he never gets there, but he finds contentment, and that the demon who had taken over his body had become a noted writer. During the course of his stay with Maya, he chats with Odysseus, King Solomon, Merlin, Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew, Yahweh, and Satan. I read this on Project Gutenberg, and it’s disappointing that it doesn’t include the Frank C. Pape illustrations, but I don’t know about the rights for those.

Mislaid in Parts Half-Known, by Seanan McGuire – Antsy, the protagonist of the previous book in the Wayward Children series, finds out that she has the power to find doors to other worlds. She journeys back to Shop Where Lost Things Go with her new classmates to sort things out there. There’s also a visit to another world inhabited by dinosaurs, where another human child has chosen to stay. There’s a lot of speculation how the doors actually work.

The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales, by Richard Garnett – The author was a librarian at the British Museum, and this is a collection of fantasy stories set in many different times and places, often taking cynical views on different religious traditions. They’re full of gods, demons, priests, and magicians. There’s a good amount of whimsy and satire, and while some of the stories didn’t really stick with me, there were definitely moments throughout that worked quite well. The titular tale has Prometheus being freed from his captivity by a young woman in the fourth century, and the two of them dealing with the new religion that’s become prominent in the area, and the Titan is made a Christian saint. “The Demon Pope” has a Pope trade places with the Devil, to the approval of the treacherous cardinals. In “The Claw,” a magician, Peter of Abano, reveals to a young man that he’s under an obligation to procure souls for the Devil, and these have included many members of the clergy. Peter was an actual thirteenth-century physician who was accused by the Inquisition of practicing magic. Also mentioned in two different stories is Michael Scot, a Scottish mathematician and astrologer who had an interest in the occult, and also eventually garnered a reputation as an evil magician. Whether the character from The Office was named after him, I couldn’t say. “Alexander the Ratcatcher” has Pope Alexander VIII hire a man to exterminate the rats in the Vatican, and he turns out to be his predecessor Alexander VI (otherwise known as Rodrigo Borgia), who has become the ratcatcher in Hell, and gets rid of the rodents in exchange for a better reputation. “The Rewards of Industry” follows the general structure of a tale about three brothers seeking their fortunes. In this case, they’re Chinese, sons of a mandarin, and the ones who spread knowledge of printing and gunpowder to the West are treated with contempt, while the one who’s obsessed with chess grows rich. In “Madam Lucifer,” the Devil falls in love with a widow, but will lose his reign over Hell if he leaves his wife. The description of Lucifer’s wife is amusing: “This lady’s black robe, dripping with blood, contrasted agreeably with her complexion of sulphurous yellow; the absence of hair was compensated by the exceptional length of her nails; she was a thousand million years old, and, but for her remarkable muscular vigour, looked every one of them.” Now that’s what I call a Dis track. “The Talisman” is a pretty funny one, in which a student wizard stops time, arousing the ire of a watchmakers, an almanac writer, and a meteorologist. In order to claim a talisman, the student has to swallow ninety-nine poisons, marry and divorce a salamander, become engaged to a vampire, and sacrifice his mother and sister to the infernal powers. In “The Bell of Saint Euschemon,” three saints bicker over which of their church bells is the most important, only to find out that their powers are actually caused by a demon. There’s a scene in it with the demon teaching the bell-ringer to play cards, and another with a bishop and a sorcerer playing off each other. And “The Poison Maid” is about a magician who raises his daughter to be incredibly toxic, but she meets her match in a prince who was brought up on a regimen of antidotes.

Fox Snare, by Yoon Ha Lee – The third book in the Thousand Worlds series alternates chapters between the perspectives of the protagonists of the other two, the fox Min and the tiger Sebin, who are both present on a mission to try to bring peace between the Thousand Worlds and the Sun Clans. They’re accompanied by a government official who’s also a fox spirit, but isn’t aware that any others of her kind still exist, and has her own agenda. The mixture of Korean mythology with a spacefaring society works well. This is billed as the final book, and as such, I feel like the ending wasn’t really as developed as it could have been; it didn’t feel final.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

Once Upon a Time in Wonderland – I wrote a little bit about Once Upon a Time back when it was still pretty new, but I only recently got back to watching it. I’ve watched the first three seasons, and then this spinoff because I believe it aired after the third. Wonderland has been a part of the main show, but not a particularly major one, as it’s presented as a different world than the one with the Enchanted Forest. It’s mostly set in Wonderland, but with the general penchant for crossovers and characters from different stories being related in complicated ways, it’s no surprise that there’s a fair amount of that as well. One of the main characters, the Knave of Hearts, is also Will Scarlet from Robin Hood’s Merry Men. And in terms of villains…well.

He teams up with the Red Queen, who’s Will’s old girlfriend, and there’s a lot of back story for him as well. He’s revealed to be the illegitimate son of the Sultan of Agrabah, who tries to drown him after he tells this to the ruler, but he survives and learns sorcery to get revenge. There’s actually quite a bit from the Aladdin universe and its rules for genies, one of whom, Cyrus, falls in love with Alice. He’s also the son of Jafar’s former partner. Jafar and the Red Queen distrust each other so much that it’s surprising they started working together in the first place, but there’s a lot of people suddenly switching sides in general. I get the impression that they had to condense some intended character arcs.

The protagonist, now an adult, has been committed to a Victorian asylum, but Will breaks her out and brings her back to Wonderland with help from the White Rabbit, who is voiced by John Lithgow and has the ability to open portals between worlds.

Alice is quite resourceful, and Wonderland is very pretty and colorful, and contains such oddities as marshmallow quicksand, a forest that turns people into trees, a boiling sea, fire-breathing dragonflies, trees with floating bark, and a magical implement called a forget-me-knot. The familiar characters are generally less weird than in the source material: Tweedledum and Tweedledee are obedient servants in David Bowie makeup, Bill has become a human thief nicknamed Lizard, the Jabberwocky takes human form, and the White Knight only shows up to introduce a puzzle.

On the other hand, there’s also a giant Cheshire Cat and a mob boss Caterpillar voiced by Iggy Pop who kind of resembles Jabba the Hutt.

Speaking of Star Wars, the Sarlacc is mentioned in a book of monsters. And Grendel from Beowulf shows up at one point. Really, I think they could have made it weirder, but in terms of introducing political intrigue into a nonsense world, it worked a lot better than the Tim Burton film. By the way, if the Rabbit can tunnel to both Victorian England and Storybrooke, which didn’t exist until 1992, does that count as time travel, or is this a special case?

Psaving Psaro

Dragon Quest IV was pretty amazing when I played it on the NES, so I made sure to pick up a copy of the DS remake in 2008, after which I played through most of the game and then set it aside indefinitely. I have a habit of doing things like that. It might not be a bad idea to do a replay, but I have other things I want to do first. One addition to this version is that there’s a sixth chapter, accessible after you beat Psaro, although it doesn’t exactly follow it narratively. Instead, it reverts you back to your last save, but with some things changed, most notably a big fissure having opened at the altar in the Azimuth. I looked this up, and I’m not really sure how anyone could find it on their own without going back to every single town. It leads to a bonus dungeon that, like the ones in the Game Boy Advance Final Fantasy, has different environments on pretty much every floor, including some houses. At the bottom, you come across two guys called Chow Mein and Foo Young, who apparently spend most of their time arguing about chickens and eggs.

They’re not particularly antagonistic, but that doesn’t mean they hold back; it’s a pretty difficult battle. At least it lets you access your reserve characters in the wagon. During the fight, instead of the normal fight theme, it plays the casino music. Defeating these two allows a flower to grow on the World Tree, which only blooms once every thousand years, and can bring people back from types of death that normal spells or Yggdrasil Leaves cannot. You use it to resurrect Psaro’s girlfriend Rose, and she joins you to confront the villain in Nadiria (although she doesn’t fight in battles), convincing him to team up with you. Yes, this is the guy who murdered everyone in the hero’s home village, but these things can happen. He was already the first main villain in the series to have enough character development to be somewhat sympathetic. He hates humans, but that’s partially because they would try to torment Rose to get her to cry ruby teardops, and he seems to be respected among his monster followers and the animals he gave the power of speech. One of his top officers, Aamon, reveals when you fight him that he was responsible for Rose’s death, having disguised himself as a human to lead a party to kidnap her, so that he can goad Psaro into taking his place as a super-evolved supervillain.

The bonus content builds on this by having Aamon take over as ruler of the monsters and use the Secret of Evolution on himself, making him the official final boss.

He takes a similar form to Psaro, as everyone knows the ultimate goal of evolution is to turn into a giant creature with knee spikes and a face on your chest. He has fewer forms than Psaro, and doesn’t seem to be as powerful until the final one, but it’s mitigated by how you can’t access reserve members during this fight. Getting Psaro as a playable character is pretty cool, and he has access to some abilities that didn’t originally exist until later DQ games. The downside is that you really don’t have any dungeons to traverse after getting him, so you’re mostly just going to be using him for grinding. After beating Aamon, you go through the same basic ending as before. Psaro refuses to enter Zenithia, but the Zenith Dragon acknowledges his contribution anyway, and you see Psaro and Rose watching your balloon as you float over Rosehill. By the way, Aamon is named after a being from demonology, probably derived from the Egyptian god Amon, often depicted as a wolf with a snake tail.

The earlier English translation called him Radimvice, and in Japanese he’s just “Evil Priest.” In later appearances, his evolved form is called Ashtaroth, another traditional demon.

The other main addition to the DS version is the immigrant town, which is established in the desert where a bazaar is held in Chapter 2 by Hank Hoffman Jr., an innkeeper’s son who joins your party for a little while as an uncontrollable character. The town that develops over time is pretty common in RPGs, and one of them is part of the plot in DQ3. You can recruit people from various places in the world to live there, and residents include plays on Rocky and Adrian, Elvis, Marie Curie, and political philosopher Leo Strauss.

You find out over time that the site used to be the location of a country called Pioniria, ruled by a sultan who accidentally triggered a genie’s curse. The town eventually develops into a castle, and the sultan is restored.

The guy who came there specifically to be king doesn’t seem to mind this. For that matter, isn’t the desert part of Zamoksva? When the Tsar returns, what does he think of this restored kingdom showing up in his land? I’ve also read that you can get a cross-dressing version of Psaro to live there if you beat Chow Mein and Foo Young a few more times.

Once was enough for me, at least for the time being.

You Got Your Head on Backwards, Baby

Four movie reviews with SPOILERS.

Relic – When an old woman named Edna goes missing, her daughter Kay and granddaughter Sam visit her house to look for clues, and find everything covered in black mold. Edna reappears with no knowledge of ever having gone away, and acts in unpredictable ways, like giving Sam her ring and then accusing her of stealing it. The younger women manage to escape from Edna, but go back to tend to her, and Kay peels off her skin and lets her die. I wondered if that was a reference to some kind of folklore or mythology, but apparently it was supposed to represent her acceptance that Edna’s dementia had essentially made her someone different. It also turns out that Kay has a scar like the one she saw on her mother.

Hotline – This documentary from 2014 runs the gamut in terms of its titular topic, addressing everything from psychics to sex lines to suicide prevention. As such, it tends to jump around quite a bit, but there’s a general theme of how people have used hotlines to gain human connections, despite their usually impersonal nature. From the title, I was kind of more thinking of the hotlines from my childhood where you’d hear a recorded message and get an exorbitant phone bill (not that I ever called any of them), and those were mentioned, but the focus is more on ones where you talk to an actual person, even if they’re an actor.

Hellraiser (2022) – I feel that this remake tried to make the concept of a box that summons demons who torture people into something more complex, but didn’t entirely succeed. It’s a long movie, but it has a pretty small cast and not that much really happens. The plot centers around a recovering drug addict who’s led by a boyfriend she met in rehab to the puzzle box, and the Cenobites take her brother away. It’s eventually revealed that the whole thing is a setup by this one rich guy who had to sacrifice a certain number of people in order to be granted a request, which in his case was the typical pleasure that turned out not to be what he thought, but there are indications that the Cenobites can grant other requests as well. The puzzle doesn’t always remain as a box, but changes shape over time. It also has a knife on it, which seemed to be overkill to me; it doesn’t need to cut people to be sinister. I guess I appreciate that it tried to do something different, but I don’t think it really succeeded. I did find it interesting that the Pinhead character had a feminine voice, which is what Clive Barker said in the original story; but it’s weird that they’d include that one detail when it otherwise had very little to do with the source material. And it was kind of neat to see that the rich guy’s house incorporated some aspects of the box into its architecture.

The Vigil – Like Relic, this also involves an old widow with dementia, but otherwise it’s pretty different. It’s a very Jewish horror movie, about a guy named Yakov Ronen, who left the Hasidic community in Brooklyn after watching his brother die while escaping from some men on the street who were harassing him. He’s having trouble making money, and a guy from his old community offers to pay him for being a Shomer for the night, watching over the body of a Holocaust survivor who’d just died. While in the apartment, he’s haunted by strange visions and cryptic comments from the widow. He tries calling both his girlfriend and his therapist, but both conversations become bizarre. Yakov learns that the deceased was haunted by a Mazzik, a sort of demon that torments people. The idea that a Mazzik could be identified by its head being turned around backwards seems to be an invention of the movie, although it’s certainly the sort of thing that appears in a lot of stories about demons.

Zeromus Mission

Since I finally managed to beat Zeromus (and I was kind of surprised when I did), I suppose I should say some more about Final Fantasy IV. This was the second game in the series to be released in North America, and I actually played FF6 before it. Looking back now that we have access to the games in between, it’s interesting to see how it compares. It’s pretty straightforward, certainly more so than 1 or 2. It has a story it wants to tell, which means going through the plot points one at a time. There’s some room for exploration, but most of the time it’s one thing leading to another. Even after you’re able to go anywhere on the surface of the world, you find out there are new places to explore underground and on the Moon, but can’t until you’ve accomplished certain tasks. Who’s in your party is also decided for you, and their abilities are the same throughout. FF1 lets you choose which classes your party members are, and you can upgrade them as well. 2 has a set party, with one rotating member, and how the heroes increase abilities depends on what they do in battle. 3 lets you switch between different jobs. In 4, only Cecil is with you the whole time, and he’s the only one who changes jobs, in a manner similar to that in 1.

This is the first game where you can use a Paladin and an Engineer, but the other classes all appeared in previous games: Dark Knight, Dragoon, Summoner, White Mage, Black Mage, Sage, Bard, Monk, and Ninja. At any point in the game, you usually have a party that’s going to be able to handle the upcoming battles without too much trouble. 4 is also the first game in the series to really distinguish the characters’ personalities, although it does seem to gloss over certain elements that feel pretty significant, in order to move the plot along. You have the Elder of Mysidia basically saying, “You attacked our town, killed some residents, and stole our crystal, but you seem sorry, so go climb a mountain and all will be forgiven!”

And everyone is pretty much okay with Kain rejoining the party after betraying them on two separate occasions.

Maybe it was partially due to the translation, which was pretty sloppy on the Super Nintendo version, but it appears that key character motivations, particularly with Cecil and Kain, were kind of downplayed. There’s a mention of being a Dark Knight affecting Cecil’s well-being, but it doesn’t really come into the gameplay. Nor do I recall learning until somewhat later that Cecil was basically raised by King Baron, explaining why he’s so reluctant to disobey the monarch and why the people think he’s a good choice to be the next king. Kain’s jealousy of Cecil and love for Rosa also wasn’t as developed as it could have been, but maybe that’s partially because of Cecil being the viewpoint character. The game also loves to have characters appear to be dead and then reveal that they really aren’t, lessening the potential impact somewhat.

On the other hand, that’s mostly just with playable characters (only Tellah actually dies, and he’s still able to help you out against Zeromus), while pretty much everyone experiences other losses as well: Rydia’s mother and neighbors, Tellah’s daughter and Edward’s fiancee (the same person), and Edward’s and Edge’s parents; and Cecil and Kain were both orphaned before the events of the game. And a lot of them become kings at the end, although I don’t recall any preparation for Yang taking that position. The former King of Fabul just retires, rather than dying like most of the rest.

The plot of the game fits the general trend in this series to put in weird twists towards the end. That time loop in FF1 kind of comes out of nowhere, after all, and 3 has the whole thing with a separate world where time is frozen, or something like that.

Here, you find out that the hero and the villain are both sons of a magical being from space, that his species is originally from a planet between Mars and Jupiter that blew up, that they now live on the Moon, and that they introduced a lot of the more advanced technology on Earth. It’s several weird conspiracy theories combined into one.

The story behind the story, as you eventually find out, is that a guy living on the Moon wants to destroy all life on Earth and take over the planet, and while he’s imprisoned underground, he can still use mind control on a half-Lunarian guy called Golbez. So he gets the idea to gather the eight crystals together, so he can summon a giant robot to destroy everything. Was that Zemus’ entire plan? Yeah, it’s a powerful robot, and Zemus doesn’t have any way of knowing that someone can fly inside it and destroy its core, but is that one mech actually going to kill everyone on the planet? I can only assume this is because he made the plan when humans were still rare and primitive, and he hadn’t really been keeping up with their development. But that does raise the question as to how much Zemus planned himself and how much he left to Golbez. After all, the plan as it worked out not only involved stealing the crystals, but also infiltrating and control of the main military power in the world. Speaking of which, maybe this was also the original translation or my own mind, but I initially got the impression that, when you confront Cagnazzo, he’d only just started impersonating the King, and wasn’t very good at it.

But now I think the implication is that he’d actually been in that role since before the beginning of the game, and he was able to fool Cecil, who’d known him since childhood, for a while before finally having to reveal his monster turtle form.

Maybe the Fiend deserves more credit than I gave him. On the other hand, the real King was presumably already beefing up the military and employing Dark Knights before the takeover. And after his death, he haunts the basement and is possessed by the Eidolon Odin, and I’m not entirely sure how that works.

I do find it interesting that someone in Troia worries that the country will become a wasteland without the Crystal of Earth, which suggests that these gems have terraforming powers that seem way more impressive than the Giant of Babil, but we don’t really know how they work. It is a theme in these early FF games that the crystals are required to maintain the balance of the world.

Another thing I’ve seen about the story of FF4 is that your party is always one step behind, never able to stop Golbez from taking the crystals even when they are able to figure out his next move ahead of time. I was always a little annoyed at how you have no choice but to give Golbez the Earth Crystal when there’s no reason to trust him, but I suppose it is Cecil’s only chance of getting Rosa back alive.

Then there’s the sequence where you defeat Golbez, but his disembodied arm is still able to grab the crystal. Maybe nobody could have actually prevented that, but it doesn’t seem entirely fair.

I didn’t experiment with any of the extra stuff the Advance version added in, specifically the ability to change party members after defeating the Giant of Babil and the new dungeon that opens on the Moon after beating Zeromus. By that point, I was anxious to move on to something new. I am wondering if I should revisit FF5, which I also stopped playing years ago when I couldn’t beat the final boss, but that might be a little more difficult to pick up again.

Yarthly Matters

The First Kothar the Barbarian Megapack, by Gardner F. Fox – This collects three different volumes, Kothar: Barbarian Swordsman (itself originally published as three short stories), Kothar of the Magic Sword, and Kothar and the Demon Queen. The author is probably best known for his work in comics, and I realized when looking at my tags that I’d read some of his Silver Age Justice League of America stories. These tales of Kothar, barbarian warrior from the northern country of Cumberia, are pretty derivative and formulaic, but still fun. Kothar receives the magic sword Frostfire from the undead wizard Afgorkon, the inspiration for the Lich in Dungeons & Dragons and other fantasy. Owning the sword means he will never be able to have other significant possessions, despite how many fabulous treasures he finds, but he prefers the weapon. He has a recurring enemy in the sorceress Red Lori, with whom he has a weird love-hate relationship, and even teams up with her at one point. The barbarian faces the usual contingent of wizards, monsters, and demons, generally coming out none the worse for wear. One conceit of these stories is that, rather than taking place in an imaginary distant past, Kothar’s planet of Yarth is instead a remnant of an intergalactic civilization that died out, not that this really comes into the plots.

Voyages to the Moon and the Sun, by Cyrano de Bergerac – I’m not sure that, until recently, I realized Cyrano was, like, a real person, and not just a character in a play. But he was, and, among other things, he wrote these two tales that are often published together, although they don’t appear on Project Gutenberg that way. Moon starts out amusingly nonsensical, with the author attempting to reach the satellite by means of evaporating dew, but ending up in Canada instead. He actually gets to the Moon with a machine powered by fireworks, and finds out that the Garden of Eden and Elijah are there, as are four-legged people who communicate through music. Much of the rest of it is a mix of philosophy and satire, and despite the silliness, Cyrano seems to have had a better idea of the layout of the solar system than many of his fellows. The second book begins with some commentary on the first, much like the second part of Don Quixote, with the narrator being accused of heresy (in real life, neither book was published until after Cyrano’s death) and escaping into space in a glass box powered by sunbeams. He finds that the Sun is also inhabited by shapeshifting people and mythical creatures. It’s also the home to a court of birds who put Cyrano on trial because he’s human. He also hangs out with the Italian philosopher Tommaso Camapanella, who’s presumably there because he wrote a utopian dialogue called The City of the Sun.

The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps, by Edward Brooke-Hitching – By the same author as The Madman’s Library, this is also a book of trivia, specifically regarding unreal places that have appeared on maps, many of them included in the volume. Some are purely legendary, while others are the result of hoaxes or wishful thinking. Some were simply misidentifications or phantoms. European attempts to fill in unknown territory in places like the Americas and Africa often come into play, the search for the Northwest Passage showing up pretty often, and the Mountains of Kong being an assumed range that supposedly ran all the way across northern Africa, while the Mountains of the Moon were the imagined source of the Nile. There’s also mention of the proposed southern supercontinent to balance out the land in the Northern Hemisphere, including both what turned out to be Australia and Antarctica. Antillia,Atlantis, El Dorado, Lemuria, Prester John’s Kingdom, St. Brendan’s Island, and Wak-Wak with its human head tree are all here. So is the Garden of Eden, often marked on maps due to the tantalizing mentions in Genesis of actual rivers being nearby. The circular Hy Brasil, not etymologically related to the South American country, which was often said to sink for periods of seven years.

The book notes that later maps actually made the location more specific than older ones, which is pretty uncommon. Another mythical island that made the rounds for a long time was Thule, thought of as the northernmost island in the world, first mentioned by a Greek explorer in the fourth century BCE. There are also some brief diversions to discuss creatures that appear on Olaus Magnus’ Carta Marina and Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff’s Nuremberg Chronicle Map, including Cynocephali and Arimaspoi.

Hargon Is Gone

Having gotten a bit bored of losing to Zeromus in Final Fantasy IV, I decided to do another playthrough of Dragon Quest II, this time on the Switch, which I think is the same version you can get for cell phones. I think it would be weird playing an entire game on my phone, but I guess you take what you can get. It has kind of the same cutesy cartoonish style with disproportionately large heads that I’ve seen pictures of for other phone releases, albeit not to the same extent as what I’ve encountered of the mobile Final Fantasy VI.

I had already played through this game on the NES, when it was Dragon WARRIOR II. That was after I’d played the third game, which was much better realized. The game is known for being unfairly difficult at times, as the programmers didn’t have the time to balance things out properly. There were some clear improvements over DQ1, including a party of three characters. The main character, the Prince of Midenhall, can use a lot of weapons and armor but no magic, while the Prince of Cannock can use a little of both, and the Princess of Moonbrooke just specializes in spells. That said, Cannock can’t really use that many more armaments than Moonbrooke, so they’re both pretty physically weak. There’s a popular meme about Cannock constantly being dead in the NES version, and while I can’t actually recall if he died more than Moonbrooke did in my own experience, it’s quite possible he did because he was attacked more often.

Incidentally, the Switch version calls Cannock an Armamentalist and Moonbrooke a Mage. And there were some monsters toward the end of the game who could wipe out your entire party with one spell that never failed. Later versions of the game were made a bit easier, both in technical matters and in making certain things less frustrating. In the Switch version, the Yggdrasil Leaf brings a character back with full hit points, the Zoom spell lets you choose where to go (in the original it was just the last place you saved the game), and there are indications of where to search for items. I didn’t necessarily need that last one, as I remembered where most things were, but still. The game feels small now, but even when I first played it, the towns and castles seemed a little cramped. This is obviously the case when you revisit Tantegel Castle, which is reduced in size and connected to Brecconary.

Did they physically move one of them? That must have been labor intensive.
But even the new places feel a little on the small side. It does introduce towers and travel by ship. And even in this version, Erdrick’s Sword isn’t very good compared to how it is in DQ1 and 3. Time takes its toll, I suppose.

The plot is about a cult that worships a god of destruction trying to take over the world, with the leader being a priest named Hargon. With Nintendo’s policy of avoiding religious terms, the NES version just called him a wizard. That isn’t entirely wrong, as priests in the series do cast magic spells, but it lacks some nuance. The priests serving him, punningly called Wrecktors and Whackolytes in the modern translation, are instead Mace Masters and Evil Clowns, I guess because the priestly garb looks kind of jesterish.

Maybe it’s like how the chess piece called the bishop in English is a jester in French. On the NES, the Whackolytes refer to themselves as wizards in dialogue, but are Evil Clowns in battle. When these enemies appear in future games, they still wear the bat-like emblems, which are presumably supposed to represent the god Malroth.

And I suppose the false idol that you use to access Rendarak, called the Eye of Malroth on the NES, is an idol of the god.

There is now a mention at the beginning of the game that Hargon wants to summon a dark god, not calling Malroth by name, but still giving more indication of his existence than the game did previously.

That also helps to explain why everyone is so scared of Hargon, aside from his destruction of Moonbrooke Castle. You fight Malroth immediately after defeating Hargon, and I beat him on my second try.

I noticed that some of the lines I best remembered from the NES aren’t in this version, although I suspect the new takes are closer to the original Japanese. I found this script online, so I was able to compare some specifics. There’s a woman in Slewse who complains about her husband sneaking off to get drunk, while the earlier localization instead has them arguing about what to name a dog. That’s funnier, but I suspect it was only put in to remove the reference to alcohol. And a priest in Beran who curses you if you don’t tell him what time it is just says something about Hargon following a false religion.

And a merchant in Zahan who talked about the sunken treasure ship you can find instead reports that the town’s fishermen drowned at sea, perhaps a bit too dark for Nintendo at the time. Or maybe the translator just caught the bit about the sinking boat and assumed it meant something else. Considering how heavy the modern translations are on puns, I’m surprised that they removed one when the King of Moonbrooke, who exists only in the form of a flame, said it was “Hargon’s way of firing those he doesn’t need.” I think this lighthouse keeper’s line was adjusted to work in a reference to the Lord of the Rings films.

I also noticed that someone in Burrowell now explains that the reason everyone is living underground is to get farther away from Hargon’s influence, and there’s a lost guy there named Luke who comes from Zahan. On the other hand, nobody sings to you anymore.


And the Dragonlord’s grandson is now his great-great-grandson, I guess to better fit the hundred years since DQ1.

But dragons live a long time, so I never had a problem with his being a closer descendant than any of the human characters. Since I didn’t die as much this time, I don’t know whether your father still insults you if you die.

With Hargon and Malroth out of the way, I was finally able to beat Zeromus, so I’ll have more on FF4 in the near future. I’m also revisiting the DS version of DQ4 and taking another crack at Psaro, but I think my levels are kind of low.

Games and Goddesses

Gamemaster Classified: An Insider’s Guide to Nintendo’s Coming of Age, by Howard Phillips and Matthew Taranto – Back in the day, Howard was a very visible part of Nintendo’s marketing, especially in Nintendo Power, known for his signature bow tie. This book describes his time working there, which lasted from 1981 through 1991, starting as a warehouse worker and later becoming a game reviewer and tip provider, in addition to other stuff. Taranto provided the illustrations, including comics based on Howard’s experiences, but also provides his own insight and opinions on games and the like. Going year by year, the book provides some behind-the-scenes information, as well as thoughts on various games and technologies. Howard is someone who really likes action and challenge, often giving positive reviews to notoriously difficult games, like Ghosts ‘n Goblins and The Adventures of Bayou Billy. He also mentions that he doesn’t really like sequels that change the play style substantially, as happened with Super Mario Bros., Zelda, and Castlevania. And perhaps he was in the majority here, since all three of these series made the third game more similar to the first (with some elements taken from the second). It’s also notable that he really didn’t think Dragon Quest/Warrior should be released in the States, citing the primitive graphics and lack of action, the former partially due to the long gap between Japanese and American releases (DQ3 was already out in Japan before we got DQ1). Interestingly (and not mentioned in this book), Howard is in the English version of DQ1, along with Nester from the Nintendo Power comics. I had wondered before what these characters were called in Japanese, and it turns out they were given the names of people who worked on the game. Nester, by the way, was modeled on kids Howard tried to give advice on games they were struggling with, only for them to insist they already knew. Howard did like the also turn-based Mother, and thought it would be a better introduction to console role-playing games in the States. I’m not sure I’d heard of Sky Skipper before, but it sounds bizarre. Howard also seems to have been confused by the themes of Kid Icarus and Devil World. Towards the end, Howard explains why he left Nintendo for Lucasfilm, that they had him do more purely corporate marketing rather than more casual promotion of stuff he already enjoyed, and that he wanted to try making games.

Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth, by Natalie Haynes – This book gives an overview of several significant goddesses, along with pop culture references in a casual but still well-researched style. Haynes defends Hera, points out that Athena was a powerful woman who pretty much always took the side of men, describes the contradictions in Artemis, and explains how important Hestia really was despite the fact that she doesn’t appear in many stories.

Dawn of the Jaguar, by J.C. Cervantes – It’s been so long that I couldn’t quite remember what had happened in the previous book, but this one starts out with shadow bruja, alien conspiracy tracker, and daughter of the goddess of time Renata Santiago having died, and making a deal with the goddess Ixtab. She has to find a crown in order to thwart the Aztec Lords of Night, who want her to be their queen. She’s also lost her usual powers, but instead is given jaguar-related abilities. It seemed a little rushed, but I enjoyed it.

Kings of the Wyld, by Nicholas Eames – I became aware of this because Aidan Moher favorably compared it to the Final Fantasy series in his Fight, Magic, Items, and I can see why. It even has an airship as part of the story. It’s set in a fantasy world where mercenary heroes are treated like rock stars, and the leader of a group called Saga wants to get the band back together to rescue his daughter from a city under siege. A lot of the humor in the story is based on the comparison between mercenary and rock bands, including their having a sleazy manager who books monster-fighting gigs. Along their journey, they encounter bandits, an undead bard, owlbear cubs, and surprisingly friendly cannibals. They eventually rally a bunch of other bands to join them in fighting an army of monsters led by a rabbit-eared being from another dimension.

Let Me Kluya In

I’ve reached Zeromus, the final boss in Final Fantasy IV (the Game Boy Advance version), but haven’t been able to beat him. I can’t really think of anything to do other than just leveling up some more, but I suppose I can still talk about the game. One thing I particularly wanted to discuss was this translation of a Japanese guide, with extra information on the characters and locations. I love stuff like that, even if it’s often retconned later on. My brother had a book about FF6 that was in badly translated English, and had a history of the world from the War of the Magi to the time of the game, which I think was the same as this. The translator of the FF4 guide comments on how small the countries in the game are said to be, with Baron only having 3500 inhabitants. Of course, there are a lot fewer character sprites than even that, but I usually assume there’s stuff you don’t see.

There are six main countries, plus three presumably independent towns, and some more stuff underground. Most of them have a theme of sorts: magic, martial arts, ninjitsu, matriarchy, things you can be transformed into. Yeah, Mythril Village is a weird place.

There are spells to shrink someone down, and to turn them into pigs or toads, all pretty standard in fantasy and fairy tales. But we don’t know whether the inhabitants of this town were themselves transformed, or just happen to have those same shapes.

It’s interesting that Baron seems to be the most powerful nation, but it doesn’t have its own crystal. The guide suggests that this was done in order to maintain balance between the nations, but doesn’t indicate how these countries came to possess them. I suppose the desert kingdom having the Crystal of Fire makes thematic sense. The guide gives rough histories for all of the main locations, and includes several references to previous games: the founder of Mysidia is named Minwu, the guy who brought the Deathbringer to Fabul is Leonhart, and the first King of Damcyan is named Duster. Minwu and Leon are characters in FF2, and Duster a town in 3 with a lot of bards. Kain already had the same surname as Ricard, the last surviving Dragoon in FF2, and there was an additional connection made later on. Ricard’s friend’s son is named Kain, and Kain in FF4 says in the DS version (which I haven’t played, but I hear is much harder than other versions) that his father Ricard died fighting an evil empire. While I think it would be fun if these were the same characters across games, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, and it’s been established that all the main series games are separate anyway. Besides, Minwu in 2 didn’t found the Mysidia in that game either.

By the way, I was kind of disappointed when I learned that the name of the town wasn’t a play on “my side,” and that Fabul isn’t pronounced like “fable.” Does this mean there was an evil empire active in this world a mere decade or so before the start of the game? Wouldn’t there still be traces of it? It would explain why Baron was so heavily militarized when there’s no indication that they have hostile relations with any other countries prior to Golbez’ infiltration. While Cagnazzo has presumably already killed the King by the time of the invasion of Mysidia, the military buildup must predate that. Maybe it’s to fight monsters. Baron plays the same antagonistic role that Palamecia does in 2, except here your main character starts out as part of it. Baron and Mysidia were likely allies before the invasion, as they’re connected by a magical path.

Since there are mages in the Baronian army, perhaps the Mysidians were involved with training them.

The guide also credits Cid with inventing airships based on an ancient text. In the game itself, Fusoya credits his brother Kluya with introducing both airships and the Devil’s Road to the Blue Planet. The DS version gives some more details on him.

We don’t know how long Kluya was on Earth, but it must have been a considerable amount of time if his spaceship became the subject of ancient legends. Incidentally, the Advance translation has Fusoya say that Kluya had “many children,” rather than just two, which seems like a mistake.

I guess it’s possible that he had children with people other than Cecilia, whom he wouldn’t have met until close to the end of his life, but that complicates things.

There were probably Lunarian visits to Earth before his, as the Tower of Babil is a gateway to the Moon that transports the robotic giant built by Zemus to the planet.

The tower is an immense structure, with its bottom in the Underworld, and you never see the top, and you never find out who built it. The floating Tower of Zot, where Golbez has his headquarters, might also be of Lunarian design. You never do see what happens to this place after Barbariccia destroys it. If the part about Cid using an ancient text is accurate, it might also have been of Lunarian origin, in which case maybe Kluya helped him with the translation.

There are a few other interesting details as well. There is, for instance, detailed information of how spells work, with Flare being said to create nuclear fusion. Seems like someone could put that to other uses besides frying monsters. There’s also a mention of gil, the typical FF currency, being named after King Gilbert of Damcyan. The list of items includes the Coeurl Whisker, related to the Coeurl enemy introduced in FF2.

This references the science fiction story “Black Destroyer,” by A.E. van Vogt, in which the Coeurl is a very intelligent being that some space travelers find on a mostly abandoned planet. It looks like a panther with larger forelegs and tentacles on its shoulders.

The Coeurl has the power to manipulate energy, and is always hungry. After killing a bunch of people on board the ship, it finally takes its own life after being outmaneuvered by the humans. The monster in the game has an attack that can either paralyze or cause instant death, and I guess their disembodied whiskers can have the same effect.

Like many other FF monsters, this one might have come into the games by way of Dungeons & Dragons, in which their name was changed to Displacer Beasts.

Good night, everybody, and keep watching the moons!