Personal Post: My media recap of 2016.

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My Christmas haul for this year. Some of which will be for your benefit in the up coming year.

 What else can I say about 2016? It's been a big year, several anniversaries for various franchises, I finally moved on to Lets Plays, reviewed the Sentai series that premiered on the same day I was born which was Jetman and I'll just leave it at that. Oh and I also managed to get Madoka Magica Beginnings and Eternal on DVD for a somewhat reasonable price, thank you holiday sales. So for this list I'll just be going through the pieces of media that were released in North America in 2016 that I've played/watched in no particular order.

 This isn't a best of worst of list I'm just going through new movies, video games, anime what have you that I've seen which premiered in 2016. Though I'll only count remasters or HD remakes if they've made a significant change compared to the previous version of this product. But I won't include Demos that I've played since by definition I haven't played the full game and thus feel uncomfortable giving my thoughts on a full game based on the first hour or so.

My Favorite movie of 2016, good continuation of the MCU story, brilliant adaptation of the Civil War comic and just the perfect thing for people to cleanse their palates after ingesting the garbage fire that was Batman Vs Superman. But if you want a more detailed account of my experience with this movie, here you go.

I've finally finished this game and surprise, surprise it's really good. Now I still don't want to give too much away but we do see some good character development, the bosses can kick your teeth in if you have no idea what you're doing and Dagda is one of the grand poobahs of dickery. Read my review of my first impressions, get both SMT 4 games and have some fun. 

Essentially Iron Man with magic instead of technology but by the Emperor are the special effects impressive. Also it reveals one of the Infinity Stones so if you're a hardcore MCU fan this is required viewing. Especially for the upcoming Thor Ragnarök. Review post, like share subscribe moving right along.

It's Pokémon's 20th anniversary game, of course it's really good. The Kahunas are an interesting reinvention of the Gym Leader concept, Team Skull is my second favorite villain group behind Team Plasma, and I love the concept of regional variant Pokémon. My personal favorite is Aloan Marowak. Though I wish these games could provide a decent challenge like Hard mode in Pokemon White 2 and Black 2, please Nintendo, bring back Hard mode for the next games, pretty please? Here's my thoughts on Sun, me and my Fire Kitty are almost to the end.

I've played this since Day 1 so take my advice. Don't ever go for Free to Play, unless you have great patience and self control with your money. I do I only limit myself to deals or exclusive events but for the rest, you may want to just watch a  Lets Play. Or since Kingdom Hearts 2.8 has HD cutscenes of all the important events of this game, just wait for that. You can get by without purchasing new Medals, but only for so long. Sure there are Events that give you great medals but unless you know what you're doing and log on at least once a day to contribute to your party for events you'll be out of luck. But hey it's better then Final Fantasy All the Bravest. 

A great remake of a Point and Click Classic. I've never played the original game back in the day I was more of a Putt-Putt, Freddi Fish, Pajama Sam kind of guy. I was a little kid can you blame me? Back on point this was a real brain scratcher and while I have a Lets Play of this game I may want to avoid making another one in the future since they take time, I want to beat them without walkthroughs and I doubt all you members of the PC Master Race want to see this filthy console peasant miss what was OH SO OBVIOUS on my walkthroughs. But all in all a good game, an interesting experience and you should definitely check it out for yourselves. Also it has the original Maniac Mansion in the game so 2 games for the price of 1, can't beat that.

GET THIS COLLECTION RIGHT NOW!!!
Seriously this is a compilation of three of my favorite games of all time, in HD, with all their single Player DLC and minus Bioshock 2's pointless and irrelevant multiplayer. You will not regret this. But even if you don't since next year is the 10th Anniversary of the franchise guess who has two thumbs and is going to do Lets Plays of these games and their DLC because he is a humongous fan? d o_o b This guy!

My favorite game of 2016. Though I couldn't show it the way I intended. See I originally wanted to do a lets play of this game but for some reason I couldn't upload any clips from my PS4 to Youtube. Though the few I could were flagged down by copyright because they had clips from the failed movie. But I do want to show my love for this game somehow so why not here? I personally view this as non-cannon to the main series due to Quark telling this story to a fellow inmate and; let's face it the guy is about as unreliable a narrator as you can get aside from the Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past from the Future so you have to take this story with a major grain of salt. Besides we still have the original games, they're not going anywhere and I do still have a lets play of the original game so I can at least show how far we've come.

Now for your viewing pleasure my first impressions of the game as well as a small sample of my constant failures at the Hoverboard track before Patch 1.03 that actually made the minigame winnable. The others you can see on Youtube.

I'm betting that you all forgot this came out this year and quite frankly I don't blame you. This is almost a textbook example of what NOT to do in a sequel, reuse gags without the proper context of the original, pointlessly reset character progression, jumps the shark even more then the first you name it it's here. The only time laughed watching this flick was whenever Will Ferrell was on screen. Just give this flick a you-googly and move on.

Technically the worst movie I've seen this year, but that's only because I haven't seen that many movies and the few I have seen were really good. So all I have to say about this movie is that it was just kind of "meh". Though I will agree that Jerod Leto had no business being the Joker. I get what they were trying to go for with him but every-time I saw him I wasn't seeing the Joker I was seeing a pusher for Dr Rockso. Besides at least this wasn't Batman Vs Superman Dawn of Cheap Cash-ins. Also I really liked the part in the final fight where Diablo turned into an Aztec Fire monster to duke it out with Incubus. But aside from that, just meh.

I honestly wanted to review this movie in my usual style but well life happened and I wanted to talk about other stuff. However I do think this movie is decent. Not great but decent mostly coming off as Toei trying to make an apology (somewhat insincere but an apology nonetheless) to fans of the Showa Era with Hiroshi Fujioka's name slapped onto the writing credits. But considering how he hated Takashi Hongo's depiction in Kamen Rider Taisen and the retcons included in the Kamen Rider Yongo netmovies that remove that and Grand Prix from cannon I can see why he'd want the chance to set Takshi Hongo back on the right path. It's certainly better then the last Taisen films as at least this does seem like we're watching Takashi Hongo fighting Shocker to save Tachibana's granddaughter who is essentially his Goddaughter.

A man on his last legs desperately fighting to save the family of the man who helped shape him into what he is today, and like most Inoue scripts while the execution may be clumsy I get the emotion and sentiment trying to be conveyed. But there are somethings wrong with the movie. Mainly the new look for Kamen Rider #1. I really don't like the over-muscled look and he looks like "he's been hitting the roids bro!" Also thankfully while Ghost and Specter are in the movie they don't overshadow Takashi, since this really is his story just with elements from Ghost crammed in. So all in all better then what we've got but could have been far better.

Speaking of Hiroshi Fujioka we have Project X Zone 2. I enjoyed the first game due to the crossover madness seeing characters from various franchises and three different companies fighting against familiar and new (and sometimes sexy, hello Saya) evils trying to conquer or destroy the muliverse. Hell it even motivated me to Pick up Endless Frontier to see the intro for Hawken Browning and Kaguya as well as how Reiji, Xiaomu and KOS-MOS were so familiar with them and Phantom. I've also been watching a let's play of the original Namco X Capcom on Youtube to see how the whole fiasco got started, that shows how much I've been hooked.

Project X Zone 2 has the crossover fun of the first Project X Zone game as well as really botched localization. If you have at least some knowledge of the Japanese language and hear the clips you can tell that they went off the reservation with some of them. Now I can get that directly translating languages involves various constraints like how Japanese is very contextual and English not so much but Bandai of America has a bit of a reputation of not giving the slightest amount of a shit with their localizations these days. But those who've played this and Digimon Cyber Sleuth can attest to this claim.

Also, Sheath, oh dear. While I do like to see Vilenesses who are cute, strong, competent and not an evil, hateful, irredeemable bitch who doesn't know how to crack a joke, did we really need one who was a Weeaboo Squealer? I get the joke with her but still the boarder between Parody and reaffirming stereotypes is paper thin (see the Dave Chappele "Racist Pixies" sketch for evidence of that). I can tell she was meant to be a parody of the American fanbase who petitioned to have the first Project X Zone game brought into the international market but if it wasn't for the scene where Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine reaffirmed Reiji and Xiaomu that not all Americans are like her it would have been the developers biting the hand that feeds them. Pedantic complaints aside these games did inspire me to check out some of the games these characters come from, like Devil May Cry, God Eater, Xenoblade and Strider for example. So all in all get these games, see if there's a franchise that looks interesting and give it a try if only to expand your horizons.

And now my list of characters that I really want to see in Project X Zone 3. Now some of these may sound silly but then again this whole series as basically an interactive fan fiction so might as well get into the spirit. If you have suggestions I'd love to hear them.

Heroes:

Viewtiful Joe and Sylvia
Alastor (Viewtiful Joe)
Amaterasu (Okami)
Asura and Yasha (Asuras Wrath)
Axl (Megaman X)
Atoli (.Hack)
Sonic and Tales
Knuckles
Shadow and Rouge (Sonic)
E-123 Omega
Flynn and Nanashi (SMT 4) (Sega owns Atlus which made SMT, both SMT4 games are on 3DS so it makes some sense.)
Isabeau (SMT 4)
Guile (Street Fighter)
Dan Hibiki and Blanka (Street Fighter)
Trish (Devil May Cry)
Kamen Rider Ex-Aid and Kamen Rider Brave (Well Namco-Bandai's letting Toei use Pac-Man in Ex-aids movie and Ex-Aid is based on Video Games so I hope that'll happen. Probably not but not outside the realm of possibility)
Kamen Rider Lazer ( Yes I know he's dead but this series is known for using time slips so again not impossible.)
Jotaro Kujo (Part 3) & Jolyne Kujo (Namco-Bandai published Eyes of Heaven and Cyberconnect 2 developed it so all they'll need is Araki's blessing, or some negotiations with David Productions; again a man can dream)


Villains:

Jet Black (Viewtiful Joe)
Orochi (Okami)
Deus (Asuras Wrath)
Sakaki (.Hack)
Dr Eggman
Metal Sonic
Krishna (SMT 4)
Walter/Lucifer (SMT 4)
Johnathan/Merkabah (SMT 4)
Balrog (Street Fighter)
Vega (Street Fighter)
Mundus (Devil May Cry)
Kamen Rider Genm
Kamen Rider Snipe
DIO (Jojo's Bizzarre Adventure)
Enrico Puchi (Jojo's Bizarre Adventure)
Nightmare (Soul Caliber)

Like I've said before I'm not a big Star Trek guy, but this was still a decent movie. The plot kept me engaged the characters' back and forth was witty and it didn't seem to be just a rehash of previous Star Trek movies.

It's Telltale's Walking Dead of course I think it's great. Hell I'm doing lets plays of every episode of the new season so don't take my word for it. Watch and then play for yourselves.

It's not as good as Seven Samurai, now that the obvious is out of the way I can talk about this movie on its own. Especially since I haven't seen the "original" Magnificent Seven so thus no point of comparison. It's a kickass movie, Denzel Washington is a badass, Vincent D'Onofrio is coo-koo nuts and I love it and I seriously want that gold gatling gun.

Again never really was into Gundam, my only exposure was that SD show that was on Toonami back in the day and Gundam Seed which is apparently the black sheep of the franchise. So you can tell with that kind of first impression why Gundam isn't exactly in my top 10. But I decided to check this out and holy crap this hooked me. The characters are charismatic the fights are close, hard hitting and downright grizzly. Though unlike Code Geass where that was an entire new universe I've had a bit of a hard time trying to follow the politics of IBO since I've never seen any previous Gundam series so I have no idea about half the terms they're talking about.

I do get most of it but I may just have to go through it again to grasp the full scope. Also the funniest episode was when a certain character dies when Tekkadan was attacked on Earth. I won't say who but it was soooo obvious that this person was going to die I was surprised he wasn't wearing a red shirt talking about how he wasn't afraid of anything anymore since he had two days left till retirement. I mean it was so obvious that when it did happen it wasn't like when Mami was killed by Charlotte it was more like that Steamroller scene from the first Austin Powers. Maybe not like that but it was more like a boring punchline to an incredibly drawn out joke.

Aside from that my favorite characters are Naze and Orga. Naze is calm, cool and a charismatic charming SOB who also acts a good mentor for Orga. Also yes the dude has a literal harem of hot, smart capable ass-kicking women at his beck and call and essentially a Space Polygamist. On the one hand one can't help but be teeth grindingly jealous of a charismatic dude with hundreds of girlfriends who love him as much as he does them. But on the other hand; well to quote Charles Britannia from Code Ment "I swear to god if I have to sit though one more episode of Bridezillas I'm going to saw my own arm off." Pros and cons to everything am I right?

Though speaking of Code Geass Orga is basically Lelouch but with a key difference. If I had to compare the two Lelouch would be more book-smart where as Orga was Street-Smart. Then again somebody must have thought the same thing considering Johnny Young Bosch voices both characters. Considering that Code Geass is one of my favorite anime I'm not surprised that one of my favorite characters is Street-Smart Lelouch. But still dispite some setting issues IOB gets my seal of approval. But seriously don't fuck with these guys.

I get the joke, it got pretty tiresome, thankfully there's a good story, likable characters and more then just the main joke for this show to fall back on. Saitama is basically what would happen if Goku were strong enough to beat Superman, he's the strongest man in the universe so what now? Why just be a hero for fun of course! Also possibly find someone or thing that could give him a challenge. There's more to Saitama then just his insane strength though. He does know what it means to be a hero, he's not a glory hound and will go so far as making himself look bad to make sure that the other heroes who fought before him get their fair share of credit for their bravery. This is also getting a second season in the near future so be sure to check it out.

So that was 2016. Now on to 2017 and hopefully bigger and better things.

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