Mirabile Dictu

Rally ’round, children.  Aunt Mirabella is going to tell you a story, and I’m only going to say it once.

Once upon a time, when fandom was shiny and new and bright rivers of porn ran sparkling through the kingdom, all of Fandomland was… well, pretty much the same wind tunnel of wank and pissiness that it is now, actually; but there was one great Law, my children, written in the stars above Fandomland for everyone to see and take heed of, and that Law was this:

What goes on in fandom stays in fandom.

That meant that if you got pissed off at someone for flaming you, you didn’t track down their employer and rat them out for writing NC-17 Thundercats porn.  If you met a fellow fan’s family, you didn’t blurt out “You know, she writes the hottest buttsex I have ever been privileged to witness” to her 90-year-old grandmother.  And you never, ever, ever pointed the mainstream media in a fellow fan’s direction unless you knew with cast-iron certainty that she was okay with it.

You see, back in the day, people understood that the non-fannish world, which in fact is most of the world, is a cold and uptight place, especially if you happen to be American.  They understood that fanfiction was something people lost their jobs over, and that an awful lot of people in fandom need those jobs for silly things like feeding their kids.  They understood, simply as a matter of courtesy, that not everyone wants media attention, that sometimes people just want to hang out in that by-fans-for-fans space and it will be just peachy with them if Steven Colbert never discovers their existence.

I don’t know where that understanding went.  All I know is that fandom seems to be increasingly full of people who literally cannot conceive of there being anyone in the world who does not want media attention of any sort.  Maybe you can blame reality TV.  I don’t know.  All I know is that I’m about fucking tired of having to pull down parts of my site because the “What goes on in fandom stays in fandom” rule has gone the way of men’s fedoras.

So let me make this clear: you do not ever, ever have my permission to link to my site or my fic in any non-fandom venue.  When I find out you have, and I will because it will show up in my site stats, I will pull down whatever you linked to, and everyone you linked and everyone else who wanted to read that fic will be shit out of luck.   If this means pulling down my entire site until the hits from your link go away, I’ll do that too.

Look.  Don’t be an asshole, even unwittingly.  I understand that people exist who can’t comprehend not wanting to be on The Real World.  I’m asking you to understand that people exist who can’t comprehend wanting to.

What goes on in fandom stays in fandom.  Live it.  We’ll all be happier and I can leave my goddamned pages up.

Look. I’m going to explain this in words of one syllable, so it can be right here where all, like, six of you who read this blog can see it in writing.

It is really, really not okay to take my fic and repost it wherever you damn please. No, honestly. It’s not. I would not lie to you. No, I don’t care if you want to translate it for all your friends. There is not a doubt in my mind that Harry Potter fanfiction exists in your language. You can find it, share it with your friends, and even make rec lists. You don’t need to repost mine.

In the last week I’ve found two different people, in two different countries, translating and reposting my fic without permission. Stuff like this pretty invariably makes me think that posting my fic online is a bad idea after all. So, you know, I’m glad you like my fic, but reposting it somewhere else without my permission is a pretty goddamned good way to dry up your dealer, because if I keep having to deal with this shit, eventually I’m going to decide - as pretty much any sensible person would - that the way to avoid having stuff spread all over the internet is not to post it to begin with.

There’s a reason my fic is mostly only posted here. If I wanted it strewn from hell to breakfast, I’d post it on archives. I don’t do that, as a general rule. Please don’t decide by fiat that you’re allowed to second-guess my decision and do it for me.

Edit: One of them says she had permission, so let me make another request. Fanfic writers get a lot of email. If a year passes between your email and your translation, the probability that the writer will remember that she gave you permission is pretty close to zero. At least forward the email back to her and give her a heads-up before you start posting.

Okay, I have to confess: James sort of got on my bad side in an interview I read with him here while back, wherein he tried to tell me that his character (bearded gay medievalist mystery writer) was not him (bearded gay medievalist mystery writer) because his character is a vampire, while James, of course, is not. Dude, come on. If you’re a 14-year-old girl posting your American transfer student at Hogwarts fic, it’s no use telling me that Aurelia Ravenswing Gryffindor Slytherin Dances With Elves is not a Mary Sue just because she’s a witch and you aren’t. I expect a guy in his 50s to be able to come up with a better Gary Stu defense than the average 14-year-old girl.

Anyway.

These books have been a huge, huge, huge disappointment to me, because I read a short story of his with the same character and loved it. The character, Simon Kirby-Jones, was a riot in the short story - funny, bitchy, snarky, and all-around fun to spend time with. Saying this is not so much true in the books is a huge understatement. The character in the books is intolerable. He’s utterly twee in a pompous, self-congratulatory way, and has that communication style that its proponents probably think of as “roguish” and the rest of us think of as “Jesus Christ, get this freak away from me before he gets a weird look in his eyes and starts telling me all about the secret life of his Precious Moments figurines.” Also, the main interesting thing about the character - to wit, that he’s a vampire - more or less falls completely by the wayside in the second book. If there’s a point to his vampirism other than a gimmick that’s never really made use of, I’m not seeing it at this point.

The first book was tolerable; though, sadly, not because of Simon. The first book was redeemed - nay, pwned - by Jane, a little old lady who was made a vampire in the days of Elizabeth I and doesn’t - always - follow the Old Ways. Well, dude, if I told you what was hidden in her garden you would totally worship her too. Sadly, in one of the author’s less wise judgment calls, Jane does not look likely to be a recurring character, and without her to balance out the main character’s relentless self-important buffoonery with her edgy goth granniness, the series just falls to shit.

The writing is… okay, let me talk about the writing here for a minute. Now, I can see how authors like Anne Rice and JK Rowling don’t have editors, dearly though they need them. But somebody like Dean James, whose books you have to order online because it’s more than your life is worth to try to find them in the stores? Why the fuck does this man not have an editor? Why has someone not sat him down and had a come-to-Jesus talk with him about this annoying quirk of everyone using everyone else’s name in EVERY SINGLE LINE OF DIALOGUE, a thing I managed to overlook in Darkly Dreaming Dexter but that is so much worse here that it drives me absolutely batshit?

What’s worse is that I think the writing is trying for ironic and self-referential, but it’s missing by a long shot. And someone - either the character or the author, I can’t tell which, though I definitely have my suspicions - is the type who just beats every single point to death. To DEATH. And laboriously explains why every joke is funny. At one point Simon makes some comment about his own writing, referring to it as “deathless prose,” and then goes on to point out to us that, hey, in his case that comment is totally accurate! Because we would totally not have picked that up on our own! The comment would have been funny if he’d left it alone, but he can’t, because he is the type of person who tells a joke and then is like “Get it? Get it? Because horses have long faces, see, so when the horse walks into the bar -”

Which, you know, if your character is really truly that type of person, okay; but it’s annoying as fuck. You know it, your readers know it, everyone knows it but your character. (In an ideal world, I mean, though probably not in this case.) The way to deal with that, it seems to me, is to acknowledge that your audience is being fucking annoyed. Show other characters being fucking annoyed too, even if you have to work it so that your POV character picks up on it but misinterprets it or something. Invite the reader to be annoyed with a whole community of fucking annoyed people, instead of leaving them to roll their eyes on their own with no one to commisserate.

Also, sort of following on that - you know, there’s a good way to do self-important characters and a bad way to do self-important characters. Good way: Hercule Poirot. Bad way: Simon Kirby-Jones. Poirot is not a smug asshat all the time, or even most of the time; it’s just, every now and then he comes out with “Sacre bleu! How dare he have a more luxuriant mustache than I have!” or some placid comment about the superiority of his little grey cells. But then, we’re not living in Poirot’s head, either, which is fortunate because first-person is a narrative style that magnifies every character(ization) flaw. Because we’re in Simon’s head, we can’t get away from the relentless, weirdly camp smarminess; it’s right there on our heels through the whole book, chasing us down long empty participles and dark adverb clauses like some horrific, cackling clown, and there’s not a sentence’s respite.

Blanket statement, here: I think the mass-market mystery industry needs to rethink this glut of first-person books. First-person is a heinous bitch to pull off, and as far as I can tell the last mystery writer who managed it without suffocating under the miasmic cloud of Sue-ism was Agatha Christie. Say what you like about about Christie, I really doubt that that guy in The Moving Finger or the doctor in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd were authorial self-inserts. Like I said when I last posted about mysteries, I really don’t think it’s good strategy to gamble a book sale solely on my willingness to become the author/character’s BFF on two pages’ acquaintance.

Especially not this character. Dude, I’m serious, he’s like Dolores Umbridge without the quill and the lurking evil. “Hem, hem. May I speak to you, George? Have you forgotten your name, George? Shall I remind you no fewer than thirty times during the course of a four-page conversation, George? Also, George, does it bug you when I poke you in the ribs with my finger? Hahaha, George, isn’t that funny? Hem, hem.”

I might be willing to risk another short story or two by this guy. Another book? Fuck, no. I would be reduced to, like, ripping the pages out and drawing glasses, mustaches and horns on them with a black sharpie, where I wasn’t just stabbing the pages into big black Rorschach cards of SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUPness.

Two things:

1. I’m behind on SoHW19. The first part of it is up here, though, and I’m hoping to have the next part done here by next weekend.

2. The SoHWiki is here. So far it contains character bios, a FAQ, various things about the SoHW universe, and an Index of Arcane Literary References. Still very much a work in progress.

ETA:  Okay, that was not quite as helpful as one might hope.  The links should work now.  Sorry about that.

I’ve been bitching about this piecemeal for a while, so I thought it would be nice to have it all here and organized.

I have a love-hate relationship with mass-market mysteries. When they’re good, they’re great. (Lord Meren is my fictional husband, and he agrees.) The problem with them, though, is that somewhere along the line the genre became more saturated with Mary Sues than ff.net, a thing that takes some real doing. And I mean Mary Sues in the purest sense - they might not have amethyst eyes, they might not be universally beloved, their mere presence might not cause men to behave like idiots (though, then again, it might), they might have money problems and unpleasant relatives, but they are, quite literally, authorial self-inserts. You pick up a mystery off the shelves at Borders, and the odds are that you’re going to be reading someone else’s daydreams about themselves and their lives.

Which is kind of creepy, actually, when you think about it. Two prime examples of this phenomenon:

1. First, and no, I am not ever going to let go of this: The main character of the book has short dark hair. She owns a joke-goods business. She takes Tai Chi. She lives in Marin County. You turn the book to the author bio, and there’s the author, looking exactly like her character. She (the author) takes Tai Chi. She (the author) lives in Marin County. I bet you can’t guess what she does for a living! No, you were right the first time - she (the author) owns a joke-goods business. Yes, this is an actual book. No, I do not make this stuff up. The author is, literally, writing about herself, and making not the slightest attempt to disguise the fact. Unless you’re Vladimir Nabokov, that takes some chutzpah, especially if all you’re writing about yourself doing is hanging around with your boyfriend and solving rather trite mysteries.
2. Second, one that was actually a little disturbing. No, more disturbing than the last one. This woman lives above a bookstore that’s haunted by the ghost of a private detective. Most of the story is from her POV. She’s clearly an authorial self-insert. But the action diverges from her POV just long enough for the ghost to watch her in the bath and swoon over how hot she is. I can’t figure out how this could have been written that wouldn’t come across as frankly creepy narcissism, but if there’s a way, this author didn’t find it.

An entire genre, O my sisters, of women telling us about their fantasies, their issues, their jobs, their dreams, and where they think they went wrong in their lives, in a way that I guess is supposed to allow us all to pretend they haven’t just run us over with the Bright Orange Hummer of TMI. The books aren’t about the mystery. They’re about the author-characters, whom the publishers hope we’ll like well enough to buy the rest of the books in the series, and the mystery is just along for the ride, to showcase the author-character and her wonderful fantasy life. This isn’t mystery as Agatha Christie wrote it. This is mystery as reality TV, and after a while it starts running together in this strange, joyless, compulsive drone, the literary equivalent of the author cornering the reader at a cocktail party and rambling about how she’d always wanted to open a bed and breakfast and would have done it too if she just hadn’t married that asshole right out of college.
Fortunately, all you have to do to get away from the author in this situation is put down the book. Some of the things I’ve read, the only way to get rid of the author and her Issues at a cocktail party would be to fake your own death, and that might wind up causing more problems than it solves.

So let me start with Mirabella’s Law of Mary Sues: If you want me to read about Your Fantasy Life Starring You, you better have a really fucking interesting fantasy life. And all your friends that you write into your books? They better be damn interesting too. (I’m looking at you, Joke Shop Woman. If that chick you hang around with says “Ye gods and goddesses!” one more time in a completely unironic manner, I’m going to force-feed her a My First Baby Pagan Barbie.) Authors of this kind of mystery, as a rule, bank awfully hard on the chance that you’ll like their Mary Sues. Like I said, they’re selling the character, not the story. Which sets up an even less savory dynamic - the author is standing in the background of the story going “Pleeeeease like meeeeee!” Worse, she wants you to like her enough to pay to like her. There are very few characters in this genre I like enough to pay to like. Very few. Out of the whole, whole lot of books like this on the market. From the rumblings that have reached my ears about the steady decline in mystery sales, I suspect that I’m not alone in this.

I am just saying, it’s possible that someone might want to look into the relationship between that decline and the rise in the percentage of mysteries that depend for their success on my willingness to become the author’s BFF. Well, I mean, not on my willingness or the genre would crash and burn like a thousand Hindenburgs, but you know what I mean.

The question here, it seems to me, is… well, there are a lot of questions, starting with what the fuck Shower Scene Woman was thinking and proceeding from there, but there’s a question to be raised, I think, about character investment. By definition, all fiction is Your Fantasy Life Starring Somebody. If some part of that character is not present in some part of you, you can’t write them effectively. But there’s always, it seems to me, been this unspoken rule that your characters are People Who Are Not You, sort of like your kids are people who are not you despite carrying your genes. Even teenagers on ff.net sending their American exchange students to Hogwarts realize this, which is why they get all “OMG she iz so not meee!” when you make pointed mention of the fact that their character in fact shares their screen name. So how did the message blow right past these authors? Because you cannot, cannot tell me that they don’t know they’re writing about themselves and their imaginary adventures. Of course they do. (And it’s not just women either. I’m halfway through a Dean James book and literally cannot figure out whether it’s him that’s annoying me or his character. One or the other of them needs a clout upside the head, either way.)

Second, why in the world does anyone write these, other than because they sell? I mean, Mary Sues in the ff.net sense I get. I too would like to have a glorious mane of hair, eyes of some improbable color, and sparkly magical powers. But to put myself into a book, as I am (more or less), with the same job and the same issues and the same apartment and the same addiction to coffee, cigarettes, and Chinese takeout? The same clothes, the same hair, and the same cat? (Not that my cat would not make a good Mary Sue familiar. She would, because she is just that awesome. Sadly, however, I think she’s too lazy to participate in the crime-fighting.) What does that buy me? I’m not new and improved. My life probably isn’t in any better shape, and considering that my life currently does not contain cadavers and bloodstains it’d probably be in worse shape in my mystery incarnation. Is it really just that when people say they like my character they’re quite literally saying that they like me? Is it just that I like to write stories about my life as is just with a little more excitement? Sheer narcissism? Some sort of exhibitionistic thrill at the thought that five thousand people know what I keep on my mantlepiece?

Connection?

What?

I don’t know. But… look, people. I’m sure you’re perfectly nice in person. But the cold fact of the matter is that there are not too damn many real people who are interesting on paper as is. Sylvia Plath, maybe. Elizabeth I. Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. The average mystery writer? Not so much. This is not a put-down - I’m not interesting on paper either, and neither are any of my loved ones. But frankly after a while you all run together into some sort of Ur-character, a well-meaning, good-natured, middle-aged woman with an adequate boyfriend and a self-employment-type job that you sort of obviously want us to think is cooler than it actually is, who manages to twist the laws of probability until they vanish in a puff of logic by collecting a pile of cadavers every season or so.

She’s… okay, you know, in small doses, this Ur-character. But Sylvia Plath she ain’t. She’s not even Nancy Spungen. Get back to me when she gets addicted to heroin and runs off with the lead singer of a proto-punk band, and then we’ll talk. Until then, maybe I’ll check you out of the library sometime, and we’ll have coffee and talk about the relative merits of different vacuum cleaners or some shit.

So apparently my comment notifications have been being delivered straight to my bulk bin, which I am in the habit of emptying without looking at what’s in it.  At least, I assume that’s what’s going on; if it’s not,  I don’t know what is. My apologies.  Everyone’s comments should be visible now.

I have a confession to make: Anna Wintour is my new hero. The woman is a saint.

Well, okay, probably not. But I came away from The Devil Wears Prada firm in the belief that if I had to deal with a bitchy, self-righteous, humorless twentysomething assistant who rolled her eyes and made faces when she thought I wasn’t looking and couldn’t even get my latte to me while it was still hot, I surely would not let her hang around for eleven months before inviting her to watch the backswing on that door on her way to the unemployment line.

The book is supposed to be Lauren Weisberger’s “thinly-disgused tell-all” about interning for Wintour at Vogue. The storyline itself is stereotype from start to finish: Serious Intellectual Plain-Jane gets accidentally sucked into the world of high fashion, comes just close enough to Losing Her Soul OMG to provide a couple of chapters of angsty soul-searching and reality checks from angry boyfriends, but then triumphs over glitz in the end with the power of her innate goodness of heart and goes back to wearing sweat pants. Now, there’s nothing wrong with writing stereotyped storylines; look at all the retellings of fairy tales (though not, please, at that guy who wrote Wicked, whose retelling of Snow White I got halfway through before realizing that indeed life is stern and earnest but for God’s sake let us have limits). But the trick is that you have to tell them well - the devil, so to speak, is in the details. Either you find a sparkling and engaging way of telling an old story, or you’re left with… well, an old story, that many, many, many people have told better than you.

The Devil Wears Prada just doesn’t quite work.  It has potential, certainly, and there are many things about it that ought to work; indeed, the fashion industry ought to make for a biting, sparkly, and endlessly entertaining satire even in the hands of that guy who writes Garfield.  But the book doesn’t work, for several reasons.  To begin with, it’s simply not funny - situations that are themselves inherently absurd somehow have all the spastic energy sucked out of them by Weisberger’s lifeless prose.  The writing suffers from an endless “And then, and then, and then” litany of facts and events that read like an annoying movie montage and somehow serve to make it seem that the narrator has absolutely no inner life, which doesn’t help the reader when it comes to empathizing with her.

And the narrator needs help, make no mistake - the fact that her boss is a monster doesn’t absolve her of being smug, whiny, and annoying.  There are times when she comes across like a nineteen-year-old flouncing huffily because her boss, ohmygod, actually asked her to get off her cell phone and run the stupid cash register like it says to in her job description.  Case in point: we’re invited to be incredulous and sympathetic at the fact that her boss, who is the editor of a huge fashion magazine, wants umpteen magazines, papers, and trade publications sitting on her desk first thing in the morning, laid out just so, and the narrator later makes a snide comment about what a waste it is because Miranda only reads the society and gossip pages.

Okay, but - Lauren.  Sweetie.  Sit down and I will explain this to you slowly using little words.  When you are a huge-ass media mogul, it behooves you on a professional level to, wait for it, keep up with the media.  And while I’m sure it might be more morally righteous to sit around on your ass reading the New York Times Review of Books on company time, that’s not really your job.  Your job is to keep on top of the people to whom your magazine is helping to hock ten thousand dollar Dolce and Gabbana dresses.  See, the annoyingness of the narrator has driven me to defend her boss, who really is a huge bitch, and I don’t think that’s quite the effect that the book was intended to have.

I didn’t really hate the book.  I didn’t like it, either, though I wanted to.  The writing is flat, humorless, one missed opportunity after another, and no one’s sympathetic - not the narrator, not anyone she works with, not her tediously saintly boyfriend or her skeevy lush of a roommate, not the hot society writer who took a wrong turn out of a book in which he had an actual purpose and is now gamely trying to improvise his way through this one with no idea what’s going on or even what genre he’s in.  I’m still going to go see the movie, but clearly I will have to place my faith in the ability of Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci, and Donatella Versace to rise above even the limpest material.

The new chapter of The Shadow of His Wings is in beta.  I can’t post earlier than this weekend, but I’ll have it up as soon as I can thereafter.

 Also, there’s a new Fullmetal Alchemist section at The Guest Room.  The fics there are part of a nine-fic series, the last one of which has not yet been written, so actually the last two links don’t work.  I’m hoping to get that one up soon too.  Have patience.

The Bottom Line: OMGFMA! No, really, that’s sort of the bottom line. If you’re not a fan already, this game won’t make you a believer, but it doesn’t suck either. It’s a good game for someone who’s an FMA fan already and wants to hang out with the characters some more.

The Characters

You play as Edward Elric, Fullmetal Alchemist. With you, doing NPC things and joining in the combat, is Al. This is both cool and not cool. For someone with the stats-on-steroids Al has, he does bewilderingly little damage; he’s handy as a distraction, but not really much more. The cool thing is that when he gets knocked out you can alchemize him back together, making it so that you never have to use healing potions on him. Also of the cool is the fact that Al can equip kittens. No, seriously. Kittens. They do things like make him resistant to being stunned.

You have three other NPCs who join you from time to time: Roy Mustang, Riza Hawkeye, and Alex Louis Armstrong, who aside from Ed, Al, and my poor lost Maes are my favorite characters, so I did a lot of “OMGYAYE!” when one or the other of them showed up. They all do some fearsome damage to enemies. Also, I love Roy in this game. He is a cocky, snarky bastard to a truly jaw-dropping degree. There’s a part in the game where you get to play, depending on which one you take, with Roy, Riza, or Alex, and comes a time when Ed is all “I’m going to have to kill someone! Woes!” If you’re playing with Alex, he’s all comforting and consoling and stuff. Roy? Roy is like “…So? Suck it up, you little whiner. You were the one who wanted to join the military.”

I heart Roy. He is mean to Ed out of love, really.

N’awwwww!The PlotMonsters are menacing Amestris. Forth the Elric brothers, to find out what the hell’s going on.

You start out in Liore, facing off against Father Whatsisface with some cut scenes from the series, but the game diverges from both anime and manga within about five minutes. After the battle against the chimera in the church, you chase Father Whatsisface outside; there’s an annoying boss battle, and then the good Father gets abruptly sucked down into the ground by what looks like an oil slick with arms (well, I mean, it looks an awful lot like the stuff that lurks behind the Gate, actually, which threw me for a minute, but this doesn’t actually have anything to do with the Gate). There’s also a strange Mechawoman who looks sort of like a Harryhausen Medusa.

On the trail of the monsters, you find strange old men, alarmingly resurrected ancient civilizations thought to be destroyed in an apocalypse, and a Creepy Villainous Alchemist who’s, um, actually pretty hot.

Evil Is Hot. It also has bad taste in women.The GameplayEd can transmute all sorts of things out of elements in his environment, including but not limited to: bombs, swords, throwing knives, shuriken, strange little clockwork Ed dolls, huge bobbly things that suck up your enemies so you can hit them all at once, and boomerangs.

(ME: Mah luhv can’t catch a ba-boom-a-rang-rang-rang…
SHE WHO MUST NOT BE IDENTIFIED: OH MY GOD ARE YOU SINGING A SONG ABOUT BOOMERANGS?
ME: Um… yes?
SWMNBI: NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.)

Sadly, a lot of these things are fairly useless. The swords are no better than the one you can transmute out of the ground, the hammers are amusing but don’t do much damage, and the bombs have all the range and half the attack dice of a jelly jar dropped on your foot.

Similarly, the stuff Ed learns to transmute out of said ground aren’t all created equal. The hammer is insanely slow, and in a game where most of the enemies are faster than you that’s enough to knock it out of contention as a viable weapon right there. The lance is also fairly slow. Most of the time you’ll probably go with the sword; it packs more damage than Ed’s automail arm but is just as speedy.

Whosoever pulls the sword out of this stone is rightwise king of all Amestris, and also gets to fuck Roy Mustang.The inventory system is one of those incredibly annoying ones where you keep collecting stuff that you can neither drop nor sell, and – this is the really inexcusable thing – both Ed and Al have only two equipment slots. Yes, two. Which means, basically, that you get decent armor and, like, a +1 Ring of Getting Your Ass Kicked Slightly Less, and that’s it. Or, if you’re Al, the ring and a kitten. (Also, Ed apparently has an ear pierced. Who knew? Anyway, he gets earrings from time to time.)
Two items, y’all. Two. And also, for reasons I cannot even begin to fathom, half the items you get for Al are quite obviously cursed.Ed’s slow. That’s a problem. Ed’s slow and a lot of his weapons are slow, and there are going to be way too many times when you’re going to take damage because you couldn’t abort out of a combo in time to get out of something’s way. He and Al have this kickass rage attack they do in tandem, which is extremely useful because it can do damage even to the enemies that Ed’s too short to accurately reach by himself.There are quite a few different types of enemies, from huge lumbering headless things that shoot pink lasers out from between their shoulders to annoying, bomb-throwing little things that have huge heads, look like they’re wearing glasses, and generally look like someone tried to make a golem of Bloom County’s Oliver Wendell Jones out of used 3-In-One oil.

Speaking of enemies. As some of you know, my gold standard for video game annoyingness is Beyond the Beyond. As long as something isn’t as annoying as BtB, it’s one point ahead of the game in my book. Conversely, if I find myself going “Well, okay, I wouldn’t actually rather be playing that one part in Beyond the Beyond where you have to go through the caverns and you keep randomly falling through the floor, but damn, it’s a close call at this point,” that is usually a bad sign. The caves outside Rizembul seriously made me wonder if I was going to fall through the floor and reemerge as an eight-bit bobblehead with a chibi dragon. Hell, it’s not like both games don’t have Winry. Anyway, the problem here was that the enemies regenerate, completely, as soon as you leave a cave section. Fuck that. If I clear out a section it damn well better stay cleared, at least for a while.

One last thing about the gameplay: this is one of those games where you do an awful lot of watching cut scenes and whatnot. Which is occasionally pretty cool when they’re fully animated, but you’ll get tired of the Basil Exposition thing pretty quickly. Not that I’m not always glad to see Roy, but I would like to actually control the character for the bulk of the game, you know? I spent way too much time in this game feeling like I was watching a badly animated FMA fanvid with the occasional bonus interactive game thrown in.

The Bosses

The bosses in this game are weird.

Now, I know nothing about how video games are made, technically speaking. Games like this, though, make me suspect that different levels are made by different teams, and they don’t always have good communication. For instance, except for the final boss, the hardest boss in the game, bar none, is at the halfway point. That’s the only battle I didn’t get through on the first round – or the second, or the third, etc., because this particular boss will seriously fuck your shit up and can take huge amounts of damage. The rest of the bosses are… well, they’re not easy exactly, but the fights are more annoying than challenging. For instance, there’s one boss who is way faster than you – enough that you basically have no chance in hell of catching her – and she spends 90% of her time running around whatever room you’re fighting in.

Did I mention that, unless there’s stuff around you can transmute them out of, Ed has no projectile weapons, and the ones you can transmute are useless as often as not?

So, yeah. Fast boss who runs around most of the time plus slow Ed with no ranged weaponry adds up to a long, long, long, tiresome boss battle. She takes a lot of damage when you do hit her, fortunately, you just… can’t hit her, most of the time. Al will probably do a better job than you do, but not by much, and he doesn’t do much damage, as I said before. Most of the bosses are like this – not difficult, just tiresome. Plus for whatever reason the camera angles in the boss battles are never, ever where you need them to be; you’ll spend way more time than you should adjusting them.

There can be only one!The Rating:I’m giving FMA: Curse of the Crimson Elixir three out of five alembics for failure to suck, but I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it if you’re not an FMA fan already. Finishing the game doesn’t unlock anything major, but the replay value is decent as long as you’re obsessive about your games like I am.

Sadly, there does not seem to be a Roy In The Shower cheat code. Next time, next time.

The Summary: A drug corporation has developed a “cure” for mutant-ness. Ian McKellen cares, but pretty much no one else does. Characterization arcs are picked up and put down as if the director were an unenthusiastic guy shopping for his mother’s birthday present in Bath & Body Works, and Jean Grey is resurrected as a mutant revenant whose superpower is staring glassily into space and wearing funky contacts. Oh, and people die, with and without falling rocks. (more…)