With the 5th Anniversary even now closed out, I wanted to take a moment to share some random shots and comments on the various activities.
I didn’t spend as much time in the game doing things as I feel like I should have, but also, it was a bit chaotic, which kind of feels like a regular problem for some of these events. I did not realize until last minute that the portals took you to the special gallery areas. I think for the most part, I managed to catch everything at least once. There were the two wireframe galleries, a sort of fancy dancing area on top of the Office zone, a giant video screen viewing area, and regular events in the Aviary itself.
Probably the most interesting but was the two gallery areas. One in Isle of Dawn and one in the Forest. You explored through each zone viewing commentary and images. The neat part was that both had a modified display so everything was a sort of wireframe look.
There was a special cape you could buy that would allow you to return to these zones later. I considered it but decided not to get the cape.
The Isle of Dawn zone was a sort of, history of ThatGameCompany and the lead up of decisions to creating Sky: Children of the Light.
The Forest zone was the same idea, except it was a behind-the-scenes look at the history of Sky.
The Dance zone was neat but I don’t socialize enough to have really taken advantage of the area. This was where the vendor for the limited cosmetics was located though so I went there pretty regularly. The cosmetics were, ok, I doubt I use most of them. The nest decor was the better stuff overall, there was a cool Disco Ball thing for some heart currency.
The cooler thing from the Dance zone was that they had all of the previous special capes available for use so anyone could access the various special zones. I got to visit a few areas for the first and maybe only time. I did not revisit the Aurora Concert using the Aurora Wings nor did I visit the Nine Colored Deer.
I did visit the others. First was the Little Prince Moon. This season happened before I played Sky at all, and had some nice looking items I missed. This includes a cape that would allow you to visit a small area inspired by the story. It’s a small planet, like in the story, which has a small biplane. Several Sky Kids can sit on the plane and eventually, it launches and flies around past various other views and things to see.
The second, and one I might eventually buy except I don’t own a Switch, is the Nintendo Area. Accessible via a warp pipe prop. The neat part of this zone is that it is locked to a 2D view, like a Mario game. The zone actually serves as a home hub with portals to each of the places in Sky similar to Home and Aviary. There is also a little underground area that is designed like a mini Mario level with moving platforms and coin blocks that spit fireworks and butterflies.
Back on other actual anniversary activities, one was a schedule of videos from the designers in a large viewing area. I kind of watched a few of these but personally, I feel just watching a YouTube video would be a better format for this.
Lastly there were a bunch of activities in Home, some group games, occasionally giant Oreo dogs would take over, and a fireworks display.
Everyone knows the classic Voltron version with its 5 lions. There have been a few versions from the Stealth Voltron and Netflix Voltron and the newer Modern Voltron. There was also an additional team though that was made up of 15 vehicles, divided into three teams, colloquially called, “Vehicle Voltron.”
Like the Lions, it was based on a Japanese series, in this case, Dairugger XV. I have always really loved the Vehicle Voltron design, even though the Lions always got all the love.
Ok, more specifically, I like the combined mode design more, the separated designs are, kind of lame in the majority of cases. There are three teams based around land, sea, and air, each consisting of 5 vehicles each. Some of the vehicles are neat. The helicopters and the little trucks are cool. The battleship looking ones are alright. The head is cool.
A lot of the others are essentially just, “A box on wheels.”. Some have little flip out towers or whatnot to give them a bit more variety, but they are still just, weird boxes.
Each of the three teams can form a combined vehicle. They also all combine into one larger robot.
The real fun of this is definitely the combined robot. It’s surprisingly articulated and hides the joints in the blocky vehicles that make up most of its torso and pelvis very well.
Some of the articulation is tricky to use though. Mostly because some of the actual connection joints feel a bit fragile. This is not a model kit, but it very much has the FEEL of a model kit. It’s light weight, pretty stiff plastic 5+3 joint tolerances for the connections feel a bit too type.
I still really dig it though. And it helps fill out the little collection of similarly sized robots and Kaiju I have been working on building up very nicely. It’s a little smaller than my Die Cast modern Voltron, but not so much that it’s super out of place. I am really hoping it scales well with the Moderoid Lion Voltron I have on the way (which IS a model).
As expected, despite there technically being ways, the crew is just staying in the Future’s Future. This season has been kind of meh overall, it really really feels like a rehash of the last two seasons except now Space Elon is the bad guy.
Also, are the actors getting bored with the show? Or maybe just, COVID messed up everyone’s schedules? It feels like a lot of the lesser characters started leaving near the end of the season. At least, the ones they didn’t give some characterization to. Last season they sort of gave Detmer a few bits of actual characterization beyond “pilot”. This season’s spare characterization cycles seem to be going to Owosekun. The other “person who sits up front.”
And of course, Tilly left, (she comes back). It really feels like they got rid of Tilly as Stamits’ engineering buddy and replaced her with Adria. More specifically, they took everything interesting about Tilly and put it in Adria, and everything kind of annoying about Tilly, and put it in Gray Tal. And neither half works as well when it’s split. Tilly is the Gestalt.
Speaking of Adira and Gray, they had a sort of, subplot going on early in the season, that stemmed from the weird Holo version of Gray. I am glad it ended fairly early on, with Gray leaving for Trill. I feel bad, but I found Gray to be incredibly annoying as a character. Way way too chipper, he made Adria’s character extremely wishy-washy and worse from her previous time, and he wasn’t ever actually part of the crew, which made him doing crew things (rarely) weird.
Not to mention the whole, “Lets synthesize you a body so you can be a real boy and extract your Trill consciousness,” kind of feels like it’s really screwing with Trill Lore.
It feels like they wanted to make Wesley seem less annoying by comparison. I suspect he will show up again more, and that’s fine, I just kind of hated him as a “regular.” And after his departure, Adira already feels more like their old self a bit more. Which is great.
The core plot arc for the season involves this giant black hole anomaly thing that sort of, showed up out of nowhere and started gobbling up planets. But it’s “random and unpredictable”. Eventually Space Elon (Tarka) shows up to be smug and annoying and screw things up for his own gain.
The black hole eats Book’s planet which kind of turns him into a huge emotional mess because we just got to meet his family (how convenient) who were of course, on the planet. This all leads to a lot of discussion a d politicking by the Federation leaders. It’s kind of crazy how suddenly the Federation is this whole thing again after being in literal shambles even BEFORE the Burn happened. Anyway, Burnham wants to negotiate with whomever is controlling the wormhole.and Space Elon wants to nuke it. The Federation decides to vote on whether or not nuking black holes is a good idea or not and decide that no, it’s not, that’s a stupid idea.
Not one to take no for an answer, he convinced Book to sneak away on their own to blow it up anyway. They also steal a prototype new Spore Drive, to put in Book’s ship, because the writers realized how impossible the story would be with regular Warp.
There is some chasing for a while and relationship drama because Burnham isn’t real happy about Book going against her and trying to nuke a black hole. Eventually, Discovery stops them, but Tarka manages to pull off his plan anyway.
This literally amounts to nothing.
They blow up the core. The thing goes away, then it just, come back. Like less than a minute later.
But a long the way we learned that the source is coming from our beyond the Great Barrier. We went to the Future’s Future, now it’s time to go to Outer Outer Space. Also Book and Tarka escape away, and we learn some backstory that is supposed to make Space Elon sympathetic but mostly just makes us wonder if he was gay for that alien dude or if they were just “roommates”.
It’s never stated. Potentially killing billions of people for a “roommate” feels a little extreme though.
So Discovery, because it’s the only ship that can do anything, Spore Jumps to the edge of the galaxy, because apparently, the Spore Drive doesn’t work outside of “the known universe”. Somewhere a sleeping Chief Engineer had to wake Up and tell Jett Reno to clean the dust off the warp core, because they were stuck using traditional warp for a while.
After passing into Outer Outer Space, Discovery encounters a giant shielded egg thing belonging to the unknown aliens. They make a detour to a nearby planet and find some long dead original civilization of these aliens. The President of the Federation also shows that she doesn’t know anything about how the Federation operates here too, because she protests that Burnham should not be beaming down to the planet. It’s like she doesn’t understand that even.on a ship with hundreds of crew members, only the senior officers and Captain ever get to actually leave the ship.
On the away mission, they discover that the aliens communicate through emotions. My first thought was, too bad they don’t have a Betazoid on board, but then I remembered that Book is also an Empath. Seems like the logical plot run, but nope, they don’t go that route.
Instead they use some sciencey stuff to work out the emotion language.
I want to touch on an issue with Discovery here. It’s become increasingly annoying, and by the end of the series, it’s bad enough that it’s literally used for jokes in the finale. They really really really gloss over the science parts. Like, all Trek science is kind of techno babble.mumbonjumbo, but it’s somewhat consistent and at least pays lip service to making sense in world.
Science in Discovery feels like the writers took a bunch of Trek science terms, put them in a tumbler, and started pulling them out randomly.
It’s like when CSI talks about “Port Forwarding the dev shell antivirus driver over the RAM chip interface”, but with Trek terms. It’s all words that mean something, but it’s output as gibberish.
Anyway, they work it out and start negotiations with the aliens. And they have to because suddenly both Vulcan (Sorry, N’Varr) and Earth are being threatened by the black hole thing now. Which feels weird because those two planets feel like they aren’t close enough to be threatened, but then it’s the Michael Burnham Show, and those are both her home planets, so, WE GOTTA UP THOSE STAKES FOR HER!
Burnham, Saru, and the various Federation emissaries on board, all beam down to start negotiations.
Also Book and Tarka also came to join the party, in secret, and somehow they don’t have nearly as much trouble getting around and through the barrier as Discovery did. Tarka, still hell bent on ….
Fuck it, it’s actually not clear WHAT Tarka is even doing.
He was a prisoner, he met a smart alien he may or may not have been in love with, he escaped the prison, but his friend didn’t, but he seems to think his friend escaped to another dimension. The pair had been working on a dimension-jumping project while in prison. Anyway, Tarka needs the power source the aliens use to power the dimension thing, but he also wants to blow it up, for, some reason.
It’s all very, kind of dumb.
Anyway, Tarka threatens the aliens, which freaks them out but then Discovery proves themselves to be true by stopping Tarka.
This also involves several moments of “This character is going to sacrifice themselves or die” that never happen because, Transporters exist and we can’t kill off characters anymore, I guess.
Overall the season felt kind of weak, and the show is starting to fall deep into iffy territory. I’ll probably go on about a lot of this for the Season 5 write up, or if it gets long, it will just be its own post.
I probably don’t really need to reiterate my overall criticisms of this line from my Cloud write-up. I will add that, I was inspired to start this line when I saw Wave 2 had Yuffie, who is my favorite character from the game. But this Tifa looked super great and was part of what pushed me to go ahead and get the rest of them.
That and Cid and Cait Sith both look great, and kind of round out my top 3 of this game.
Tifa was harder to find though. Since I was starting with the announcement of the second set, the first group was basically sold out everywhere. I was able to piece together Cloud, Barret, Aeris, and even Sephiroth between BBTS and Amazon. But Tifa was nowhere. I think at this point she is actually more available for a second run, but I ended up getting her from USA Gundam Store, a place I had not ordered from but reports were it was alright.
Overall, she does actually feel nicer than Cloud. Her joints are hidden better overall for one. She has a second face plate for another, though she has less alternate hands and no weapon. The weapon part is understandable, she fights with kicks and punches.
The figure’s balance is a bit weaker than Cloud but probably partly because being a brawler, I have been trying to put her into more exaggerated poses. She does come with a stand at least, to help hold her up.
My only real complaint is the hair. It has a sort of, permenant side swoosh going on. It feels like they could have put some sort of hidden rotation joint in there to let it pose swooshing the other way, or just straight down. Feels like something Bandai or Max Factory would have done, and kind of touches on the complaints I had about in my Cloud write up about the poor bang for your buck value on this line.
