MOVIE REVIEW: EXECUTIONERS (1993)

Directed by Johnnie To and Ching Siu-tung

Produced by Ching Siu-tung, Johnnie To, and Yeung Kwok-fai

Fight Direction by Ching Siu-tung

Story and Characters by Sandy Shaw

Written by Suzanne Chan

Cinematography by Poon Hang-Sang

Production Design by Pui-Wah Chan and Catherine Hun

Edited by Ah-Chik

Music by Cacine Wong

Starring 

Anita Mui as Wonder Woman

Michelle Yeoh as Invisible Woman

Maggie Cheung as Thief Catcher

Damian Lau as Inspector Lau

Lau Ching Wen as Tak, a mercenary smuggler

Paul Chun as the Colonel, promoted from Police Chief

Takeshi Kaneshiro as Chong Hon, a Charismatic Religious Leader

Eddy Ko as President’s Deputy

Shan Kwan as the President

Anthony Wong Chau-sang as Mr. Kim, Gothic Megalomaniac; and as Kau, Ex-Decapitator, Ex-Landmine Enthusiast, Ex-Villain 

. . .

“Just because you can’t watch it on TV doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Executioners is a direct sequel to the comic book wuxia fantasia The Heroic Trio . . . so direct that I consider it less of a standard sequel and more like Act II of a two act dramatic structure. Yes, sure, The Heroic Trio is perfectly watchable all on its own, and you are, of course, free to resist sequelization if it vexes you; but Executioners offers a more complex and unpredictable set of outcomes for the characters we meet in the first movie. Heroes fight among themselves. A bumbling side character rises to villainous heights. A ruthless killing machine yokes himself to an honorable mistress. The forces of oppression employ some truly underhanded brutality in their pursuit of total power. Executioners is a cynical downer in which the comic book fantasia of The Heroic Trio is mutated towards a dystopian totalitarian vision. But what good are our heroes if they are never tested to the limits of their mortality? Executioners is not consequence free Marvel and DC nonsense-although it takes inspiration from the American superhero comics-where no one ever really dies because of merchandising. Batman, Spider-Man, and Iron Man must live on because plastic bullshit must be sold. When people die in Executioners they die hard, they die in pain, and they do not come back. Heroism comes at the highest cost in this dark fantasy realm. 

Executioners returns us to The Heroic Trio’s precisely art-directed Hong-Kong-by-way-of-Batman’89’s-Gotham City-style metropolis a few years down a very dark road. Nuclear war has decimated the planet. Hong Kong stands as a city state bastion of civilization in a world radically desertified by atomic fire. Clean drinking water uncontaminated by rads has become both a desired resource and a cause for battle. Mercenary smugglers deal in scarce goods. Cutthroat raiders use violence to dominate. Against these chaotic circumstances, four political actors offer the people competing visions of order: the President, Chong Hon, the Colonel, and Mr. Kim.

The democratically elected President isn’t above doing some dirty deeds in service of the greater good. He and his supporters don’t have all the answers, but they’re trying to pull everybody together on a basis of considered choice as opposed to brute force dictatorship. It’s something worth considering.

Chong Hon is a charismatic religious leader who preaches an inspirational message of social justice by way of the spirit, and is played by Takeshi Kaneshiro in what I believe is his film acting debut. Pray hard enough and the radiation vacates the aquifers in the name of God. Yeah. Sure . . .

The Colonel offers a harsh, face-stomping military dictatorship-later for all that weak liberal democracy shit. The Colonel is played by Paul Chun, who played a comically bumbling Police Chief in The Heroic Trio. Here, Chun is hard-as-nails as an aspiring tyrant, who casts out compassion in favor of ambition. There’s also the disturbing implication of harsh circumstances bringing out people’s dark sides. The Colonel seems to think if he can secure his dictatorship-for-life then the ecological disaster will resolve itself; or maybe he’s too focused on his own game to grok the bigger picture. Watching The Heroic Trio and Executioners back-to-back offers a chance to see contrasting performances by Chun. 

And finally we have the obvious Final Boss: the Gothically perverse Mr. Kim, a decadent technologist who dresses like the Phantom of the Opera, and loves collecting severed heads. Mr. Kim claims to have innovated a revolutionary water purification technology that can defeat the pervasive radioactive contamination. All he’s asking for is total power to pursue his sadistic pleasures without limit. Mr. Kim is a kind of right wing libertarian techbro, though his dandified style distinguishes him from the usual macho posturing of contemporary examples of the species who eat up so many news cycles. The amusing thing about Mr. Kim is that, in his own twisted way, he’s rather, well, not honest, exactly, but he is authentic. Mr. Kim makes no attempt to hide his bizarre depravities. He’s an example of someone who looks at the post-nuclear wasteland and decides to have as much fun as possible. Of course, he is played by Anthony Wong with gruesome gusto.

But what about our Heroic Trio?

Well . . .

. . . Anita Mui’s Wonder Woman has seemingly given up her superhero identity to raise a child with hubby Inspector Lau. Of course, she is drawn back into the game by a series of ordeals comparable to what Christian Bale’s Batman would go through in The Dark Knight Rises. Mui’s Wonder Woman rises to the occasion, offering a shining example that even brings out the inner swashbuckler in one of her enemies. She’s that kind of heroine. Wonder Woman inspires even the villains to raise their standards of evil. 

Michelle Yeoh’s Invisible Woman conducts military operations against wasteland raiders. She’s also taken on a new sidekick: Kau, the former head-collecting henchman of the Evil Master from The Heroic Trio. Kau was horribly burned in the previous adventure, and so he now acts like a human attack dog wrapped up in head-to-toe bandages. Kau embodies the comic book logic of “better living through horrible mad science accidents.” Of course, Invisible Woman also served the Evil Master, and her journey in the first movie embodied the struggle between good and evil within a person’s conscience. She has a very tough road to walk in Executioners.

Maggie Cheung’s Thief Catcher is as capitalistic as before, still acting as a bounty hunter, but now taking on smuggling as a side hustle. She becomes frenemies with rival black marketeer Tak. Her journey crashes her entrepreneurial desire against the greater good.

And I shouldn’t neglect the honorary Fourth Man: Inspector Lau. In The Heroic Trio he played a classic Movie Cop of the Hong Kong style, blasting a maniac rampaging through a maternity ward, looking tragically cool with a cigarette in hand, and surviving getting blown up by a landmine. In Executioners Inspector Lau is pressured by his superiors to carry out a cold blooded assassination. Lau’s ethics are cruelly tested. His fate is a lesson. 

Wonder Woman, Invisible Woman, and Thief Catcher all have their separate questlines that must be sorted before the trio can be reunited. These quests involve a bewildering array of ordeals: combat against superhuman persecutors; assassination attempts; journeys into atomic wastelands and subterranean city depths; and struggle against disillusionment with flawed political processes that sputter and choke against globally scaled ecological catastrophe. Yes, this is a pro-democracy movie . . . but nothing comes easy. Even idealized comic book champions must reckon with betrayal, defeat, and death in Executioners.

MOVIE REVIEW: THE HEROIC TRIO (1993)

Directed by Johnnie To

Produced by Ching Siu-tung and Johnnie To

Fight Direction by Ching Siu-tung

Written by Sandy Shaw

Cinematography by Poon Hang-Sang and Tom Lau

Edited by Kam Wah

Music by William Hu

Starring 

Anita Mui as Wonder Woman

Michelle Yeoh as Invisible Woman

Maggie Cheung as Thief Catcher

Damian Lau as Inspector Lau

James Pax as Inventor of Invisibility Cloak

Paul Chun as Police Chief

Anthony Wong Chau-sang as Kau, Decapitator, Landmine Enthusiast

Yen Shi-Kwan as the Evil Master

. . .

"The past is trivial. What matters is the thing you wish to do now."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

The Heroic Trio takes place within an art-directed backlot comic book city caught between a heroic future and an imperial past.Think the Gotham City of Batman '89 and Batman Returns but on a budget, and coming out of the no limits hyperkinetic Hong Kong action/fantasy cinema of the early 1990s. Heroes and villains clash in a swirl of bodies, blades, and bullets. A subterranean villain reminiscent of Danny DeVito's Penguin hatches a vile scheme. A superwoman runs across power lines like early 1980s Daredevil to rescue newborn babies cruelly dropped from a deadly height. There's even a melodramatic pursuit on horseback. It's all here. It's almost all in-camera. Later for those computer graphics cubicle farms. This is the real shit.

The imperial past is embodied by a telekinetic eunuch known as the Evil Master, who employs an invisible agent to kidnap babies away to a subterranean realm of shadows where they are all raised to become future emperors. Back in '93, this may have been a fanciful expression of pre-1997 angst about Hong Kong's looming handover to Beijing; nowadays, this resonates with the Chinese Communist Party's genocide of Uyghur Muslims and/or Vladimir Putin's kidnapping of Ukrainian children. The sinister eunuch kills the babies who cry too much, but this might just be a method to artificially prolong the scheme, to always live in hope of the coming of a true ruler even if that means serving a long-dead regime. You know, I can't exaggerate the impressive gruesomeness of the Evil Master. I mean this eunuch character lives in a strange realm of shadows accessible via a certain manhole that can only be opened by stomping it in a certain way, sorta like a trick video game mechanic. And once you're down there the kidnapped babies are all imprisoned within hanging birdcages. And the eunuch just kinda lounges, not really putting out much effort. He has this gimmick where he can use psychic powers to chase intruders with flying poison needles. He's also got a fearsome warrior monk henchman-Kau-who relishes decapitations and creating fields of land mines. What I'm trying to say is that this Evil Master is one weirdass motherfucker, but he also kinda has his shit together. You're just gonna have to watch the movie to fully marinate in the sinister vibes. 

The heroic future is embodied by three superwomen-a hero, a bounty hunter, and a seeming villain. This titular trio brings the heroism although they must first fight out their differences among themselves, Marvel Comics-style, for one of the three is the eunuch's invisible agent, while another is a selfish vigilante mercenary. The invisible woman is known, helpfully, as Invisible Woman. The mercenary goes by the handle Thief Catcher, although she tends to use shotguns, machine guns, and dynamite to obliterate bad guys rather than capture them alive. The pure hero here is known as Wonder Woman-but not that Wonder Woman. So far as I know. 

The seeming villain of the trio-Invisible Woman-gets her powers from a prototype cloak of invisibility that she has appropriated from a lone genius inventor who has fallen hopelessly in love with her. That's kinda what happens when Michelle Yeoh shows up in your life in crimson shimmering, form-fitting superhero attire.  This inventor guy has devoted his entire life to perfecting the cloak even if he ends up dead due to exposure to the radiation which is necessary to its manufacture. The comic book science is strong with this film. Invisible Woman starts out cruelly using the inventor to further the Evil Master's schemes, but she is eventually won over by his pure hearted devotion. Dig the pages of scientific research blowing on a mysterious wind just like those autumn leaves in The Conformist. Invisible Woman embodies the struggle between good and evil. 

Thief Catcher is the comic relief character, who always knows how to make an entrance whether astride a motorcycle or a flying barrel, and never seems to run out of those oh-so-handy sticks of dynamite. It's possible that she has cheats enabled. I wouldn't hold it against her. Thief Catcher is played by Maggie Cheung who would go on to do a deadpan meta-parody of her role in The Heroic Trio and its dystopian sequel Executioners in the Olivier Assayas flick Irma Vep. 

The Evil Master's enforcer, Kau, is played by the prolific Anthony Wong, who many will remember from his turn as a hospital-hating archvillain in John Woo's Hard-Boiled. Here, Wong plays Kau as a mute flesh-and-blood analogue of the Terminator. Kau's immune to pain,has no fear, and uses a steel hood on a long chain to rip people's heads off-the same weapon the villain used in Master of the Flying Guillotine.

Wonder Woman is married to an incorruptible Movie Cop named Lau. Inspector Lau isn't a superhero, but he does get to throw some shots into a maniac rampaging through a maternity ward. Lau doesn't know he's married to a bona fide superhero, but he's no dummy. Inspector Lau is almost an unofficial fourth member of the Heroic, erm, Quartet? He has an all time brilliant moment of "cigarette acting" wherein he is so demoralized by certain events that he nearly lights up in the middle of a hospital. Inspector Lau is played by Damian Lau, who, among his many roles, played a noble swordsman in the tragic wuxia film Duel to the Death. 

Which brings me to Wonder Woman who is played by Anita Mui, who is a difficult figure to summarize. Mui died of cancer in 2003, and her stature in Hong Kong cinema and beyond is impossible to overstate. I recommend you do a YouTube search of her live musical performances just to take in her power as a popstar, but also read up on her legacy as a pro-democracy activist post-Tiananmen Square. Mui didn't just play a superhero in the movies. She lived it.

The Heroic Trio is also difficult to summarize. The version I watched most recently is just under ninety minutes, and part of me feels like it's just about perfect at that length. The movie uses the lingua franca of comic books to cut exposition down to nearly zero. The movie remixes characters and motifs from Tim Burton's Batman and Batman Returns,Blade Runner, Master of the Flying Guillotine, Dragon Inn '67, The Conformist, wuxia, film noir, DC Comics, Marvel Comics, the special effects fantasias of Tsui Hark, Evil Dead 2, Dirty Harry, The Terminator-similar to a Sergio Leone or Quentin Tarantino flick almost everything here comes from someplace else. And yet the ruthless  pacing and iconic human performers transform it into a hallucinatory epic that makes overlong contemporary blockbusters feel stodgy, formulaic, dinosaurian. 

The special effects are minimal. There's wire work where, yes, you sometimes see the wires, but these lapses scarcely detract from the visceral sense of physicality. Every action beat involves actual human bodies in motion. Sure, there's trick editing, out of frame trampolines, clever camera placement, stunt performers; but actual people put their bodies on the line in almost every frame. It approaches the excitement usually only possible in live theater.

And yet there's this other part of me that wants another sixty minutes or so, or a New Game+ mode or something. The Heroic Trio leaves me wanting more which is, allegedly, a good thing. 

Of course, there is the sequel, Executioners . . . maybe I'll get to that one before the year's out . . . 

BONUS: The final confrontation with the baby murdering Evil Master begins in a nearly abstract shadow realm that always reminds me of the boss fights of many 8-bit NES games wherein you often had colorful boss monsters contrasted against a solid black background. I'm sure it was due to graphical limitations, but this style of presentation became one of the "theatrical conventions" of retro gaming in my imagination. The Heroic Trio hits upon something similar by coincidence, but it still moves me on that level.

MOVIE REVIEW: BOILING POINT (1993)

 

Written and Directed by James B. Harris

Adapted from the novel Money Men by Gerald Petievich 

Starring

Wesley Snipes as Jimmy 

Dennis Hopper as Red

Dan Hedaya as Brady

Viggo Mortensen as Ronnie 

Lolita Davidovich as Vikki

Valerie Perrine as Mona

Jonathan Banks as Max

Paul Gleason as Transaction Man

Seymour Cassel as Leach

Tobin Bell as Roth

Tony Lo Bianco as Dio

. . .

"You just look for the happiest redhead in the whole world!"

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Boiling Point . . . another movie with the title Boiling Point . . .

This one is about Jimmy, a U.S. Treasury Agent who is trying to figure out who killed his partner during an undercover sting operation over some counterfeit bills. The details of the investigation are engaging moment to moment, but I think the motivations of the characters will probably be what sticks with you when it's all said and done. 

Jimmy's under threat of reassignment due to the fact that someone died under his watch. Jimmy's work has ruined his relationship with his wife and child. All this has got him questioning his commitment to his job. Jimmy tries to be an at-a-distance father to his child. His ex-wife has already moved on to another man, and this is a reality Jimmy can't quite accept. The night that his partner is killed, Jimmy hits up his ex for a comfort bang-well, things could be complicated even back before social media, y'know?

Jimmy's partner was killed by a criminal named Ronnie, a callous young man under the influence of a con artist named Red. Red owes a gangster named Dio lots of money, and so Red is under some pressure to elevate his hustle before he gets zapped. Ronnie killed the undercover agent more or less on Red's behalf, although Red himself is averse to violence. That's what's amusing about Red: he's such a nice guy in person. He's clearly a bullshitter and out of step with the world with his off-the-rack suits and fancy wingtips, but you would be charmed by him for a few minutes at a time. You would have to be a brain-damaged psychopath like Ronnie to bet your entire future on Red, tho'. 

Red hits up a crooked lawyer named Max, who's known for circulating funny money, but Max knows Red's underwater, and tells him to fuck off-which is why Red has the younger guy Ronnie on the leash. Ronnie hits up Max for a similar deal on Red's behalf with Max being none the wiser.

That's Red's con. He has Ronnie as a kind of spare self to do things with, and it's intriguing to watch how this all operates. If Ronnie were less inclined to shoot people to death with his sawed-off shotgun it would almost be cute. 

Jimmy, meanwhile, is able to talk his way out of reassignment, and puts pressure on a couple of other underworld operators to see what shakes out, but his desire is for vengeance, not justice. Jimmy's head is in a bad place. The job has ruined his family and gotten his guy killed, and for what? Jimmy's no longer interested in putting his quarry in a cage. It’s body bag time!

What keeps all this interesting is that Jimmy doesn't know what Red and Ronnie look like, and Red and Ronnie don't know that Jimmy is even after 'em. Red and Ronnie don't even know that they killed an undercover Treasury Agent! They think they just waxed a fellow criminal in a motel room. The film has some fun with Jimmy and Red obliviously patronizing the same late night food counter, pissing in the men's room urinal at the same time, and even hiring the same call girl-tho' that last one is for separate dates. Presumably, a threesome would be out-of-bounds for a middle-aged crook who likes 1940s swing music and an uptight federal agent. 

Like many crime movies, the main idea here has to do with the conflict between appearances and reality. Red is a hoot to bullshit with, but he’s a delusional liar with blood on his hands. Ronnie is young and handsome, but also stupid and murderous. Max is an outwardly prosperous lawyer whose wealth comes primarily from dirty deeds done not so cheap. And our hero Jimmy isn't so much interested in serving justice as he is fixated on lethal payback. 

This is all fascinating to watch. It ends about how you expect it will end. At least it did for me. This is not an action movie, tho' there are a few sequences of mayhem. This is more in the tradition of hard-boiled crime fiction mixed with a police procedural. We have the line between law and crime, cops and crooks, but as for what's right and wrong . . . that's trickier. Our sympathies are no doubt with Jimmy, but he definitely makes some questionable choices. 

The dialogue is sharp. Red's effusive, self-aggrandizing speeches are the highlights. 

I also liked the interrogations Jimmy conducts with the criminal operators he has to handle. These end up being negotiations over who and what and where and how much time spent incarcerated and how much time free-I found it more or less convincing. 

The cast is solid. Look for future horror villain Jigsaw in a memorable supporting bit. Hopper was born to play a grifter like Red. Snipes is convincingly disillusioned yet determined as Jimmy. Viggo Mortensen is creepy as Ronnie. Dan Hedaya plays Brady-Jimmy's partner-and gets to run from an explosion in one scene. Lolita Davidovich plays the nicest person here-the call girl, Vikki, who is also the least dishonest in her way. Breaking Bad's Jonathan Banks gets to play Max, the lawyer, in good times and bad. And I always appreciate Seymour Cassel. Cassel plays a crook named Leach, and I like to imagine he told stories about working with John Cassavetes between takes.

Boiling Point . . . it's another movie with the title Boiling Point. 

I had a good time with it.

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEW #11: MEGA MAN X (1993)

 1.

If I were a pro-wrastler, the Sigma Select Screen Theme would be my entrance music. 

It captures the arrogance and the swagger of a conqueror. This music puts across the peculiar charisma of authoritarianism. You get a sense of why people would grovel before such a ruthless character as Sigma. You can see all the other robots cheering and howling at vast hate rallies wherein Sigma would give jokey, long-winded speeches about how he’s the Risen Robo-Christ, and how all robo-journalists are fake news, and anyone that disagrees should be disassembled. 

Maybe I would even shave my head and modify my body with robot parts. My pro-wrastling name could be something like ‘Roid-Bot DX: Death Xtra.’ My backstory could have something to do with being an experimental cyborg entity who was accidentally dropped into a vat of Neo-Steroids, and when I swam back to the surface I was overcome with a desire to become a champion pro-wrastler and I would let nothing stop me from that day forward.  

Pro-wrastling is all about celebrating the Stupid. 

I think I could swing that.

I know about the Stupid.  

2.

Now, when you get to Sigma-the final boss-he sics his robo-hound on you. That’s what an evil bastard Sigma is-he wants to fuck with your revulsion at killing an adorable canine. I mean, there are people that are super-triggered by depictions of dog-death in movies. They won’t even blink if you mow down a bunch of human civilians in a Vietnam flick, or something like that. But kill one dog? Shit, if you even kick a dog, okay, that’ll fuck their shit all the way up into the stratosphere. And, I guess, Sigma knows that, so he tries to psych you out by making you fight a robo-doggo. So you’ve gotta deal with that.

And once you’ve dealt with that, Sigma himself steps out of the shadows, throws off his cape, and comes after you with a lightsaber. In retrospect, Sigma should have also had a glass of fine wine which he could have tossed aside with aristocratic disdain. Or, since he’s a robot, he could’ve had a glass of fine motor lubricant. I would’ve been satisfied by either one. But they didn’t do that. I had to wait a few more years for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. But by then,well, I certainly appreciated the gesture. It was very sweet. But, honestly, I’d kinda moved on.

The music is driving and frantic. It’s a proper final boss battle theme. 

There’s something cool about Sigma. He lives up to the hype of his Select Screen Theme. Sigma’s lightsaber is cool. It’s always cooler when a guy comes at you with a sword, even in a modern or-as we have here-a futuristic setting. Sigma’s putting himself at an intentional disadvantage against your Buster Shot. That’s how much confidence this Robo-Mussolini-looking motherfucker has in his fighting skill. There’s something cool about that. I wish I were that cool . . .

You and Sigma bounce off the walls. You bust off your shots where you can. 

If you have the patience, and you can keep bouncing off the walls, you’ve got this. 

You blow up Sigma’s body. His head is all that remains. 

But wait, there’s more.

The head flies up to the top of a giant robo-demon body that has a kind of robot wolf’s head. Sigma’s head is a kind of crown upon the wolf’s head of the robo-demon body, which commands both lightning and fire to try to destroy you. Behold, Sigma, Master of the Elements, your Destroyer! Why not grovel and pray to Him . . . for a swift death!

The music is different, now. It’s . . . lugubrious. We are now on a grim march, one that’s losing steam. The wily drive and power of our first round against Sigma are gone. We are smaller than our newly re-bodied enemy, but we are quicker, and we leap onto one of the flailing hands of the robo-demon wolf’s head body, and, if we have patience, we steadily blast Sigma’s faces into robo-hell. 

Sigma overplayed his hand. Sigma thought brute strength would win him the day. Sigma never considered the possibility that we would use his arrogance against him. 

This is Sigma’s downfall. 

This is the fate of the Robo-Asshole who thought he could never lose. 

Adieu, Sigma.

Perhaps, we’ll meet again in Robo-Valhalla, or something. 

3.

I’m still sitting here, thinking about my future as a pro-wrastling cyborg.

Have I been infected with the authoritarian fantasy embodied by the Sigma Select Screen Theme?

Do I desire to trade my humanity to be worthy of that ominous, arrogant music?

I know Enemy when it’s outside of me. Not everybody can see the Enemy of the Exterior. It’s not easy for everyone. And so many people live in the presence of their oppressor-Father, Mother, Brother, Sister, Boss, Deity, Religious Leader, Political Figurehead, Envious Colleague, Jealous Lover, Abusive Partner-because they find confrontation too traumatic. But bridge-burning comes naturally to me. This is a kind of strength.

But strength has its peril-the hubris of Sigma-in the blindness to an Enemy Inside. Festering within my so carefully up-armored body, showing no hint of weakness or sentiment.

Truly . . . if it came down to it . . . do I have the tears to stop ambition? 

No, I’ll not fall into evil.

I’ll stop obsessively exercising and training in lethal forms of mixed martial arts and eating right, and sacrifice my hunky, diamond cut battle body that the world might be spared the evil and oppression of my Supreme Merciless Strength Form unleashed.

I’ll sit so hard, so long, so deep into this cushiony chair until the distinction between Me and Chair ceases to exist-much like the rope of the swing and the tree to which it has been tied. 

I’ll resist the terrible power of the Sigma Select Screen Theme with an endless stream of frozen pepperoni beefsteak cheesy crust pizzas, two-liter bottles of Generic Cherry Cola, family packs of chewy chocolate chip cookies, tub after glorious tub of French Onion Dip, and all of this drizzle-drenched in sour cream, nacho cheese, and roast chicken juice-and just the juice. I find roasted chicken to have a rather vulgar texture. But I let nothing go to waste. I have the actual chicken delivered by courier to an abandoned house adorably squatted by a gang of rambunctious stray cats down the block.

(Sidenote: Did you know that you could dip your cookies in French Onion Dip? You’d be shocked at how good this tastes. And then you add in some pancake syrup-ooo wee! That’s good eatin’.)

For the price of Human Freedom . . . is the loss of my Beauty. 

This loss . . . is the only ward against Global Cyborg Wrastler Dictatorship. 

And so I give up my diamond cut battle body . . . gladly.

You’re welcome, People of Earth.

You’re welcome. 

-February 2021

VIDEO GAME REVIEW: SECRET OF MANA (1993)

Director/Designer Koichi Ishii
Producer/Designer/Writer Hiromichi Tanaka
Programmer Nasir Gebelli
Art Designer Hiroo Isono
Music Composed by Hiroki Kikuta
Developer/Publisher Squaresoft


Review by William D. Tucker

Long ago, humanity exploited the magic power of Mana to erect a terrifying flying fortress of unimaginable destructive capability. The Earth, enraged at the exploitation of its lifeblood Mana, sent forth the Mana Beast, an apocalypse monster capable of destroying the Mana Fortress, and therefore humble the ambitions of humankind. This epic battle happened long ago, and has passed largely into legend, myth, and fable. Human beings have settled back down into simple existences mostly using medieval-agrarian levels of technology, save for a few centers of high technology including an evil empire and some pirates with an impressive earth burrowing land cruiser. The Mana Fortress is long gone, destined to live on in rumors of submerged mystery continents and dark schemes in the Emperor's heart . . .

A young boy wanders outside of his village, led along by a ghostly presence. He finds a sword in a stone, which he promptly removes, and becomes the target of an aggressive, outsized bug monster dwelling in the subterranean caverns below his village. The boy defeats the monster, but he is immediately exiled from his village by the community elders for the sword he wields is a repository of great mystical power. The dark forces of this world will attack the boy in order to kill him and take the potent weapon for themselves. Anyone near the kid may also be killed, and so the young boy must leave the village in order to confront the source of evil in this world and free himself from the curse of wielding a heroic sword of legend.

The Earth is filled with animals, plants, and giant insects with unusually high levels of aggression. The implication is that the natural world has become much harsher to keep humanity in check since the war against the Mana Fortress, lest humankind decide to create a new supreme weapon of annihilation.

You, whoever you are, are the player. You control the boy and his two eventual allies, piloting them through a maze-like top-down world of forests, towns, cursed temples, towers filled with Game of Death-style floors filled with opponents of escalating difficulty-all with the goal of gathering a complete set of the mystically empowered heroic weapons of old (which include a whip, a battle-axe, a spear, a set of steel knuckles, and a mighty bow) to keep them out of the hands of the dark forces. You must also collect a set of magic seeds which are tied to different elemental powers. All standard fantasy role playing game stuff, but with a few tweaks.

For one, you cannot actually purchase any of the weapons. They must be earned by overcoming evil forces, and then you must charge them up by killing scores of enemies in battle. Yes, these heroic weapons of yore are charged up by the blood of your foes! The game doesn't quite present it like this. But the reality is that you must kill many, many forest animals and monsters in order to make your weapons more powerful. There's also an experience point system which increases your hit points, your magic points, your various defensive and offensive statistics, but the combat really leans into the notion of these mystically charged, ever transforming weapons. Power, how it should be used, and how it may corrupt those who wield it, is the theme of Secret of Mana.

You eventually take control of three young heroes-a human boy, a human girl, and a sprite of indeterminate gender identity-stand between the world and the world's annihilation. The boy wields a sacred sword of legend. The girl uses healing magics. The sprite casts offensive spells: fireballs, lightning bolts, makes enemy go boom. The fighter, the healer, and the death-ray shooter-a classic trio.

The gameplay consists of nonstop combat with no real puzzles like in a Zelda game, which is somewhat unfortunate. Some puzzles would've livened things up a bit. The combat is surprisingly addictive despite it not always feeling completely under your control. Every time you take a swing with your weapon, you have a recharge period before you can attack at full strength again. As you gain higher levels of weapon proficiency, you can charge your weapon up to deliver a mystically empowered killing strike. The trade-off is that the higher level charge strikes take longer and longer to build up to criticality thus leaving you open to attack. Fortunately, you have your two companions to carry on the fight while you charge up, so you rarely end up feeling overwhelmed as long as you take the time to grind up to a level equal to or above that of your enemies.

An amusingly strident instruction manual exhorts the player to go forth, conquer evil monsters, and to restore balance to the world. It also provides some interesting explanations for why you can throw away most all of the items in your inventory except for your weapons. Your weapons are mystically empowered and capable of transformation into deadlier forms; therefore, they cannot be permitted to fall into the hands of enemies or innocent civilians lest they wreak havoc in the hands of the malicious or untrained. There is also the implied prospect of powerful-perhaps semi-living-weapons corrupting whoever wields them, and this is a bit of lore not obvious within the game itself. It's a nice little bonus that's only in the manual. It got me thinking, "Is this game an elaborate allegory for principled use of weapons in time of necessary armed resistance against overwhelming evil?" Hmmm . . .

Secret of Mana's story isn't quite all that it could have been. The game was originally developed for a cancelled CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo that would've allowed for a much more expansive gaming experience. Once the CD-ROM was scrapped, the developers had to cut large portions of the planned design to fit into the constraints of the regular SNES cartridge. As you get further along in the game, it becomes more and more obvious that a much more elaborate scenario has been hacked down to the minimum: boss enemies are reused; dungeon crawls become simplified and repetitious; the story goes in directions which are not fully elaborated; characterizations are slashed to the minimum-however, it mostly works if you consider that the heroes are children. The game takes place from their perspective, and so not all of the complexities of the world are immediately obvious to them. What is obvious is that the world is in chaos, full of monsters, and endangered by the ambitions of evil would-be rulers. And since the adults have long ago abdicated moral leadership, the children must step up to make things right.

In fact, I rather enjoy the semi-coherent magical realism storytelling of Secret of Mana, which seems culled from various myths and religions. It gives the game the vibe of some half-forgotten, half-remembered myth-cycle only partially set down in writing upon ancient tablets or scrolls or 5D metaphysical holo-cubes or whatever the ancients liked to doodle upon in their idle hours. It reminds me of the endless battle sagas I would compose with my action figures as a kid.

That's not to say Secret of Mana doesn't pack a dramatic punch in a few key scenes. It does, but the game was clearly much more ambitious in its original unconstrained design than what they were actually able to ship back in '93. Many of the themes here explored would achieve greater expression in Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII, and in games from other developers such as Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma. Secret of Mana has a very strong reputation for those of us nostalgic for the SNES, but it doesn't quite live up to such fond memories. Today, it plays like a much more casual kind of game, closer in play-style to Final Fantasy Mystic Quest-which is not an insult coming from me. Mystic Quest is massively enjoyable for me to play through-the low-stress alternative to more demanding JRPGs.

Secret of Mana and Mystic Quest have something else in common: both games are blessed with excellent soundtracks. I revisit these titles as much to hear the music as to experience the gameplay. Secret of Mana's soundtrack ranges from soothing meditative arctic melodies to the manic, coked-out loop that plays when you are hanging out in the underground blacksmith works of the dwarfs. The boss battle themes are killer: the mainline boss fight theme begins with a hectic evocation of overwhelming danger that transforms into a soaring theme of heroism thereby providing a sonic map of the ideal flow of battle: danger met, danger conquered, bask in the glory! The Dark Lich Battle Theme is, I believe, an act of psychological warfare upon the player. My personal favorite might be the quietly unsettling theme that plays late in the game signalling the dawn of an ominous new era-but you'll just have to play the game yourself to get the story on that one.

Visually, Secret of Mana pops. Bright colors, credible designs of houses, temples, stores, subterranean lairs, with the one shortcoming being the noticeable number of empty rooms that serve no purpose other than to be dead ends. This is obviously a sign of the cuts made to the game design once the CD-ROM device was cancelled.

All of the enemy and character designs are charming and distinct from the cutesy chibi mini-figure designs of other JRPGs at the time. The characters are stylized, but somewhat close to human proportions. Chrono Trigger would carry on the character design ethos and some aspects of the enemy design approach to new heights, but it's all basically laid out in this game. The boss monsters are satisfyingly large and intimidating thereby giving you the satisfaction of victory once vanquished. One of the more unusual boss creatures is a mega-slime that grows to nearly screen-filling size as you inflict damage upon it. As mentioned above, the game repeats a number of boss fights with slight variations which is another sign of the game's reduced design ambitions.

In terms of gameplay, my favorite stretches involved the longer crawls wherein you really could get the feeling of controlling three swashbuckling heroes dueling wave after wave of formidable foes. The final dungeon before the end boss fight was satisfyingly demanding, although due to my obsessively grindy play style I blew through it pretty quick. I loved fighting the ninja enemies, and would've thoroughly enjoyed fighting an entire castle filled with those guys. The combat has moments where it really cooks, and I wish there would've been some longer, more challenging battles. The final boss fight did keep me on edge in a way I did not expect.

Secret of Mana is an unfinished game which shouldn't work as well as it does. It's not quite a masterpiece all on its own, but it lays the groundwork for superior games to come from Squaresoft and most likely had an influence on other developers of JRPGs in its day.

So take the sword from the stone, and fight alongside three punk kids to save the world from the ambitions of asshole adults!