I got here through Star Craft. Once I started looking up matches on You Tube, it wasn't long before I met Husky Starcraft, and from there his friends Press Heart To Continue and Rosanna Pansino, not to mention Jesse "OMFG Cata" Cox and Sean "Day Nine" Plott. The thought of these talented, entertaining people writing and starring in their own RPG parody seemed too good to be true.
It is.
Writing is not easy (I know this from experience), but it seems to have been too much to ask: the tone is an Indecisive Parody that sometimes deconstructs genre conventions and sometimes just slaps silly hats on them. The art and voice acting are of respectable quality, despite some Limited Animation, but neither really shine. The plot is so far quite episodic, going for jokes and banter at the expense of any sort of development. The editing is sometimes flabby, making certain shots feel like filler. And the humor devolves almost immediately into the most banal kind of sex comedy. The resulting X Meets Y could be "Drawn Together for fantasy gaming," except that Drawn Together was funny.
There's only been seven episodes. Maybe this will turn out to be Early Installment Weirdness and everything will pick up. (The seventh, to its credit, genuinely made me laugh out loud.) But as I watched the series, I realized that I was watching it solely out of a sense of obligation, the way you do when your friend has labored too hard over something for you to do anything but humor them. And, well, a lot of hard work has gone into this series. I so wanted it to be good. But it's not.
I'm glad that the Polaris staff are experimenting and pushing their boundaries; you learn a lot from success and even more from mistakes. I'm glad that they're learning. But that doesn't mean I want to watch them screw up all over You Tube.
WebAnimation Three gamers walk into a bar...
I got here through Star Craft. Once I started looking up matches on You Tube, it wasn't long before I met Husky Starcraft, and from there his friends Press Heart To Continue and Rosanna Pansino, not to mention Jesse "OMFG Cata" Cox and Sean "Day Nine" Plott. The thought of these talented, entertaining people writing and starring in their own RPG parody seemed too good to be true.
It is.
Writing is not easy (I know this from experience), but it seems to have been too much to ask: the tone is an Indecisive Parody that sometimes deconstructs genre conventions and sometimes just slaps silly hats on them. The art and voice acting are of respectable quality, despite some Limited Animation, but neither really shine. The plot is so far quite episodic, going for jokes and banter at the expense of any sort of development. The editing is sometimes flabby, making certain shots feel like filler. And the humor devolves almost immediately into the most banal kind of sex comedy. The resulting X Meets Y could be "Drawn Together for fantasy gaming," except that Drawn Together was funny.
There's only been seven episodes. Maybe this will turn out to be Early Installment Weirdness and everything will pick up. (The seventh, to its credit, genuinely made me laugh out loud.) But as I watched the series, I realized that I was watching it solely out of a sense of obligation, the way you do when your friend has labored too hard over something for you to do anything but humor them. And, well, a lot of hard work has gone into this series. I so wanted it to be good. But it's not.
I'm glad that the Polaris staff are experimenting and pushing their boundaries; you learn a lot from success and even more from mistakes. I'm glad that they're learning. But that doesn't mean I want to watch them screw up all over You Tube.