Recently, Sara, Brendan, Laughing Mike, Sean and I were all hanging out and experiencing something of a failure of a night. Don't get me wrong, though. It was still fun as hell. While we were there, I started talking to the guys about this web series I had recently watched, partly with Sara. It's called There Will Be Brawl. (Links will be at the bottom of the post.) Basically, There Will Be Brawl is a parody of the Super Smash Bros. world, and so by extension, the Nintendo Universe we all know and love. Now, TWBB can be funny at times, in an absurd sort of way, but it is by no means a funny sort of parody. Instead, the makers of it wanted to take a broken, dark, noir-esque dystopian Mushroom Kingdom, years after a golden age of heroes.
Here's the thing. It sounds a bit silly, I'm sure. And it is silly. The acting is pretty wobbly in a lot of parts, the writing could use a little fine-tuning, and let's face it. At first glance it's really hard to accept Luigi freaking Mario as a hard-bitten PI trying to save a place that's no longer worth saving. But what you find, if you get to watching it, is that it is actually a lot of fun to watch, and it's a very interesting concept, and for me personally, it made me think, and from time to time, it got real emotional response out of me.
I think I know why that is, actually. I didn't want to make this post as a review of TWBB, but in fact I wanted to talk about what I got out of it. These characters from these games are not real. They have never been real people, and they never will be. Yet, for many of us who grew up with their adventures, they are our sort of heroes. Let's take a look at Link and Mario, specifically.
What do these two do? I mean, yeah, jump on Goombas, and smash pots, and get power-ups, but at the core of the characters, what is it they truly do? The answer is, they beat the bad guy, and they save the princess. It's as simple as that. Every single time, no matter how many times it's happened before, they save their princesses. TWBB asks us a question; what happens if the hero doesn't save the princess anymore?
We make jokes about it, of course. We say that sometimes, Mario just gets sick of rescuing Peach over and over and over. Why the hell is she so good at being captured, anyway? In the series, we see what happens to the Mushroom Kingdom when its heroes no longer act heroically. But what about our world, the real world? I begin to think very seriously that if our answer to the question, "what do these heroes do?" was something other than "save the princess," this place would be very different, and far darker indeed.
Throughout TWBB, you keep thinking to yourself, alright, so which character is it that's going to still be like he used to be? Where's the character who's stayed true to themselves after all this? Where's the last hero? You want it, and you expect it to come, and it never does. Luigi is by far the closest thing you get, and while he does decide to act heroically, he seems to beaten and broken at times that it still feels like you just want someone to come and make it all better. I imagine that's what the makers wanted you to feel like the characters had been feeling for years, and I think they succeeded.
That's why TWBB managed to get to me. It challenged not just years of storytelling, and took a different look at some of the most widely recognizable and established stories told in the modern day, but it also challenged the things that were important to me from my very childhood. It challenged, to some degree, my silly ideals.
Now, I realize this post has been awfully serious-face, which is not generally the tone we take here at Zuul Arcade, so to transition back to having a good time and playing games, I've got some neat stuff to show you guys. If any of you read the blog Geekologie, you've probably already seen this, but it's awesome, and it felt like it fit in with what I was talking about.
That's right. It's a Mario and Peach version of Michaelangelo's La Pietà. I happen to think La Pietà is a pretty damned amazing piece of art, personally, so I thought this was incredibly cool. Best part is, this Mario and Peach version is a massive sculpture. I expected it to be tiny. Granted, this is in polystyrene, not marble, but still. How cool is that?
Let's face it, Video games have become their own art form, much like how film making has been for some time. Now, as incredible as the gaming experience can be at times, it's still making a transition from silly frivolity just made for having fun to a full blown art form, but it really is getting there, and for me, that's exciting. The other thing I love is that video games can have such a fantastic visual and aural quality to them, that even after some artist has made something that becomes the video game's visuals and music, it can still inspire other artists to do amazing things based on the originals. Just look at the Video Game Orchestra, and that sculpture there.
From that, I also found this other really cool thing where this artist has been making these very pretty digital paintings of what updated old games could look like. Some of them are fantastic. The Altered Beast one, the Metroid ones, they're just fantastic. I wish I could post all of them, but there are a LOT, so I figured I would post one and then a link to the gallery. The one I picked is because it's got some relevance to some of our people here!
Click the picture for full-sized, by the way. Oh yes, it's for Final Fantasy 6. You have to love that he made the characters look as Amano originally designed them there. Anyway, that's about enough for me. I'm happy to report that it seems like most of us have been playing their games, and are just waiting for a good spot to make a post. Me, I'm still grinding. One of my characters just hit level 9, so I'm almost to where I decided I want to be before I try to take on The Marionette.
Links!
Okay, fine. I know, I made the same joke twice in this post.
-There Will Be Brawl -The series has 10 episodes ranging from 10 minutes to 35.
-TWBB costume photography -The costume photo gallery that alerted me to this thing thing's existence before I ever saw the series. These photos are fantastic.
-Orioto's Gallery -The gallery of video game remakes. There are two pages!
-Mario Sculpture -Geekologie's post about the Mario sculpture. Includes a picture of the artist next to the piece, and a picture of the original Michaelangelo sculpture for comparison.
Kordiana Lewandowskiego -The artist's portfolio. The Geekologie post links to it too, but I thought I would anyway if you want to go straight to the source. The piece, which is called "Game Over," by the way, is easy to find on his site, and includes more pictures, a 360 degree turning image, PLUS a description of how he made the sculpture. It's in Polish, but Google Translator actually does a decent job of translating it for you.
The Video Game Orchestra -Because I mentioned them, and they're awesome.
