Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (film)

It seems like I'm starting out a lot of articles with the phrase "I'm a big fan" lately. Probably because there are a lot of things I grew up with that are being sequelized or remade lately. One of those is one of my all-time favorite animated series, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I'm more of a fan of the 2003 Fox/4Kids series than I am of the 1980s cartoon, but I've watched a good deal of it. I've seen all three of the previous live-action films multiple times, and I loved every second of them. I've read the original comics, I've read the Archie comics, I've seen the 2007 movie that may or may not fit into any of the previously established canon. The only Turtles material I haven't seen is the Super Sentai parody OVA and the recent Nickelodeon series. The former only because I haven't been able to find it, and the latter because I saw how Nickelodeon's revival of one of my other favorite Saturday Morning shows turned out, and I've got enough rage in my life riffing on new episodes of Power Rangers, I don't need to add another once beloved title to my list of hatred.
I know the history of everything Turtles-related, mostly because I would spend long times after school at the local library on the public computers either watching old episodes on 4Kids.tv (Now defunct sadly), or listening to the Turtles Podcast while researching the franchise on Wikipedia and various fan-sites. If it exists, if it's an official part of the Turtles franchise, then I know about it. Maybe not off the top of my head, but I definitely know about it or have known about it at some point. I'm a die-hard fan born and bred with a love of the brothers from the sewers from childhood, and you can bet that I've forgotten more about this franchise than most fans have ever known. That basically sums up everything I'm a fan of, honestly, so I'm going to try and stop making this speech every time something I'm a fan of comes up for review. It's part of how I work, when I'm interested in something, I go through all the behind-the-scenes content I can find until I know as much as anyone who didn't directly work on the project possibly can.
Now that all of that is wrapped up, let's get into the details of the film, shall we?
You'll notice that I put "film" in the title-bar to differentiate from the game of the same name released for Xbox Live and Steam back in 2013 and for PSN in 2014. Like the previous Michael Bay-produced Turtles film, it features a cast who had never been in anything else Turtles-related, some of whom I like and have heard of, others of which I haven't even heard of in passing, and some don't even have Wikipedia pages.
The main complaint I had about the last Turtles film was the lack of accuracy to an previous installment in the franchise. Shredder was split into two characters, one of which was an over-designed mess. The Turtles origin was changed rather absurdly and unnecessarily. However, it was still pretty fun to watch if you could get past those issues.
This film? Well, we've got the Turtle Wagon, Krang, Mikey's rocket-board, The Technodrome, Bebop and Rocksteady, Casey Jones, an actual Shredder suit based on his previous appearances, and plenty of pizza.
As one might be able to tell, this film takes more inspiration from the '80s series than the '03 one, and rather unfortunately, it takes on a lot of the flaws of that series as well. For instance, Shredder doesn't have a whole lot to do in this movie after he gets the ball-rolling on the plot. Splinter also doesn't do much in this film. Tony Shalhoub has one scene as Splinter, and then he's gone. He's the Turtle's father for crying out loud, why didn't he get a few more minutes of screen-time?
Basically par for the course as adapting the old Turtles series goes, except Splinter usually had at least as much screen-time as Shredder did in each episode.
After the events of the last film, the Splinterson brothers do what they normally do. They eat pizza, they do normal things in weird ways so they can get away with them, and Mikey acts like a little kid. The brothers are their lovable selves, and the start of this film contains some much-needed character development.
Meanwhile, April O'Neil (Played by Megan Fox, incredibly well especially compared to her performance in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen I might add) finds out that Baxter Stockman (Tyler Perry) is working to break Shredder out of prison. April tells the brothers about this, and they bust out the Turtle Wagon to intercept The Foot Clan's assault, but despite the best efforts of them and the officers assigned to the security detail, Saki and a pair of doofy criminals, Bebop (Gary Anthony Williams and Rocksteady (Sheamus O'Shaunessy), manage to escape. Shredder by a teleport device, Bebop and Rocksteady by conventional means.
Stockman screws up however, and Saki winds up in another dimension, face-to-face with Krang (Brad Garret) who sells him on an idea of world domination, giving him a powerful mutagen to create super-soldiers with in exchange for bringing together a machine that can bring his command-center and war-base through to Earth, a rolling sphere of death called The Technodrome.
Shredder returns to New York and decides to test the serum out on Bebop and Rocksteady to see what happens, while one of the officers assigned to the transport van, a former street-kid turned cop, Casey Jones (Stephen Amell) begins to hunt them down. Casey apparently went to the "Dirty Harry" school of law-enforcement by way of... Well, by way of Casey Jones as a matter of fact.
April sneaks into Stockman's company, TCRI and captures the enhanced mutagen, but is attacked by The Foot Clan as she escapes the building. Casey Jones, on the first outing of his crusade, takes on The Foot and wins before they regroup on him. The Turtles show up a tiny bit late, but soon enough to save their butts.
Naturally, Casey is taken aback by the gigantic mutant turtle creatures, but things get straightened out, and they wind up teaming up in the end, but thanks to The Foot, the mutagen winds up in the hands of the police.
Back in the base, Donny figures out from a sample of the serum that they can turn mutants human. The point of this is somewhat lost, since they went with the original version of Splinter instead of the eighties version, where he's a humanoid rat and not a human that got turned into a rat.
Leo tells him to sit on this info, but Mikey overhears it and tells Raph. Yeah, it doesn't really work to keep secrets when you live with five people in an enclosed space like that.
Raph confronts Leo, who benches him over his attitude and Mikey basically because Mikey is immature and undisciplined. Leo takes Donny on a mission to retrieve one of the things that will open the portal for The Technodrome, but The Foot gets to it ahead of them.
Meanwhile, Raph, Mikey, Vern (Will Arnett) April and Casey break into the NYPD headquarters to retrieve the purple ooze, but because The Foot shows up, the police find out about The Turtles and April and Casey are captured by the police, and charged with stealing the serum from TCRI.
Thanks to Vern though, the police find out how TCRI doctored footage to make it look like April stole the serum rather than them illegally experimenting on humans.
The Turtles manage to track Bebop and Rocksteady to Brazil, and what ensues is one of the most awesome action scenes in Turtles history. It's freaking cool, and it's one of the best things about an already freaking cool movie.
Despite their best damn efforts, the brothers fail to wrest the last of the keys to the portal away from Bebop and Rocksteady.
Back in New York, The Technodrome comes through the portal, Shredder is betrayed by Krang and stored away in a freeze-dried prison with the rest of the overgrown utrom's rogues gallery.
Vern, Casey, and April set up a meeting between the NYPD and the Turtles. The NYPD agrees to aid the brothers, and they take down Krang, while Casey takes down Bebop and Rocksteady.
The Turtles are crowned heroes in secret, Bebop and Rocksteady are captured, and everything turns out alright in the end.
All in all, this is a god-damn Turtles movie. The first one was kinda iffy, but there's no denying that we got ourselves a freaking Turtles movie this time around. Sequels are rarely better than the originals, and remakes rarer so. This is a remake, and a sequel to that remake, and it's better in every way. Hell, I didn't even mind the previous movie, but this was freaking awesome. Megan Fox shows off talents you probably didn't know she had. Stephen Amell freaking kills it as Casey Jones, showing that he can do more than just impersonate Christian Bale and beat up Cody Rhodes.
Speaking of wrestling, actor and voice-actor Gary Anthony Williams and professional wrestler Sheamus O'Shaunessy are perfect as Bebop and Rocksteady respectively. At least we now know that there was a good reason for Sheamus's stupid haircut when he came back to WWE last year, if not a good reason for his ill-advised heel-turn.
Then there's Tyler Perry, who puts on his best performance in years. Yes, they probably could have gone back for a couple more takes on some of his lines as Stockman, but he hams it up exactly the way I would expect Baxter Stockman to do. Overdramatic comparisons, self-aggrandizing dialogue said like it's a given, he's practically M. Bison in this regard, but that doesn't stop the character from being a coward who grovels at Shredder's feet at the first sign of a threat. This is a god-damn Turtles movie.
All in all, while there are a small handful of issues, the aforementioned sub-par takes of a few of Tyler Perry's lines, some of the odd and downright uninspired choices of licensed music, and the over-produced boy-band version of the classic Turtles theme-song (It's literally performed by a boy-band called CD9. Complete with auto-tune and a bad impression of N*Sync on the chorus) but hell, this is a god-damn Turtles movie. And I love Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles like practically nothing else.
In the end, I give Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows a 10.0*.

Before I go for the week, there are a few things I would like to update you guys on. First off, I'm sorry this review took until Wednesday to publish, a combination of my schedule, a few unforeseen events, the new web-show I'm involved with through Kisareth Studios, and me outright forgetting to finish this review on Sunday because I was so damn busy led to me pushing off publication until today. I'm deeply sorry for this little schedule-slip, and I will do my damnedest to make sure I never do this again. Ever. I'm going to try to have reviews scheduled at least two weeks in advance from here on out so that they never miss their Sunday publication date, and thus will be providing you guys with new content on a weekly basis pretty much regardless of what's going on with me behind the scenes.
In other news, I've finally created a Patreon for the site. It's something I've wanted to do for the last several years, but for one reason or another I was unable to. For those of you interested in contributing to it, here's the link.
That wraps it up for the updates this week, I'll see you next week! I haven't pegged it down yet, but I'm thinking of reviewing something Marvel-related.

Image from impawards.com

Fire Emblem Awakening: First impressions.

Fire Emblem Awakening is a strategy RPG that came out last year for the Nintendo 3DS, and it's one of the few games I've bought for full price around the time it came out. So far it has not been a disappointment. The story revolves around an amnesiac being found by the prince, his bodyguard, and his sister while on patrol, and them proceeding to fight undead soldiers across the country, in addition to defending villages from the undead as well as foreign raiders. I've been playing on Hard, with Classic turned on. I set out with the condition that I had to finish the game without losing a single character in battle, and aside from one, I've made good on that.

During avatar creation I didn't change a whole lot aside from the hair, which I made sorta darkish brown. That was partially due to the large and small models looking a little too unnatural. Then there's the voices. I picked the middle one because it sounded the most natural, and least forced. In case you were wondering, I created a male avatar named "GalanDun" because every avatar I create is named GalanDun and I like to think that his last name is "Hammermor" just to make my player-insertion complete...

I wound up turning off voices anyways, because in the regular (non anime) cut-scenes, the input of random reactions, sounds and words tended to distract me from the impact and wording of the dialogue. One example was when the characters were talking solemnly after a battle, and the random interjections was distracting me so much I proceeded to shut off the in-game voices (But not the FMV voices) entirely. In a game like this, they should have taken a little longer and at least recorded the voice actors narrating the lines, rather than just having a small pool of random words and sounds. Even a few more, less intrusive phrases and sounds would have sufficed. Unfortunately, that also turns off the pre-kill and post-kill taunts, which I liked. Personally I thing it's a small price to pay for the dialogue not being interrupted by random words and grunts. 

I like how FEA has an option to see your opponents attack ranges, it's just a shame that they don't let you keep it on between battles. 

This being my first Fire Emblem game, I have nothing to compare it to outside of Growlanser and Final Fantasy Tactics. I'm not sure I like the weapon degradation system, but it does add a certain level of extra interesting tactics to it all, and personally I like tactical anything. Keeps you on your toes, know what I mean?

Something else to mention is the combat, and how during combat it lets you switch between a dynamic camera, a first person view, and a side-view. Personally I really like the dynamic camera. The game also lets you slow down, pause, and speed up the action. I like to combine fast-motion with slow-motion during combat myself. It's interesting the play with and it helps liven up the combat if you ever get bored of it.

Now, the music is something I've left for last here. I like the music. I really like it. It's some good stuff to listen to, but the thing is there's not a whole lot of it. It gets real repetitive real fast. Something I noticed was that it sounds a lot like the music from Zelda. I like the music from Zelda, but since there's so little variety I just popped in The Lord of the Rings soundtrack and cranked down the volume. This is where I'm going to criticize something about the 3DS. I know that the 3DS lets you play music from the music player, but not letting you play custom music in-game means I need to crank up the volume, pause my MP3 player, and remove my headset in quick succession when the anime cut-scenes start. That's a small complaint, but if they'd had more, better music, possibly akin to that of The World Ends With You or one of the Sonic The Hedgehog games I wouldn't have a problem with it.

You can pair units up in battle for many benefits. The more two units are paired up in battle the better they work together, and the better their relationship gets. You can use this to ship your preferred couples together, and I was immediately smitten with Lissa, the younger sister of Chrom. By "Me" I mean my in-game avatar, but she is sort of what I would call "My type." Kind of goofy, and she seems like a person I'd actually like to spend time with. So I improved GalanDun's relationship with her until he proposed.

It's funny that people were raging about the lack of homosexual relationships in Tomodachi Life when there's more than enough homo-eroticism in this game to cover that and more. Seriously. Not kidding. At all.
You can press X to see the maximum range of all your enemies attacks, and I find that heavily invaluable. Unfortunately, you still have to select each enemy to see their individual range. That's kind of petty of me though.
After a while I'd managed to get two of my characters up to maximum level and I upgraded them to the next class. Personally, I'd say you should wait until they hit level 20 (The max) and upgrade them right then, because otherwise you'd miss out on a lot of XP. Since gold is in high abundance if you spend it right, you should be able to upgrade most of your max-leveled characters quickly.
Now, I have something to talk about with the pairing system. You can always pair up any two units to improve their relationship and to increase your ability to cut down more enemies. Although some of them can't have their relationship improved, and it seems fairly arbitrary. I was pairing Chrom up with a high-level Pegasus knight to try and improve his relationship with her until they got married, and I found out I was wasting my time a few hours later, mainly because they work so well together in battle. That just sucks, and there's no real reason why a lot of them can't be paired. I mean, Chrom and his sister is creepy but what's wrong with pairing him with the merchant girl that certainly seems his type? Or the overly serious veteran of the Pegasus Knights who's even more his type? Anyways, I decided to marry her to Stahl since he seems like a nice enough guy.
I haven't played any of the DLC yet since I haven't bought any so far.

So. onto the story. Spoilers inbound, be prepared to skip this review if you haven't finished the game yet, you know the drill.

So anyways, it's started out kinda strange. The intro seems to have absolutely no connection to the game as a whole outside featuring GalanDun and Chrom, the other main character. I have a feeling that the events of that opening are going to have some kind of relevance later on, but who knows? I don't have much in the way of plot criticisms other than one I will get to in a moment. When Marth shows up for the first time it's to defend Chrom and the party from a random zombie that was ambushing them, but his presence wasn't exactly necessary considering that I'd just wiped the field of an entire squad of those things a few minutes prior. I've been going out of my way to recruit every character I can, and while Donny is apparently supposed to be one of the most powerful characters in the game, he's hard to level up without leaving him open to death, and during his paralogue to recruit him I lost Sully. Not exactly an uneven trade-off, but I was hoping to pair her up with the French bowman who was so smitten with her. At that point in time though, I was almost done and I had two different horseback units that were better than her, so I just went on with the game because I was tired and I didn't want to have to replay the mission ten more times just to save one worthless character that was honestly a liability in combat. In one mission, where you have to defend the Exalt, there's a somewhat unreasonable number of enemy forces you have to defeat, and that chapter alone took me about ten tries to get right. It was an XP goldmine though, so I'm not really complaining, more like giving a synopsis. After a while my brain clicked with the specific system Fire Emblem Awakening has, which is a lot more advanced then the one from Growlanser 2. The plot so far is interesting, but there are a couple of things I need to bring up. Right before that mission where you defend the exalt, you run into Marth again. His mask gets cut off, and it's revealed that he's a girl. The strange thing is that her voice actress seems to have used a deeper voice for the female Marth than she did for when she was disguised. That just strikes me as kind of odd. Later on in the game, after Chrom's older sister was kidnapped by an enemy army, we've rounded up our allies and a large party of badass hard-hitting killers from both sides of the border. Mercenaries that switched sides, random people who we picked up from around the country who can destroy things, etc, etc. So we go on and destroy the enemy army and recruit two more people into our elite team of special-forces shepherds. AND THEN!

After stopping the mad king, who kidnapped the exalt in the first place from, in order of occurrence, assassinating and executing her, his pet necromancer raises about five over-powered zombie archers from the field and took out three of my allied Pegasus Knights in a total of three hits. Okay, that's reaching, but not too hard to believe since archers do get advantage over flying units. But then there was that one little thing. The thing that made me close the 3DS, sit back in my chair, and say aloud "Nintendo, you bastards."

You see, the game give you two options. Hand the Mad King a priceless artifact of untold power, or let the one person keeping the country from falling into chaos die. And at this point I had three thoughts. One is that he's probably going to kill her anyways, since he is "The Mad King." 

Two, is that THEY. ARE. ARCHERS!

Even if their luck is cranked up to maximum, they still can't hit if you're in a square adjacent to them. At this point in time all of the characters I'd be hitting them with could wipe them out in a single hit. I have enough units to take all of them out, and I could easily gank the mad king and his scantily-clad necromancer girlfriend without breaking a sweat immediately after rescuing the exalt.

Third thought: WHERE THE HELL IS MARTH!?

I'm serious, she's been here to keep the characters from being killed three or four separate times in the past, so either she's gonna step in and save the day no matter what, or she's gonna wind up showing up late for one of them.

So that's where I stopped, sat down, and decided to write my first impressions up. It's the 22nd, and I started this on the 21st. This is actually the second article I've written in a two day period, because contrary to the usual, I didn't have a lot to do last Saturday.
It's now the 24th, and I selected not to sacrifice Emm, so Chrom offered the Fire Emblem to Gangrel, but Emm decided to sacrifice herself so that Chrom wouldn't try to save her. Guess where Marth was? She was late. It's heavily implied that she's a time-traveler so why would you EVER be late for anything?! So I decided to save to an empty slot and restart the chapter to see what happened when I chose to not offer the Fire Emblem to Gangrel. I figured that since choosing not to let Emm die killed her, I figured that choosing to sacrifice her might have her live, right?
Wrong. There's a different exchange between GalanDun and Chrom, and then Chrom decides to do exactly what he did when I chose the other option! I think Nintendo missed the whole "Role-playing" part of the role-playing game. Marth shows up late, as in the other option, and the same anime FMV plays out as before. But funny thing, I found that even though I watched it three times trying to figure out how to save her, the cutscene only got sadder.
Afterwards, I set up my units for the next chapter, and I have to say that the music in it was so tremendously sad. The whole chapter was sad. There was a conversation between the general and one of his men, about how he was having qualms about the rightfulness of fighting us, about how he had no will to continue risking his life in the service of a king that cared naught for their lives. The general said that he and anyone else with doubts could leave, and that he would take the burden of punishment. The soldier said that he'd fight for his commander before his king, and it was really touching. Then at the very end, when I killed the general his last words were a plea to spare his men now that he was dead. And I burst into tears at that, because I'd killed every single member of his army on my way to him. Throughout that entire chapter, I felt worse and worse throughout. At the very end, I felt like a terrible person. The very enemies that I'd taken glee in killing throughout the entire last fifteen hours of gameplay, I felt sorry for. They had families and friends, and hopes and dreams and lives and loves and hates and imaginations. They were people, unique people. And I ended their lives.

So, I've just realized this is really bloody long and I should probably get around to stopping. I'll see you next week with either Mockingjay or another Pirates of the Caribbean review. Or possibly another double feature like I had last week depending on what I've got bouncing in my head. See you around.

Here's part 2 of the review.