Quarantine Control #91: Inari Time

DC Staff | December 30, 2021 | Animation, Features, Television, Videogames | No Comments

We’ve reached the end of 2021, and COVID-19 is sadly still around. Consider the current situation, where cases are higher than they’ve ever been in countries like the United States with the glorious combination of the villainously-named Omicron variant and people determined to meet up with their family members for the holidays after being forced to skip it in 2020. For as bad as things are, they’re not quite as apocalyptic because of the vaccinations and boosters that now exist. The vaccination rate could be higher, sure, but it’s part of the reason why the hospitalization rate has remained lower than expected, particularly in urban areas. But this has the added effect of making it feel like this virus will be here forever, which is sadly very possible.

Geoffrey Barnes

The Wheel of Time: Season 1
Source: Amazon Prime Video
Episodes: 8

Amazon had a little problem. The tentpole The Lord of the Rings series (a prequel to the original trilogy and The Hobbit, which I recently found out) they’ve put a ridiculous amount of money into isn’t set to begin until September. They needed something similar to hold off subscribers looking for a new fantasy show to watch until then. Fortunately for them, they had another adaptation of a well-known (though not to Tolkien levels) novel series to adapt, one that hasn’t been attempted before due to the daunting task that needed to be undertaken: The Wheel of Time. The idea here was a good one, but it would do the series much good if it felt less like a blatantly obvious hold-off for their bigger fantasy series even if that’s not the intention.

The Wheel of Time series starts off by focusing on a series of villagers living a relatively idyllic life in a secluded location known as the Two Villages. They’re eventually interrupted by the arrival of the radiant Moiraine (Rosamund Pike), a member of a powerful organization of women known as the Aes Sedai, and her accompanying Warder Lan Mandragoran (Daniel Henny). Both suspect that one among the villagers is the reincarnation of the Dragon, a powerful channeler who could mend or destroy the world. It doesn’t take long for Trollocs to attack and destroy the village in service of the Dark One, a mysterious and mischievous figure also searching for the Dragon. Thus begins Moiraine’s quest with four of the surviving villagers to determine which among them is the Dragon while protecting them from the Dark One’s influence.

This is all a very generic setup for a fantasy series, but there’s a justifiable reason for this. The series is an adaptation of the first book in a novel series that started over 30 years ago, a time when stories like these weren’t quite as generic. It’s also very obvious as to who the Dragon is upon taking a good look at all the main characters and their actions. Despite this, the journey of the heroes and their character interactions are fun to watch, exacerbated when trust issues arise among the group and with Moiraine, who happened to arrive at the same time as the demonic force she vowed to protect them from.

The storytelling could use work despite that. The series’ showrunners were either determined to get through the first novel (of fourteen) within eight episodes that range from 54 to 62 minutes in length, or were mandated to do so by the Prime Video execs. This was a novel that’s around 700 pages or more depending on the edition. The series moves at a breakneck pace as a result, which can make it difficult to keep up with key details. I had to, for instance, look up the purpose of the Aes Sedai, how their magic works, and the true purpose of the Dragon in my free time after the adaptation barely elaborated on them. Several subsequent books are even longer, so hopefully the production team figures out a good solution to manage the pacing better, either by making longer episodes or having more of them per season. This kind of adaptation could, however, work for future novels later in the series that were criticized for padding.

The overall direction could also use work, alongside the fight choreography and cinematography. Too many battles relied on sped-up footage, which created a jarring look compared to when characters moved and fought normally. The acting is largely okay outside of Pike, who outshines everyone, but I’m confident that will improve when the younger actors become more acclimated to their roles. This was already happening with Josha Stradowski as Rand by the final episode, for example.

Amazon reportedly spent quite a bit of cash on this series, though a fraction of what they’ve pumped into LOTR. The budget doesn’t show in the series, presumably due to being spent on location filming in Prague and the solid outfit design. Since the second season that started filming before the first season aired will have a bigger budget, the series will hopefully be reflective of that the next time around, though they’ll need more than money for improved directing and cinematography. Amazon’s advertising efforts will ideally prevent the series from being overshadowed by their own LOTR, and also Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon.

Joseph Daniels

I hope everyone’s holidays were pretty good. I think we were hoping they’d be normal this year to make up for last year, but alas, COVID is still around. I wish I could issue a challenge to COVID deniers and tell them that if they really want to prove COVID is a huge conspiracy to make them suffer – have you noticed that it’s always conspiracy theorists who think that everything negative the government does is always targeted at them specifically? – then all they need to do is follow the government’s guidelines for four weeks. Every single person, every single guideline. Give it enough time for COVID to die off and then we can finally go back to normal and the COVID deniers can use whatever copium they want to explain away why we were right and they were wrong. It won’t matter anymore since we can finally return to normal.

During the holidays, I played Parasite Eve in order to try to make it a continuing tradition for me. Last year, I tried a build focused on item capacity. The game doesn’t give Aya a lot of slots to do anything with, and when she starts receiving a ton of Junk on day two, it can be tempting to increase her ability to carry things in order to keep from having to throw things away. The treasure crates along the way can hold anything you want, though, and storing an extra Junk in each of the ones in Central Park would help because then you could come back on Day 5 when Aya can carry more stuff and retrieve it all.

Or, Aya could return to the Precinct whenever her inventory is almost full and hand over all the Junk, but it takes a lot of grinding to get anything worthwhile from that. I’ve never followed it through to its conclusion, all I’ve ever handed over in any of my playthroughs was probably twenty to thirty Junk in total, per game.

This time around, I chose to build Aya around the Active Time bar, speeding her up immensely. In games like this, adding extra speed to her means she can shoot faster and since many enemies can have their attacks delayed by this, it makes a lot of sense. Bosses can’t be put into animation lock like this, even though Aya can, so it feels like the game doesn’t play completely fair, but I guess making bosses able to be cheesed like that would take away from the intended difficulty of the game.

Most of my bonus points went into Active Time and a few went into the strength of her bullets, so Aya was a lot more deadly this time around. One of the best things you can do with a speed based battle system is to speed up your characters. The faster they go, the more damage they can do before you need to think about healing them. In Antiquia Lost, I lucked out near the beginning and was able to feed a ton of Speed and Attack boosts to the main character, meaning he was taking several turns before anyone else could take even one. It made most of the game easy, but it seems this is how I’m supposed to grind for the final trophy challenges anyway. At this point, I have one arena boss left and they’re still able to defeat even my speed demon. Still, the rest of the game turned to cheese after adding hundreds of points of Speed to the main character.

Anyway, it might sound like I only gamed this week, but I did not.

Inari Kon Kon (2014)
Source: Funimation
Episodes: 10 (+ OVA on BluRay)

I don’t watch much magical girl anime, but I can’t help but wonder if this is supposed to be a kind of parody of the genre. The main character, a girl named Inari who is tired of lacking the confidence of her peers and hopelessly pining over a boy she knows, finds herself in a position where a fox spirit owes her a favour, so she accidentally asks to be turned into one of her more outgoing classmates.

This helps her not.

When she realizes that the change has to come from within, the fox spirit modifies the gift by giving Inari a bit of her own power and now Inari can shapeshift, but only between human bodies. If you were coming into this thinking there were going to be fox transformations, kind of like A Whisker Away‘s cat transformations, I would definitely advise you look elsewhere.

In order to activate the change, Inari comes up with a magical girl style incantation and transformation sequence. Fortunately, even though she learned the limits of what transformation magic can do for her in episode one, she finds more practical uses of it in subsequent episodes, when she needs to be smaller or a person in authority, and so on. It’s like when Michiru starts to use her tanuki form as a utility to help her rather than a liability holding her back, about halfway through BNA: Brand New Animal.

One of the things I’ve noticed about Inari Kon Kon is that it uses the increasingly common trope of “Isn’t it funny that this thousand year old god is so into video games?” I swear, if Star Trek style Holodecks become a thing, one of the first things that happens will be that the trope will change to “Isn’t it funny that this thousand year old god is so into Holodecks?” I think it’s just the march of progress. Not every god has to sit around on a throne wishing for their so-called better days from a millennium ago. Many gods probably like to see what ingenuity humans can come up with, and gaming isn’t just for the young. You can be thousands of years old and still enjoy a game like Final Fantasy XIV, for example.

That said, the game of choice for Uka-no-Mitama-no-Kami seems to be dating sims, which is anime shorthand for “Wow, isn’t this character just a sad, lonely loser?”

Anyway, the series is supposed to be a romantic comedy, but I don’t feel like it’s as over the top as I expect from the genre. Either that or I haven’t watched enough of them. This feels a little less intense than Toradora was, making it a nice and cozy little show.

Anyway, I hope 2022 is a better year for all of us, but I think that’ll depend on the COVID deniers.

This has been a wild year, in more bad ways than good. It’s perhaps more of a surprise that Quarantine Control is still going and remains necessary for us after all this time, and is somehow nearing its second anniversary. By now, though, it’s time to accept that the series will continue throughout 2022 as well. Happy New Year, and try to make the upcoming year the best you can on a personal level, while all indications suggest it might be miserable otherwise.

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