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chibivesicle · 1 year

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Trigun Stampede - Episode 9 Millions Knives - ‘Cause Knives needs awkward backstory as well

This week’s episode decides to compress things even further by making part of the flashback a shared one for both Vash and Knives. Stampede is leaning in hard to the hyper intelligent virtuoso trope for Knives with him playing a large piano that has inverted key colors.

His hairstyle and clothing indicate that this is the continuation of the flashback that Vash started in episode eight but we are getting it from his point of view. As he plays he thinks back to his childhood where Vash joins him at the piano. Vash seems to be really enjoying it, but young Nai is not thrilled.

Honestly, could he have been even more grumpy when he was a kid? I get that they are different individuals and have different temperaments but this version from Studio Orange makes the contrast even greater than in the manga. They do play together, but since we don’t get to see Nai’s expression with the camera angle from behind can we tell if he actually is enjoying it as much as Vash? In all of their interactions, it seems like Nai simply tolerates Vash’s existence - like he’d be fine without a twin brother.

The flashback in a flashback returns to the first one and a much younger version of Conrad enters telling Knives that he got something for him.

This is a completely new version of Conrad as his original design was always older and bald in the manga. An alarm sounds and they end up moving to the large bay with rows and rows and rows of plants. Knives is visibly angry as he asks what is going on. Conrad calmly replies that they’ve hit their production limit.

As was the case in Trigun Maximum, they force the plants through their ‘last run’ where they overdrive them to death. However, unlike the manga, there has been no discussion on the physiological changes that indicate plant aging with their hair turning black yet. Knives is not happy and a weird black ash floats through the air as Conrad apologizes to Knives on the behalf of all humanity.

And it is perfect timing as the plant whisperer, Vash has appeared. Knives takes this as his opportunity to prove to Vash that he’s right in regard to everything (I guess based on his immediate need to boss Vash around).

More humans show up and try to get Knives to leave which is just a weird set up. They said he wasn’t supposed to be there, Vash somehow just strolled into their crashed ship. You aren’t doing a good job of controlling access copy paste humans who see plants as tools. Conrad just awkwardly stands there telling them to not take Knives away.

What is this entire situation? I’m not confused but it seems so forced. So forced because we need to create tension between passive Vash and aggressive Knives.

With the literal interpretation of his name, he creates claws to kill a bunch of the copy paste men while Conrad and Vash watch. Vash asks Nai to stop and he replies no one has called him that in a long time. Is five years really that long of a time though?

Why is Vash standing there? Murder happened and he’s politely asking Nai to stop. This allows for the underwhelming reveal that Nai has rebranded himself as Millions Knives. He is the self appointed leader and only independently associated plant. Wow, that’s some interesting thought there Knives but how do we know if you are honestly the envoy for all the plants or you are simply stating this without support.

We have heard no input from the plants at this point and lacking that information, I’m going to state that this younger version of Knives decided he’s the plants autocratic leader acting on ‘behalf’ of them.

Vash innocently asks why Knives had to kill people and finally gets more emotional when he reminds Knives that Rem sacrificed herself to save them.

Knives then reveals that Rem messed up his original plans - he’d intended to destroy all of the ships with humans and only save the ships that had plants . . . however, I’m sure he told himself the sacrifices of the plants on the human ships was a necessary sacrifice for the greater good of plantdom.

So Knives solution is to create a paradise for Vash and himself and the rest of the plants stuck in their containers?

Vash sort of argues back with a fact that Rem told them that plants can’t live outside of the plants and without a place to move their energy to without self-destructing. Knives counters that Vash bought into ‘that’ so he thinks otherwise as a free ranging independent plant. We don’t know enough about these plants in Stampede to know if that is a lie that Rem told them or the truth. In the manga it is a fact that the regular plants can’t survive without being connected to something as shown through the awkward interaction with the plants that fell out of Knives’ ark and needed human assistance to ‘plug’ back into the grid to prevent them from dying outright.

Either way, Vash continues to passively stand there as Knives explains his agenda to free their brethren and use his power as a free plant. Before proceeding to kill a bunch more copy paste guys with his very Wolverine inspired claws. He wants nothing more for Vash to be his partner in human murder and plant liberation, but Knives really needs to work on his power of persuasion. Seriously dude, you can’t just tell someone what to do when they are your equal.

He takes a small gun from one of the men he killed and prefaces it in a rather religious tone stating that it is the weapon of a Sinner and it is evil. Certainly, loaded Christian-ish language but again simple external dressing as far as wel can tell at the moment in this version of Trigun.

We can all see where this is going . . . since Vash won’t kill humans up close and personal like Knives, he’s going to give the gun to him because even someone as weak and docile as Vash can fire a gun. And to add to it, he has to insult Vash calling him a human-lover. And with our perfect timing, Luida shows up to tell Vash that she’s here to take him home.

Confirmed, in this version she is not a middle-aged leader of the humans who haven’t fallen and could put all of the men on the surface in their place. She’s Rem 2.0! There is no need for strong female characters here. Knives immediately decides that what Vash needs to do is to kill her. He looks down at the firearm in horror.

We know that Vash can’t shoot her. Knives you need to work harder at winning the hearts of others. He takes the gun for Vash, gaslights him to the core stating he has to do everything for his brother and approaches Luida to kill her. Vash finally snaps and tackles him. We finally get some honest Vash emotions and guilt. He confesses that he always stood behind Rem and she was the one who always protected him, but he lost her in the end. He decides that Nai isn’t going to take anyone else away from him, but gets tossed off to the side either way.

Knives then calls Luida as witch before declaring his question of how many times you will steal him from me? Wow - got a weird mother complex much Knives?

Any woman who cares for Vash is the same person and you have to fight her influence? Does this imply there were more ladies besides Rem and Luida? What is going on with this characterization of Knives?

Anyhoo, as Knives tries to choke Luida, Vash becomes upset yelling for him to start before he activates his angel arm power - which is a black hole?

And soon as this happened, everyone knew what would happen next. Knives is gonna have to cut off that left arm. . . .

Knives calls him a fool, Conrad hesitantly asks if it is a gate and it starts to suck in everything around it. As totally expected, Knives quickly cuts off the arm which gets sucked into the black hole before it eats itself eliminating the danger.

Luida tries to help him as Knives approaches not wanting to have him touched by her. But shockingly, it is Vash who pulls the gun on Knives. And we get our first serious look from Vash!

Knives has no choice but to back off and he leaves with Conrad declaring that in a century or so, he’ll create his world for the plants. Luida screams over his passed out body as the flashback fades to the present where Vash is looking at his prosthetic arm. Brad comes in and gives him grief about always having to repair the arm.

Of course Vash can’t help but note that Brad has never changed all these years, well other than his obvious aging. Luida welcomes him back home as he asks about his friends who are all ‘thrilled’ to see him. Though Wolfwood tries to pretend like they aren’t friends. While chewing on a cigarette.

Vash is relieved and excited as it reveals that of course the ship was hiding in the sandstorm as Zazie’s insects zero in on their location! Confirmed - no puppet master arc with rampant civilian deaths to be replaced by puppets that fall apart in Vash’s arms.

I’m also disappointed that this avoids the division between those on the uncrashed ship and those on the surface. The anime and manga tackled it differently but both highlighted the fact that those on the surface were seen as brutish, unrefined, less civilized than those on the ship - by those on the ship. This entire power dynamic/bias is gone for the moment.

Meryl asks if plants are powering the ship and Luida takes her and Roberto to the large internal garden. The visual looks very nice and they are excited to see such greenery. But the part that then kills me is the fact that Meryl - doesn’t know what plants are - as in the photosynthetic kind!!!

Why does a straight A student who graduated university not know about plants? Many other aspects of technology and human knowledge are known by people on the planet but humanity has collectively forgotten about - plants?

Whaaaatttt??? Okay, this is the point where my day job really makes me wonder what on earth Studio Orange’s writers were (or weren’t) thinking. In the original manga, there are plants on the planet that have been cultivated by very hard working humans. It is difficult, but the entire Little Arcadia arc was about how a part of a geoplant = part of a plant that helped to terraform, had ‘leaked’ out into the environment and was being carefully cultivated for farming and a green space. Therefore, this entire aspect of things is no longer a part of the science. This causes a huge problem in the sci fi aspect of Stampede. We know that plants help to capture potable water. They produce electricity. They create nutrients for agriculture.

A common item found in all versions of Trigun is alcohol. You need grains to brew beer, distill spirits and the like. Stampede is telling us that all of that booze we saw in the beginning is produced by something other than grains? On a large enough scale that you can bottle it, and consume it? I could see that the production of it would have been difficult in the original series, but we have pancakes, pizza, donuts, coffee, tea and all of these common food items implying that there is some version of the agricultural industrial complex in the Trigun world but in Stampede - we don’t have agriculture? This is about as bad as the ship that crashed, didn’t have a plant, had windmills and NO solar panels to use on less windy days! The science in this sci fi series is killing me. As soon as you think about it for more than five seconds your brain goes -ack- at this poor writing. I know the mechanics of many things in Trigun Maximum are hand wavy at best but at least it kept it consistent.

Luida is there to tell Roberto that they are using plants to power the garden but by having regular plants there, they are able to lessen the burden on the plants - not sure how that works since if anyone has ever worked with plants in a growth chamber or greenhouse the amount of energy that goes into it is massive.

You need your swamp coolers, shade cloth, LED or high powered lights, temperature controller, pest control and what about the pollinators for those plants? Are they all self-compatible? I’m falling down my own rabbit hole of my own making over this aspect of the episode. Where is the greenhouse staff? Who is taking care of them?

Okay, I’m taking a step back from my legitimate day job concerns with this and moving onto the scene I predicted from either my episode one or two review. The famous ‘sempai noticed me!’

Roberto tries to smoke and Luida tells him not to which results in his request of Meryl.

That’s right, he’s no longer calling her newbie, she’s now Meryl, but she still needs to do something for him as the junior colleague. She first replies before realizing it, excitedly runs up to him and asks if he indeed called her by her name. Entire plot trope status - achieved.

The entire interaction plays out where he denies it, she presses him and Luida just smiles like “Oh what a genuine interaction.”

While they are in the garden dome, we see Wolfwood sulking in a corner asking Vash what he’s going to do about Knives. Noting that he likely, can’t just make up with him. Vash insists he’ll save anyone and Wolfwood parries back that he can’t do that and he will have to make a choice.

Vash is more intent to not kill - adding he’ll never do it again. This implies that there was an incident where he did end up killing. Our non-July-July incident of the past 150 years? What else happened - since so far we don’t have anything to go on for Vash’s own past mistakes. Interestingly, since Brad is now older and wiser, he’s able to shut Wolfwood down immediately, but not after trying to connect with him stating that he was similar in his own youth. Wolfwood tries to argue that the old man is wrong, but Brad simply states that Vash is tough if Wolfwood would simply watch him over time.

Luida meekly stumbles into the room to inform them that Worms busted in and kidnapped Meryl and Roberto. Her emotions are so off in this entire scene, I get that she’s older but she didn’t run to them or use a phone to call them. Instead, she leads them back to the dome and Wolfwood is able to state that Zazie the Beast is the one who took them.

They way up in another generic looking room as Zazie welcomes them to July, which is the crashed plant carrying ship. Meryl asks if they’d met before and Zazie replies not in the current form.

Roberto asks if Zazie is there on behalf of Knives but instead states they are trying to determine which side to work with.

Roberto then shoots Zazie, who disperses into individual worms before reforming their body on the other side explaining it is a conduit. Therefore, unlike the original where Zazie used a worm to control an individual human body, which could be shot and killed and then move their consciousness to another human body, it seems that Zazie is just a worm-llusion of sorts. This entire interaction is Zazie the Beast as our new info dump character. It this version it is Zazie who tells Roberto and Meryl how humans destroyed the Earth and therefore left it in search of new places to live. The worms are not happy since they see this as their own planet. Meryl doubts Zazie but I’m now concerned about her basic education . . . previous versions of Trigun had much more well educated people despite all of the challenges that they had to overcome.

While Zazie info dumps, Vash and Wolfwood are making their way to July via blue ostrich. Hopefully, the assistance from ship three made it easy for them to reach that point?

Meryl asks what the collected red plants are for, Conrad says they don’t need to know while Zazie asks who the planet is for? And ends.

The map showed them in the ship located over the sand ocean so they are getting closer to July. We can assume that they are back on more normal land, and heading to July.

This does sort of guarantee that all road lead to July, which Vash may blow up with - his still remaining right arm?

Basic thoughts on this episode.

1.) Everything continues to be completely generic and predictable. I know, I can’t be satisfied with this series. We can follow the plot beats, predict what will happen and then watch it limply be delivered. This series is failing to pull at my heartstrings. There is no weight to actions, there is no payoff. Everything is expose. 2.) Characters and their situations

Vash - was completely passive in the flashback until he unlocked his gate potential in his angel arm which was a black hole that sucked stuff in and had to be cut off by Knives. No angelic body horror aspects, black hole only. He pulled the gun on Knives, who simply gave up. I missed the whole Vash shooting Knives and then running off screaming like a madman in the ‘98 anime or how Knives cut off his arm and then left him to die in the desert tied to a rock bit. We do learn that he apparently has killed in the past though - which is in line with the manga - but that was the July incident.

Knives - is the self-proclaimed autocratic leader of the plants with a 150 year plan for plant domination of the planet. All women are evil and can seduce - or - mother Vash which is dangerous and they are all the same and must be stopped to save Vash. That is so many tropes rolled into one that I don’t even want to parse them all out. Knives - chill dude. Unless we get more background for his anger in Stampede, he rings hollow in his motivations.

Luida and Brad - look pretty good for adults 150 years ago. I’m going to read between the lines that the crew of ship three have been rotating on and off over the years with a skeleton crew and they are one of those shifts. It is just my opinion on the internet; I preferred their manga characters 1000x more than these old & wise individuals. This also feeds into the previous observations from others that what Stampede lacks are the general population. Guess the animation budget wasn’t meant for frontier towns of people going about their day to day lives.

Meryl and Roberto - had their predicted noticed by sempai moment.

Wolfwood - has entered the friend zone by him denying it. Yep, he’s now friends with Vash despite them still having zero chemistry as characters. Zazie - continues to be crazy and isn’t the same as before which disappointed me more. The idea that a human body was a disposable host for the worm collective mind was clever and darker than being a collective of worms that appears human to interact with humans and plants.

Conrad - was stripped of his sexy balding man past and instead given hipster hair. He was already going bald when Rem talked to him about the twins.

3.) It was forced and awkward the entire episode. This entire series of events felt so stiff and unnatural. People stood around while very traumatic events happened like it was a normal day. The copy paste men ran in to be killed by Knives Wolverine X-men style. Conrad stood around. Vash stood around. Luida stood around. Where was the sense of motion and of overpowering emotions. Everything fell flat. 4.) Vash’s gate was activated by strong emotions. And then cut off by Knives. No putative angel arm in sight. This also has me wondering if we will even get the Tessla backstory or not. Episode eight had Luida trying to look up classified information about past independent plants but she couldn’t get it - yet knew that they existed . . . will there even be a flashback where Knives and Vash learn about Tessla or is that also gone? We really need a Tessla backstory for the Vash-Knives conflict and personal motivation. Vash is willing to forgive all humans in their wrongs while Knives uses their wrongs as his driving motivating factor in trying to destroy them and create his utopia for plants under his dictatorship.

5.) There are no Gung-ho Guns. Period. The concept is gone. This is not a western remember? This is sci fi. The lack of a general population of civilians also makes for the stakes to seem rather low - how many humans are actually living in the seven cities? How many are there to protect anyways? Why is their education system to bad? What do they eat without agriculture? There has been no explanation for any of this. Do the plants produce alcohol for bottling? Instant meal blocks? Cotton for clothing that the normal people are wearing? They can manufacture weapons for sure.

I will be controversial and state what this episode has me thinking about. Studio Orange has failed at world building. Too many basic concepts don’t make sense to superficially serve what are poorly written plot points in an episode. Yet when strung together don’t make any logical sense. You could argue the other versions of Trigun didn’t lean hard into the science aspect of things but everything made sense. People had animals for transport, the Thomases. They were able to farm if they worked hard. Not all towns required a plant to operate, they’d become more off the grid with other means. It was the fact that any larger place required plants. There was a functioning economic system of trade and currency to facilitate the production of goods and items. These things weren’t impossible in the anime and manga, but in Stampede they are impossible. Life was hard on the planet but the quality of living was indeed higher and those who kept themselves isolated on the uncrashed ship also had attitude to match.

I know it is an anime based on a manga, so we could say I’m being overly critical of these elements. But compared to the original anime and Trigun Maximum there was enough stuff in between that life wasn’t as bleak as in Stampede. The day to day logic held up and the world building was consistent with rules that applied to many of the basics. I can be totally fine with a bonkers set up - as long as you do a good job building that world and keeping your rules consistent throughout.

Lastly, Stampede has failed all of its female characters to date. At this point, we still have no idea what Rem taught Vash that he is hellbent on upholding her impossible ideals. Rem saved them. That’s it. Meryl is too young and inexperienced like her past version. Milly is absent. Luida has been destroyed from her previous leader position to Rem 2.0. Elendira hasn’t even done anything yet. Rosa was the only mother who didn’t get killed by Knives. What’s worse is that we still have a predicted three more episodes to go with this version of Trigun with its paradoxical pacing! July go boom and then time skip? Three episodes left for that to happen . . .

I can already feel the siren song to go back to the source material for a better meta or even more so - slide on over to more Kekkai Sensen/Blood Blockade Battlefront which is much more my vibe. I’m itching to write up my spin on how Trigun influenced B3, a series with a sitcom style format. I need to write a meta about Meryl and Milly as Leonardo Watch and Klaus V Reinheirz.

#Trigun #trigun stampede #trigun anime #trigun maximum #trigun stampede meta #trigun stampede episode review #Vash the Stampede #millions knives #meryl stryfe #roberto deniro #luida leitner #brad #luida #zazie the beast #nicholas d. wolfwood #william conrad

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cottoncloud0 · 25 days

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man of medan review thingy *SPOILERS*

i literally just finished mam of medan today after starting it in the morning and i do have to say that i kinda agree with people when they say this game is underwhelming

(can i just say that this is my personal opinion, i am in no way shape or form a game reviewer this is just for fun)

PROLOGUE

firstly, lets talk about the prologue. i actually liked the prologue it was paced well (and we saw joe aka the soldier with the same face model as jason but thats unrelated), the tutorials were actually fun and it set the 'mystery of the ship' up well.

ACT 1

although, i do have to say that i liked act one for the most part but it just drags for SO LONG. theres 5 whole chapters of all the characters talking to each other and 'getting to know' each other with only 1 of those chapters having any important relation to the later game and the other 4 being filler. and can i just add that obviously julia and conrad are brother and sister and alex and brad are brothers and fliss is the only new person. so i dont really think 5 chapters should have been used on introduction because NEARLY EVERY CHARACTER HAS SOMEONE THEY ALREADY KNOW. and before people start saying "but brad and julia have never met before!" or "but conrad only knew julia at the start of the game!" i know that but julia literally said that alex has told her loads about brad, so im sure not much of an introduction is needed and conrad was focused on fliss in all of the chapters so that solves the issue of them not knowing everyone because at least fliss had someone to talk to.

i think that there should have been a maximum 3 chapters spent on introduction and the other four left in act one should have been spent on introducing the pirates and the threat they bring. however i did enjoy that not all characters got along at first and you could really take different routes with everyone and establish relationships that will have an effect later in the game.

ACT 2

i do have to say that i enjoyed act two a lot, its probably my favourite act in the game. but my god it is long. theres 11 chapters in total (counting echo and finding friends as 1 chapter as they are interchangeable) and they arent memorable at all, at least not the beginning anyway. i felt like they were trying to establish two threats at once, the pirates and obviously the ss ourang medan. but it just didnt really work, there were too many things being introduced at once because the pirates werent properly introduced in act 1. which caused the beginning of act 2 to just feel way too busy.

on a more positive note, the later chapters i really enjoyed. i think its because the pirates took a step back from being a threat and the game really started to focus on the ship itself and the mystery around it. i really liked that they decided to sprinkle in the characters hallucinating and that the player could really have a chance to figure it out and put all the clues together. i think out of all the chapters in the game glamour girl and echo are my favourites just because of the really cool gameplay and suspense, especially in echo i LOVED that they added a time loop in the game. it just made it feel a lot more creepy and mysterious.

ACT 3

boring asf. the pacing in this game is so weird in every act, the first two felt like they went on forever and were way too long but act 3 felt like literally nothing happened. and thats because BASICALLY NOTHING HAPPENED. the only things i can really recall is the group using the radio, the junior bit (way too many opportunities to die can i just add) and the alex segment, which some people dont even get to play.

i didnt even realise that the first two chapters were different because literally nothing seperates them from each other. this is a theme in act 3, all of the chapters feel like a blur and mushed together and it just feels really short and kind of boring to play.

THE END

i dont really know how to feel about the ending because there are so many of them (7 in total). so im just going to talk about the one i got (the entire group escaped on the duke of milan and julia didnt die).

this ending just feels so blah and empty, like the characters just escape and everythings fine now no repercussions at all! naur. absolutely not. thats so incredibly wrong and not what would have happened. at least one of them (probably conrad lmao) would have gone on the news or smth and told people what happened because why wouldnt you?

i just really wish we got an actual conclusion, like how everyones lives are going, what they are doing now, if theyre still affected by what happened and how. this honestly goes for all supermassive games, I WANT TO KNOW HOW THE CHARCTERS ARE AFTER. this might just be me saying this because i want to see more salim and jason but thats beside the point lol.

finally i just want to say that the creatures being hallucinations was sucha BORING ENDING. the whole game you are trying to escape these creatures and they just end up not being real??? pussy ending if you ask me.

i do have to say that i find it really cool that a choice you make at the start of the game (julia surfacing too quick in Dive and her drinking the beer in Ghost Story) can have such an impact in the end (if she did the previous things she will die of decompression sickness/ the bends in the ending.

RANDOM SHIT

i think in my playthrough i found around 26-28 secrets, 4 black pictures, 3-4 white pictures and i didnt get the gold picture. this might just be my horrific looking skills but also i think its because the secrets in this game are so hard to find??? plus, sometimes going into a certain room, picking something up or taking too much time can result in the next chapter to automatically happen. i think this feature is so shit and unbelievably tedious to put in the game. i remember at least two instances where ive seen secrets and pictures that i want to go pick up but was not able to because i walked into a room or i picked something up (fliss in the ballroom hallucination and brad a julia trying to find the generator (it was brad and julia for me)).

i much prefer in house of ashes it shows that if you pick this thing up or go into the next room you cant go back, and all the secrets in house of ashes arent impossible to find.

CONCLUSION

man of medan isnt a bad game, i enjoyed playing it and personally i thought it was scarier than house of ashes, but the pacing, ending and exploring mechanics just made it kind of annoying to play at some instances.

EXTRA

CHARACTER RANKING

Fliss (love her, exasperated queen)

Conrad (funny man, again glamour girl is so good)

Julia (laid-back, has some flaws which is essential, used to be my number 1)

Brad (nerdy little brother whos scared of everything and wears glasses trope, but was pushed to 4 because of echo)

Alex (nothing really going on about him, was kinda rude to brad at the start)

honestly alex and brad are interchangable

RATING

4/10 / 2 1/2 stars

if you have read this far thank you for listening to me yap for 1,247 words, love you <333

#man of medan #fliss dubois #conrad man of medan #julia man of medan #alex smith #brad smith #the dark pictures anthology

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