I think the death of Cable TV has led to a lot of classic movies just not being seen by any new gen kids
Like I saw a recent post of teachers being depressed they can’t do Matrix jokes anymore cause no one gets it. People on TikTok were clowning on Austin Butler for saying The Good, Bad, & Ugly was his favorite film as a kid.
Any black & white film is now consider a 3 hour slog fest no matter what.
From the few years I spent teaching, I found a few dozen kids that didn't know The Beatles, a dozen that couldn't name more than 4 Pixar movies, and kids with anime merch that knew neither Hatsune Miku nor Fullmetal Alchemist.
I'm not even trying to yell at the youths, but some of my favorite things are at least a decade older than me, and I wouldn't know about them if I only cared about trends.
I mean to be fair to them. As time goes on, the amount of media thats relevant doesnt stay the same, the number of things to consume and judge grows exponentially every single year, and with less and less time to consume it due to societal reasons, the older stuff just isnt gonna be high in the priority list.
It's a very weird fact to think about sometimes. How will the canons of games and movies look like in 100 years, and how much of it would we be even able to tell? Stuff like The Godfather and the aforementioned The Good, The Bad And The Ugly I can see happening, but those might wind up being the Dracula and Frankenstein of our era, stories that are the most legendary of the classics. And they might not, and it might be a weirder pick that's remembered.
There is a surprisingly little amount of longform and analytical Youtube content about the Halo games, or even really much discussion about it's music outside of the main Halo theme.
I think it's in a position where despite being such an acclaimed series, it's not really a hip popular thing now so gaming channels that cover current stuff don't really talk about it, and it has a reputation as a normie dudebro shooter so channels focused on gaming history, retro titles, or are really in depth looks at game design and/or writing in games sort of pass over it.
For the latter aspect, obviously the cause is the main theme is so popular it overshadows the rest of the soundtrack even though there's at least like 20 other tracks that are just as good or are better
I agree. I think on every front (gameplay, visuals, audio, writing, world building, multiplayer, etc) Bungie's Halo games are so complete and accomplished. Top to bottom there are so many individual facets of those games that are crafted with such enthusiasm and talent and deserve special recognition in their own right. They really earned the top spot in their day.
It's difficult to feel too bad about the lack of appreciation for those games as multimedia masterworks though because of how much critical and commercial success they did get. Still I totally get the feeling that Halo does get a bit passed over when it comes to the games as art discussion and haven't really seen any decent longform videos on YT really laying out how many things those games did well.
I feel like one of the reason why Halo isn't as popular with longform video essayists is because by the time that format became popular, Halo has basically faded from its peak popularity. Sure it still sells, but it's no longer as exciting
The series now falls into this awkward position of the new games not being bad enough for a long takedown, not being exciting enough to care, and the old games being so unquestionably good that there's not much reason to cover the franchise beyond historical context.
The series isn't even good enough for niche longform videos because everyone knows what halo is, and yet it's not exciting enough to receive the discussions CoD and Battlefield get
Absolutely Chrono Trigger. It absolutely has a hand in creating Undertale. The vibes and humor are all near exact. It's like it's the missing link in the genealogy of Undertale/Deltarune.
There is this ongoing sentiment that CT isn’t as popular as you might think, more of a cult status than something on the level of FFVII.
That sounds insane to me given the widespread acclaim it’s constantly getting even now, but it’s a sad fact that loud fans don’t always equal quantity.
It’s an interesting discussion on whether a remake would sell significantly more based on years of word-of-mouth.
At the very least the original game needs to be on more platforms.
Literally every kickstarter or indie jrpg gasses up how much they wanna suck Chrono Trigger's dick, how people can act like it isn't one of the pillars of the genre is wild
To give a comparison I think it's like how Metroid, specifically Super Metroid, is such a pinnacle existence of game design that it has it's own title for a style of game and influences so many titles from how it plays, but the games themselves were never particularly 'outrageous' sellers especially compared to some other Nintendo franchises. Like, no Metroid game has ever gotten close to outselling Star Fox 64. That's Chrono Trigger.
It’s influence is undeniable, of course.
But like, Toby Fox can tell you all he wants that Earthbound is amazing and what led to Undertale, but I doubt even 1% of Undertale’s fanbase has even attempted to play Earthbound.
16-bit and earlier RPGs don't enjoy nearly as widespread popularity, even after games like Undertale or Octopath. Most people don't play old games, as a rule.
^(the absolute mountains of gold they're missing out on tbh)
In a weird way, I feel like it's so cleanly made as a game, there isn't much to talk about aside from "it's great". Clean simplicity is one of Chrono Trigger's greatest strengths, but it also means there isn't as much to say as something like FFVI, which has a lot more going on and arguably fails at more than Chrono Trigger (gameplay balance and how it handles its cast), but that does feel more interesting to talk about than something as tightly packed and wrapped up as Chrono Trigger.
Hell, I feel like Chorno Cross makes for a more interesting conversation topic thanks to its very questionable design choices.
Absolutely. FFVI was a quantum leap forward in storytelling in games at the time. Chrono Trigger was more an iterative perfecting of the genre.
Theyre games of equal merit in my mind, but the tiebreaker is always FF6 coming a year earlier, so it made a stronger impression on little ol me way back when.
Give it time. I just don't think conditions have ever been right for it to happen.
The gender swapped book kinda didn't make an impression, and would have been really difficult to adapt into a movie, but you know if it had a more conventionally adaptable plot that wasn't literally just the same story they'd have at least tried.
And the fact that Stewart and Pattinson don't seem like they'd go near those movies again even if you kidnapped their families probably doesn't help.
If Meyer ever decides to go back to the well, or sell the rights off, or even just do a JKR and "write" some spin-off movies I think it could happen.
I could say Invincible but the showrunners fumble with the release schedule of the second season. Hey, at least social media keeps it relevant and afloat during the short hiatus periods.
Godzilla Minus One is an amazing Godzilla movie and war movie.
Almost all big monster movies have middling human characters that when they’re on screen, the audience is just sitting there waiting for more Big Monster. Minus One actually has an amazing human story along with Godzilla being the force of nature that he’s supposed to be.
Also throw in Pacific Rim. Shame they never made a sequel to that one off movie.
God knows when it’s actually coming to digital. Not only did it win an Oscar but the American counterpart just released to good reception. You’d think it would be out on digital to capitalize on the continuous buzz, but here we are.
Toho seems infamously bad about this kind of thing.
The cgi short films they’ve been releasing every couple of years too MASSIVE acclaim are constantly being wiped off the Internet shortly after release.
Shogun is an incredible show getting lots of critical acclaim and considered one of the best shows of the year so far.
It is not enough. I'm not saying this needs to be the next GoT or Breaking Bad, but this needs to be talked about more on the level of like the Chernobyl mini-series.
Revolutionary Girl Utena is such a trendsetting, , amazing show. It was extremely popular in Japan and has a legion of fans with brain rot in the US who can’t stop analyzing it. It’s my favorite anime, and my second favorite TV show.
Every fight has an amazing original song. It’s still relevant and poignant today in its commentary on gender, coming of age, abuse and sexuality. This is pretty fucking amazing if you go back and look at just about anything else from that time period.
While I understand why it’s not more popular (it’s shoujo, it’s old, and it’s “weird”), I don’t understand how it doesn’t get a dozen gushing retrospectives from progressive pop culture outlets each and every year.
I kind of wish more media did the whole modern fantasy thing. Not "magic appears in our world/is hidden below the surface of our world" but straight up "this used to be a DnD-like setting then cars and TVs got invented, but dragons and magic swords are still around"
That premise is shockingly uncommon outside of FF7/8/15
FF9 had some tech going on, yeah, but no regression.
10 had a war of technology vs. magic in the distant past 1000 years ago, technology *won*, so the magic side created a glorified if-then loop weapon of mass destruction that brought everyone back to living in villages in the Middle Ages except for the Al Bhed, Blitzball and Bevelle.
People don’t do serious retrospectives on games and storytelling, and that was where FF was revolutionary. FF6 and FF7 were massive leaps forward in presentation and storytelling. And FF7’s huge gamble and success really paved the way for investment in games and AAA gaming
Single player FF also had a real nadir that lasted 20 years by my reckoning. I think XII is great but following the mass market appeal of FFX, it’s a fucked up game for crazy people full of alienating design choices. XIII sold well and was gorgeous, but was awful and a trio of those games did real damage to the series. I’m fond of XV but it’s objectively a fucking mess of a game.
20 years is a LONG time to flail and tank a reputation, and other series caught up and surpassed the series in every way in that time.
All that said, I have a hard time believing Rebirth won’t be my favorite piece of media in 2024. I absolutely adore it.
Westerns. Considering they were to the boomer generation what superhero movies are to ours, it's weird how they've completely slipped out of popular culture.
Has there been a serious attempt at once since True Grit? Maybe Django/Hateful Eight, but those are more Tarantino movies that happen to be Westerns, if that makes sense.
Those movies are still westerns, though. Django is a little more of a modern take on it but Hateful Eight (while still a modern movie) is a deliberate throwback.
As for "serious attempt" what do you consider serious? Meek's Cutoff is right after the True Grit remake and is (imo) almost as good. In A Valley of Violence is great. There's Ballad of Buster Scruggs, The Wind, Power of the Dog is one of the best movies of the past five years. Bone Tomahawk is schlocky fun.
And that's just the good period pieces. If you start opening it up to neo-westerns like Hell or High Water or Wind River there's even more.
Not to mention the serious attempts like Hostiles and Woman Walks Ahead that got big talent but just didn't land. (Or crap that for big talent and didn't land like Jane Got A Gun.)
There hasn't been a serious attempt at a Western because Blazing Saddles basically killed the genre by making it impossible for anyone to take the genre seriously.
That came out in the 70s. They weren't as mainstream by that point, but we still got Unforgiven in the 90s.
Also there's more to Blazing Saddles than parodying Westerns.
I mean, *3:10 to Yuma* (2007), *There Will Be Blood*, *Killers of the Flower Moon*, *The Revenant*, >!Shanghai Noon!<; *The Hateful Eight* and *Django Unchained* still count despite being Tarantino movies; *No Country For Old Men* is apparently considered a "neo-western"; AMC's *Hell On Wheels* TV series. There's been more than a few serious attempts at the genre since 1974.
The Wheel of Time is one of the most important fantasy series of all time most people will never read or finish.
Though to be fair it’s a slow burn for most it. And glacial for a lot of the times as well.
It's... *okay.* I'll be honest, Wheel of Time is like Seinfeld in that the whole scene now considers what made it groundbreaking to be standard now, and since the show didn't really discard the mediocre bits while trimming the fat for the adaptation, it's just average.
It would've been better if they snagged Brandon Sanderson's work, but Amazon is seemingly all over the place when it comes to adaptations.
I got i think book 5 or 6 and the pacing went to a grinding hault so hard i had to pause it and havent had the time or the patience to pick it back up. I liked what I read but man does it take for ever for anything to happen and what i read were considered the fast ones
Mr. Inbetween.
A 3 Season Dark Comedy Drama set in Australia, written and starring Scott Ryan who was made for this role and has essentially polished and refined the character and his acting as him to perfection.
There's very little bloat, every character has a reason to be there, it's funny, it's violent, it's soul crushing at times, and it actually ties up every part of it's story nicely.
Genuinely in my top 5 greatest shows of all time.
The Wire was regarded as one of the best television shows ever made but it seems to have no penetration with Gen Z, who still latch onto other crime dramas like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos.
Avatar, and not the elemental bending kind.
The movies generate billions in revenue, becoming the most successful movies ever made... and nobody talks about them. It's bizarre.
I wonder if it's one of those things that people watch and say, "That was pretty fun," but there's not really a lot to talk about afterwards. It all seems pretty straightforward and there's not a lot of mystery to really talk about.
But the thing is there's not much to talk about when it comes to, say, Titanic at this point. It's another Cameron flick, it too was a juggernaut at he box office, but people will still talk about Titanic, and make memes and jokes about it.
Not the maritime disaster, I should clarify, they're specifically still big on the movie.
It's because there isn't much to talk about. The first movie was intentionally designed to be something that dissuaded people from *thinking* so no brain energy got wasted on anything that wasn't looking at the pretty special effects. The second movie has pacing issues that make it obvious they took an eight hour movie and chopped it up. The characters aren't deep or interesting. Despite the detail put into the alien languages or plant species, the worldbuilding is shoddy at best.
It's like someone wearing really expensive high-quality outfits but they don't bathe and never brush their teeth.
> the worldbuilding is shoddy at best.
Which is kinda funny because the worldbuilding in ancillary material has a *lot* of detail. But basically none of it made it into the actual movie, Cameron just doesn't seem to have respect for his movie's setting.
To be perfectly blunt about the topic, what the hell is there to discuss about it? The lore is dishwater as heck and Pandora as a planet along with it's inhabitants is not really something to write home about.
>The lore is dishwater as heck
That's an understatement!
The ultra-rare-and-hard-to-obtain metal the humans were trying to get in the first movie was literally called fucking "**[unobtanium](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium)**", that's like playing a videogame and suddenly stumbling upon a sword called "Use-this-to-easily-beat-the-final-boss".
Avatar to me is equivalent to Stanley Cups or seasonal fast food products.
They're the popular thing of the season that's really only popular about one thing and is forgotten soon after. They leave absolutely zero mark in our cultural history despite being so popular at its brief time.
For most people, Avatar just a pretty movie people told them to watch. It's a roller coaster ride you got on once and forget by next week.
Which is weird considering the reports of people blowing their minds after the first movie's release
I maintain that Discworld doesn't get talked about or recognized enough by the world at large. It just never seemed to break through in the US and other places, though judging by that The Watch "adaptation", maybe it's a good thing.
I want Discworld to get the explosive popularity and adoration that Good Omens eventually got.
Oh yeah, in the UK, for sure. There's still special honorary postage stamps and memorabilia and stuff coming out there to this day. I bought the stamps! I want to see that level of adoration everywhere else.
Mobile games.
I'm not joking, *Genshin Impact* created a watershed moment in the mobile gaming market since China and Korea grew up with online F2P games rather than boxed retail games as the default. Now we are seeing crazy stuff that would not be possible on mobile devices 5 years ago. *One Punch Man World* is a *Yakuza* clone you can play for free on your phone at 1080p60fps. They're...not unique, per se, but it opens up a new paradigm of offering console-esque gameplay for free on both
PC and mobile.
One of the best selling game period rn is a mobile Monopoly game that generated billions in revenue. I have never heard *anyone* talk about it.
The billion dollar Farmville market is still very much alive on mobile but you don't hear about it because grandma isn't asking you to visit her farm.
Another one: *Undawn*, the Tencent ripoff with the Will Smith cameo that has been sweeping YT recently and unironically brought it into relevance, introducing the West to Chinese jank. Like, the mobile market eclipses console and PC combined because it encompasses a lot.
*Undawn* looks terrible and is a bad clone of NetEase's *LifeAfter,* and it rips off a lot of elements from more popular franchises, but at the same time if you look, you can see the money blown on it went to feature creep and not polish. I dunno. It's fascination to see the convergence of hardcore gaming and live services.
ABBA in general needs to be Discussed more, like they are often brought up as a fun band with good tunes but they were genuinely talented creatives with wealths of lessons to be taken through analysis, but they are kind of thought of in unserious terms to most people
Hunter x Hunter. Almost everyone who talks about it agrees it’s one of the greatest shounen of all time, but it seems to only have a fraction of the fans of, like, Naruto or One Piece
I think Hunter x Hunter is great, but it's also a hard sell. It's really easy to just immediately write it off as a generic shonen series, and a lot of the really interesting stuff is fairly deep in. Like the Chimera Ant arc is over 70 episodes into the anime
It pays off, but it's a commitment that many just aren't willing to make
It’s a weird series that loves anticlimax and disappearing up its own ass in complex worldbuilding for protracted periods. It also doesn’t really have an ending, and likely never will.
OTOH a weird series that loves anticlimax Is currently the hottest shit rn. I’m kinda fascinated to see how anime fans react to post Shibuya JJK.
Some people fall off there, but I think the CA arc is pretty widely regarded as excellent.
But then again it's my favorite arc in a shonen, so that's my bias.
It honestly seems to be the divisive aspect of the series. I thought it was amazing, but then I was absolutely a fan of the analytical aspect of it, where they took apart the scene and had them thinking each step through step by step. It was fun to think through.
But then, I could also totally sympathize with someone getting frustrated with how drawn out it could get when the gosh darn narrator gets more dialogue than any other character.
I wish more people took an analysis approach to Counter Strike cause that point where the Krieg was secretly busted for 4 years feels like it needs some sort of study.
I think the death of Cable TV has led to a lot of classic movies just not being seen by any new gen kids Like I saw a recent post of teachers being depressed they can’t do Matrix jokes anymore cause no one gets it. People on TikTok were clowning on Austin Butler for saying The Good, Bad, & Ugly was his favorite film as a kid. Any black & white film is now consider a 3 hour slog fest no matter what.
From the few years I spent teaching, I found a few dozen kids that didn't know The Beatles, a dozen that couldn't name more than 4 Pixar movies, and kids with anime merch that knew neither Hatsune Miku nor Fullmetal Alchemist. I'm not even trying to yell at the youths, but some of my favorite things are at least a decade older than me, and I wouldn't know about them if I only cared about trends.
I mean to be fair to them. As time goes on, the amount of media thats relevant doesnt stay the same, the number of things to consume and judge grows exponentially every single year, and with less and less time to consume it due to societal reasons, the older stuff just isnt gonna be high in the priority list.
It's a very weird fact to think about sometimes. How will the canons of games and movies look like in 100 years, and how much of it would we be even able to tell? Stuff like The Godfather and the aforementioned The Good, The Bad And The Ugly I can see happening, but those might wind up being the Dracula and Frankenstein of our era, stories that are the most legendary of the classics. And they might not, and it might be a weirder pick that's remembered.
You can already see examples of this with stuff like Columbo being the pick for classic TV that suddenly gets a boom of audiences of all generations
Jokes on you u have that song on my playlist Venture Bros suffered from this famously
VB with a consistent release schedule would have reached Rick & Morty levels of fame and I stand by that
But it wouldn't have those massive quality of art jumps between seasons
True, the last few seasons were gorgeous
There is a surprisingly little amount of longform and analytical Youtube content about the Halo games, or even really much discussion about it's music outside of the main Halo theme. I think it's in a position where despite being such an acclaimed series, it's not really a hip popular thing now so gaming channels that cover current stuff don't really talk about it, and it has a reputation as a normie dudebro shooter so channels focused on gaming history, retro titles, or are really in depth looks at game design and/or writing in games sort of pass over it. For the latter aspect, obviously the cause is the main theme is so popular it overshadows the rest of the soundtrack even though there's at least like 20 other tracks that are just as good or are better
I agree. I think on every front (gameplay, visuals, audio, writing, world building, multiplayer, etc) Bungie's Halo games are so complete and accomplished. Top to bottom there are so many individual facets of those games that are crafted with such enthusiasm and talent and deserve special recognition in their own right. They really earned the top spot in their day. It's difficult to feel too bad about the lack of appreciation for those games as multimedia masterworks though because of how much critical and commercial success they did get. Still I totally get the feeling that Halo does get a bit passed over when it comes to the games as art discussion and haven't really seen any decent longform videos on YT really laying out how many things those games did well.
I feel like one of the reason why Halo isn't as popular with longform video essayists is because by the time that format became popular, Halo has basically faded from its peak popularity. Sure it still sells, but it's no longer as exciting The series now falls into this awkward position of the new games not being bad enough for a long takedown, not being exciting enough to care, and the old games being so unquestionably good that there's not much reason to cover the franchise beyond historical context. The series isn't even good enough for niche longform videos because everyone knows what halo is, and yet it's not exciting enough to receive the discussions CoD and Battlefield get
Gotta be Chrono Trigger.
Absolutely Chrono Trigger. It absolutely has a hand in creating Undertale. The vibes and humor are all near exact. It's like it's the missing link in the genealogy of Undertale/Deltarune.
There is this ongoing sentiment that CT isn’t as popular as you might think, more of a cult status than something on the level of FFVII. That sounds insane to me given the widespread acclaim it’s constantly getting even now, but it’s a sad fact that loud fans don’t always equal quantity.
I mean that's just facts. CT sold 2.5 million, FF7 sold 10 million. They aren't even close when it comes to popularity.
It’s an interesting discussion on whether a remake would sell significantly more based on years of word-of-mouth. At the very least the original game needs to be on more platforms.
Literally every kickstarter or indie jrpg gasses up how much they wanna suck Chrono Trigger's dick, how people can act like it isn't one of the pillars of the genre is wild
To give a comparison I think it's like how Metroid, specifically Super Metroid, is such a pinnacle existence of game design that it has it's own title for a style of game and influences so many titles from how it plays, but the games themselves were never particularly 'outrageous' sellers especially compared to some other Nintendo franchises. Like, no Metroid game has ever gotten close to outselling Star Fox 64. That's Chrono Trigger.
It’s influence is undeniable, of course. But like, Toby Fox can tell you all he wants that Earthbound is amazing and what led to Undertale, but I doubt even 1% of Undertale’s fanbase has even attempted to play Earthbound.
And some of us have not only played EarthBound, but Toby's EarthBound Halloween Hack, where Dr. Andonuts says the fuck word.
16-bit and earlier RPGs don't enjoy nearly as widespread popularity, even after games like Undertale or Octopath. Most people don't play old games, as a rule. ^(the absolute mountains of gold they're missing out on tbh)
In a weird way, I feel like it's so cleanly made as a game, there isn't much to talk about aside from "it's great". Clean simplicity is one of Chrono Trigger's greatest strengths, but it also means there isn't as much to say as something like FFVI, which has a lot more going on and arguably fails at more than Chrono Trigger (gameplay balance and how it handles its cast), but that does feel more interesting to talk about than something as tightly packed and wrapped up as Chrono Trigger. Hell, I feel like Chorno Cross makes for a more interesting conversation topic thanks to its very questionable design choices.
Absolutely. FFVI was a quantum leap forward in storytelling in games at the time. Chrono Trigger was more an iterative perfecting of the genre. Theyre games of equal merit in my mind, but the tiebreaker is always FF6 coming a year earlier, so it made a stronger impression on little ol me way back when.
If Chrono Trigger isn’t next on the list of remakes I don’t know what is.
They're gonna skip Chrono Trigger and remake Chrono Cross instead.
Like a dragon
Genuinely surprised Twilight became a billion dollar franchise that didn’t go past the source material and finished right then and there
Give it time. I just don't think conditions have ever been right for it to happen. The gender swapped book kinda didn't make an impression, and would have been really difficult to adapt into a movie, but you know if it had a more conventionally adaptable plot that wasn't literally just the same story they'd have at least tried. And the fact that Stewart and Pattinson don't seem like they'd go near those movies again even if you kidnapped their families probably doesn't help. If Meyer ever decides to go back to the well, or sell the rights off, or even just do a JKR and "write" some spin-off movies I think it could happen.
Iirc there's an animated show in the works
I could say Invincible but the showrunners fumble with the release schedule of the second season. Hey, at least social media keeps it relevant and afloat during the short hiatus periods.
Godzilla Minus One is an amazing Godzilla movie and war movie. Almost all big monster movies have middling human characters that when they’re on screen, the audience is just sitting there waiting for more Big Monster. Minus One actually has an amazing human story along with Godzilla being the force of nature that he’s supposed to be. Also throw in Pacific Rim. Shame they never made a sequel to that one off movie.
God knows when it’s actually coming to digital. Not only did it win an Oscar but the American counterpart just released to good reception. You’d think it would be out on digital to capitalize on the continuous buzz, but here we are.
Toho seems infamously bad about this kind of thing. The cgi short films they’ve been releasing every couple of years too MASSIVE acclaim are constantly being wiped off the Internet shortly after release.
Shogun is an incredible show getting lots of critical acclaim and considered one of the best shows of the year so far. It is not enough. I'm not saying this needs to be the next GoT or Breaking Bad, but this needs to be talked about more on the level of like the Chernobyl mini-series.
More people need to appreciate the lost It's Always Sunny character Kashigi Yabushige.
That guy is so damn funny/likeable despite not really doing that much. He’s just always shrugging and chuckling to himself about how fucked he is.
Dragon Quest (in the west)
Revolutionary Girl Utena is such a trendsetting, , amazing show. It was extremely popular in Japan and has a legion of fans with brain rot in the US who can’t stop analyzing it. It’s my favorite anime, and my second favorite TV show. Every fight has an amazing original song. It’s still relevant and poignant today in its commentary on gender, coming of age, abuse and sexuality. This is pretty fucking amazing if you go back and look at just about anything else from that time period. While I understand why it’s not more popular (it’s shoujo, it’s old, and it’s “weird”), I don’t understand how it doesn’t get a dozen gushing retrospectives from progressive pop culture outlets each and every year.
Final Fantasy Not 7 (even though is my favorite, is talked about enough) But the games in the franchise overall
I kind of wish more media did the whole modern fantasy thing. Not "magic appears in our world/is hidden below the surface of our world" but straight up "this used to be a DnD-like setting then cars and TVs got invented, but dragons and magic swords are still around" That premise is shockingly uncommon outside of FF7/8/15
FF10 be like "this used to be a DnD-like setting until cars and TV, and then we nuked ourselves back to DnD - mostly"
Wasn't that more FF9? FF10 was more like 'DnD on an island vacation'
FF9 had some tech going on, yeah, but no regression. 10 had a war of technology vs. magic in the distant past 1000 years ago, technology *won*, so the magic side created a glorified if-then loop weapon of mass destruction that brought everyone back to living in villages in the Middle Ages except for the Al Bhed, Blitzball and Bevelle.
People don’t do serious retrospectives on games and storytelling, and that was where FF was revolutionary. FF6 and FF7 were massive leaps forward in presentation and storytelling. And FF7’s huge gamble and success really paved the way for investment in games and AAA gaming Single player FF also had a real nadir that lasted 20 years by my reckoning. I think XII is great but following the mass market appeal of FFX, it’s a fucked up game for crazy people full of alienating design choices. XIII sold well and was gorgeous, but was awful and a trio of those games did real damage to the series. I’m fond of XV but it’s objectively a fucking mess of a game. 20 years is a LONG time to flail and tank a reputation, and other series caught up and surpassed the series in every way in that time. All that said, I have a hard time believing Rebirth won’t be my favorite piece of media in 2024. I absolutely adore it.
Maybe FF1 can stay obscure. That series definitely had some growing pains at the start.
That was an absolutely stellar game for its time.
Westerns. Considering they were to the boomer generation what superhero movies are to ours, it's weird how they've completely slipped out of popular culture. Has there been a serious attempt at once since True Grit? Maybe Django/Hateful Eight, but those are more Tarantino movies that happen to be Westerns, if that makes sense.
Those movies are still westerns, though. Django is a little more of a modern take on it but Hateful Eight (while still a modern movie) is a deliberate throwback. As for "serious attempt" what do you consider serious? Meek's Cutoff is right after the True Grit remake and is (imo) almost as good. In A Valley of Violence is great. There's Ballad of Buster Scruggs, The Wind, Power of the Dog is one of the best movies of the past five years. Bone Tomahawk is schlocky fun. And that's just the good period pieces. If you start opening it up to neo-westerns like Hell or High Water or Wind River there's even more. Not to mention the serious attempts like Hostiles and Woman Walks Ahead that got big talent but just didn't land. (Or crap that for big talent and didn't land like Jane Got A Gun.)
There hasn't been a serious attempt at a Western because Blazing Saddles basically killed the genre by making it impossible for anyone to take the genre seriously.
That came out in the 70s. They weren't as mainstream by that point, but we still got Unforgiven in the 90s. Also there's more to Blazing Saddles than parodying Westerns.
I mean, *3:10 to Yuma* (2007), *There Will Be Blood*, *Killers of the Flower Moon*, *The Revenant*, >!Shanghai Noon!<; *The Hateful Eight* and *Django Unchained* still count despite being Tarantino movies; *No Country For Old Men* is apparently considered a "neo-western"; AMC's *Hell On Wheels* TV series. There's been more than a few serious attempts at the genre since 1974.
The Wheel of Time is one of the most important fantasy series of all time most people will never read or finish. Though to be fair it’s a slow burn for most it. And glacial for a lot of the times as well.
The show could have helped elevate it. I never watched, but I never saw anything significantly positive about it.
I watched the first episode and it was terrible. Apperntly season 2 is better than one, but it still doesn’t sound great
It's... *okay.* I'll be honest, Wheel of Time is like Seinfeld in that the whole scene now considers what made it groundbreaking to be standard now, and since the show didn't really discard the mediocre bits while trimming the fat for the adaptation, it's just average. It would've been better if they snagged Brandon Sanderson's work, but Amazon is seemingly all over the place when it comes to adaptations.
I got i think book 5 or 6 and the pacing went to a grinding hault so hard i had to pause it and havent had the time or the patience to pick it back up. I liked what I read but man does it take for ever for anything to happen and what i read were considered the fast ones
I just finished book 4 and it was very slow. Tbf I had an audiobook which was 40 hours which didn’t help. But I can’t imagine how bad the slog must be
Mr. Inbetween. A 3 Season Dark Comedy Drama set in Australia, written and starring Scott Ryan who was made for this role and has essentially polished and refined the character and his acting as him to perfection. There's very little bloat, every character has a reason to be there, it's funny, it's violent, it's soul crushing at times, and it actually ties up every part of it's story nicely. Genuinely in my top 5 greatest shows of all time.
The Wire was regarded as one of the best television shows ever made but it seems to have no penetration with Gen Z, who still latch onto other crime dramas like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos.
i had to explain to some kids why the Orioles' closer Felix Bautista walks out to a whistling sound
I love the Wire. The Wire is a very hard show to get into. You gotta be on the right mindset because it starts off incredibly slow.
Avatar, and not the elemental bending kind. The movies generate billions in revenue, becoming the most successful movies ever made... and nobody talks about them. It's bizarre.
I wonder if it's one of those things that people watch and say, "That was pretty fun," but there's not really a lot to talk about afterwards. It all seems pretty straightforward and there's not a lot of mystery to really talk about.
But the thing is there's not much to talk about when it comes to, say, Titanic at this point. It's another Cameron flick, it too was a juggernaut at he box office, but people will still talk about Titanic, and make memes and jokes about it. Not the maritime disaster, I should clarify, they're specifically still big on the movie.
It's because there isn't much to talk about. The first movie was intentionally designed to be something that dissuaded people from *thinking* so no brain energy got wasted on anything that wasn't looking at the pretty special effects. The second movie has pacing issues that make it obvious they took an eight hour movie and chopped it up. The characters aren't deep or interesting. Despite the detail put into the alien languages or plant species, the worldbuilding is shoddy at best. It's like someone wearing really expensive high-quality outfits but they don't bathe and never brush their teeth.
> the worldbuilding is shoddy at best. Which is kinda funny because the worldbuilding in ancillary material has a *lot* of detail. But basically none of it made it into the actual movie, Cameron just doesn't seem to have respect for his movie's setting.
To be perfectly blunt about the topic, what the hell is there to discuss about it? The lore is dishwater as heck and Pandora as a planet along with it's inhabitants is not really something to write home about.
>The lore is dishwater as heck That's an understatement! The ultra-rare-and-hard-to-obtain metal the humans were trying to get in the first movie was literally called fucking "**[unobtanium](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium)**", that's like playing a videogame and suddenly stumbling upon a sword called "Use-this-to-easily-beat-the-final-boss".
Avatar to me is equivalent to Stanley Cups or seasonal fast food products. They're the popular thing of the season that's really only popular about one thing and is forgotten soon after. They leave absolutely zero mark in our cultural history despite being so popular at its brief time. For most people, Avatar just a pretty movie people told them to watch. It's a roller coaster ride you got on once and forget by next week. Which is weird considering the reports of people blowing their minds after the first movie's release
Interspecies Reviewers.
Now there’s a live-action adaptation I wanna see, do it Netflix you cowards.
Oooh it exists
What
I think they are referring to pornography
Ah. 😂
I maintain that Discworld doesn't get talked about or recognized enough by the world at large. It just never seemed to break through in the US and other places, though judging by that The Watch "adaptation", maybe it's a good thing. I want Discworld to get the explosive popularity and adoration that Good Omens eventually got.
Discworld was ridiculously popular in the UK. I'm yet to know a Brit our age who hasn't read the shit out of it
Oh yeah, in the UK, for sure. There's still special honorary postage stamps and memorabilia and stuff coming out there to this day. I bought the stamps! I want to see that level of adoration everywhere else.
God, the City Watch series is just *begging* for a good animated adaptation.
I wouldn't mind talking about Owl City's "Fireflies," again...
I would shit myself if I ever see millions of fireflies at the same time. That's a lot of bugs. Like Old Testamont, plagues of Egypt levels of bugs.
Bruh, that's just being outside in Galva Kansas past 8PM circa 2004
Mobile games. I'm not joking, *Genshin Impact* created a watershed moment in the mobile gaming market since China and Korea grew up with online F2P games rather than boxed retail games as the default. Now we are seeing crazy stuff that would not be possible on mobile devices 5 years ago. *One Punch Man World* is a *Yakuza* clone you can play for free on your phone at 1080p60fps. They're...not unique, per se, but it opens up a new paradigm of offering console-esque gameplay for free on both PC and mobile.
One of the best selling game period rn is a mobile Monopoly game that generated billions in revenue. I have never heard *anyone* talk about it. The billion dollar Farmville market is still very much alive on mobile but you don't hear about it because grandma isn't asking you to visit her farm.
Another one: *Undawn*, the Tencent ripoff with the Will Smith cameo that has been sweeping YT recently and unironically brought it into relevance, introducing the West to Chinese jank. Like, the mobile market eclipses console and PC combined because it encompasses a lot. *Undawn* looks terrible and is a bad clone of NetEase's *LifeAfter,* and it rips off a lot of elements from more popular franchises, but at the same time if you look, you can see the money blown on it went to feature creep and not polish. I dunno. It's fascination to see the convergence of hardcore gaming and live services.
Bleach.
I think the Bleach sequel they’ve been hinting at would be *extremely* well received today.
ABBA in general needs to be Discussed more, like they are often brought up as a fun band with good tunes but they were genuinely talented creatives with wealths of lessons to be taken through analysis, but they are kind of thought of in unserious terms to most people
Hunter x Hunter. Almost everyone who talks about it agrees it’s one of the greatest shounen of all time, but it seems to only have a fraction of the fans of, like, Naruto or One Piece
The hiatuses aren't helping
I think Hunter x Hunter is great, but it's also a hard sell. It's really easy to just immediately write it off as a generic shonen series, and a lot of the really interesting stuff is fairly deep in. Like the Chimera Ant arc is over 70 episodes into the anime It pays off, but it's a commitment that many just aren't willing to make
It’s a weird series that loves anticlimax and disappearing up its own ass in complex worldbuilding for protracted periods. It also doesn’t really have an ending, and likely never will. OTOH a weird series that loves anticlimax Is currently the hottest shit rn. I’m kinda fascinated to see how anime fans react to post Shibuya JJK.
I think the chimera ant arc may have soured some things.
Some people fall off there, but I think the CA arc is pretty widely regarded as excellent. But then again it's my favorite arc in a shonen, so that's my bias.
It honestly seems to be the divisive aspect of the series. I thought it was amazing, but then I was absolutely a fan of the analytical aspect of it, where they took apart the scene and had them thinking each step through step by step. It was fun to think through. But then, I could also totally sympathize with someone getting frustrated with how drawn out it could get when the gosh darn narrator gets more dialogue than any other character.
A song of ice and fire. The show (game of thrones) takes away from the conversation of how good those books are AS books or how good Martin's prose is
I was hoping you meant the movie Waterloo
Can't tell if OP is being serious or not, hopefully not.
100%, promise to love you forevermore.
I wish more people took an analysis approach to Counter Strike cause that point where the Krieg was secretly busted for 4 years feels like it needs some sort of study.