incalor Reviews

Caliphate (2020)

"A book that was written a thousand years ago"

[9/10 · 13 June 2020]

In an era when political correctness is the norm, Kalifat towers head and shoulders above its' counterparts. The normal narratives in secular media is that religious fundamentalism is not the root cause of terrorism, but poverty, oppression and other factors often mould people into terrorists. Kalifat rebuts such arguments by removing the mask of terrorism and underlying the backward ideologies beneath that lurk even within civil society like a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. The characters are diverse and their causes for embracing radical thinking are many. But the backdrop of their radicalism is not solely attributed to poverty or social ills. It is their unstinting and irrational belief in the backward teachings of a religion whose book the show boldly criticises as being "written a thousand years ago" that connects them all. Terror has a religion, religion is at fault for terrorism, though not all religious people are terrorists and even terrorists can turn a new leaf and awaken their inner humanity -- this is the message of the show.

Good acting is the bones on which the meat of the show finds its' support. The actors who played Husam, Pervin, Fatima and Suleiman in particular were fantastic. With a taut and gripping screenplay, and a terrific emotional drama, one can hope the show gets a second season.

Nioh (2017 Video Game)

Sengoku slasher done right...but only almost

[6/10 · 9 January 2020]

Nioh...what can one say about such a polarizing game? It had the potential to be one of the greatest games of all time, but ultimately it misses the mark.

Let's get the positives out of the way. Combat system is absolutely scintillating. This game has possibly the best combat in quite awhile. The 3 stances, the wide variety of Samurai, Ninjutsu and Onmyo skills, the Ki and Ki Pulse system, the dodging, blocking and parries...I could go on. It is a joy to experiment with such a combat system that is almost infinite in depth.

The story is quite good bar some cliches if you are able to appreciate the fact that the characters are based on historical figures. There is a certain thrill in claiming you bested the legendary Tachibana Muneshige or Oda Nobunaga, and an even bigger thrill in doing quests while being aided by the likes of the One-Eyed Dragon, Date Masamune as friendly NPCs. The showdown against Sanada where you have to pick off each of his Braves in the DLC was fantastic. William is relatable and the cutscenes are engaging. The bosses were varied and for the most part, well designed. However, a couple were designed in such a manner that they require the player to be 100% focused every second to avoid death, which sometimes made beating them a chore as opposed to being fun. But that is an insignificant gripe as you get gear to even things up.

Unfortunately, the positives stop there. Team Ninja had the recipe for greatness, but at some point, messed up in adding the ingredients. The level design is bad. And by bad, I mean horrible. And by horrible, like really, really dismal. Except for a couple of levels, there is literally no immersion, no joy in wading through the levels and some of the shortcuts (a clear attempt to mimic Dark Souls) are absurd. The blandness of the levels is compounded by the loot system. Besides involving tedious grinding, loot comes in what is basically a bunch of stats that you need to carefully shift through for affixing the best ones. Since you get gear from revenants, there is no need to go looking for the same loot in chests or corpses hidden in the levels, and this totally kills the joy of exploration. As you can see, level design problems are exacerbated by a lack of motivation to search for loot, and by a tedious loot system overall.

Which is further aggravated by a lack of enemy variety. You trudge through bland level after bland level, with no motivation for exploration, all the time facing just the same handful of enemies -- Dweller, Skeleton, Horned Yokai, Oni and Onyudu. These guys are literally in every level and there are few variations other than reskins. The point of a brilliant combat system is defeated when you have so few regular enemies to use it on. Limited enemy variety adds to the tedium created by poor level design.

The final stamp of mediocrity is the deliberate bloating of the game by a number of pointless side missions which reuse the same levels and same bosses over and over, or make you face 2 or 3 of the previous bosses together, just for the sake of difficulty. Not counting the twilight missions which again use the same map and bosses, with just higher difficulty. This really contributed to the game becoming a slog at the end, the fun evaporating altogether. The side missions could have been cut down to 2-3 per region which would have probably made the game less exasperating and papered over some of the negatives like poor level design.

The DLC and dual boss mission difficulties do not naturally flow from NG, but is scaled to a level that forces you to embark on a tedious grind for better gear to face them competently. This prolongs the already tedious game even further.

In conclusion, Nioh had many elements for greatness, but its' insistence on levels just being "arenas" as opposed to encouraging exploration and immersion, coupled with repetitiveness, limited enemy variety and a diablo inspired loot system, just fails on many more levels. I don't think Team Ninja have any intention to change a great deal in Nioh 2 as the game has performed well. It is certainly a pity, for all the game requires is a bit more polish and attention to details other than the combat. I give 4 points for the combat system alone, 1 point for cutscenes and NPCs inspired by historical figures, 1 for good boss design and 0 for every other aspect of the game to arrive at my 6 rating, which feels pretty fair for what this game offers.

Mardaani 2 (2019)

Hits home with all the subtlety of a sledge-hammer

[1/10 · 25 December 2019]

A major problem that Indian filmmakers have, be they from the North or South, is that a very few of them are capable of delivering their story without a heavy dose of exposition. Facts that would be obvious to the viewer are nonetheless explained pain-stakingly in dialogues just to make sure the viewer "gets" it. They treat the audience like children and are afraid the latter may not understand what they are trying to say, so they go the extra mile. Similarly, if the movie is about a rape or other such crime, the director is duty bound to give us long expositions on apathy, misogyny, etc rather than subtly hinting about them on screen.

For example, it was already established that senior members of the police force were sexist towards Shivani, and her forthright actions itself show that they were wrong to treat her that way. It is something quite simple to understand. So why include that unnecessarily long monologue on feminism? Rather than stating the obvious (which was established in previous scenes) in an obnoxious way and via a mountain of dialogues, the director could have chosen to flesh out the interactions between Rani and the misogynist cops and simply show her proving them wrong. Talk about pounding the truths in our heads with a sledge-hammer. Social messages should be woven into the story and screenplay rather than devoting separate scenes of needless exposition on facts we already know.

The rest of the movie is plagued by plot holes. We watch in disbelief as the antagonist crossdresses as a woman, barges in on a highly sensitive police meeting, hires random beggars and tea boys to do his dirty work quite easily and even gets away with threatening politicians. The movie is just an emotional mess, and the final scenes doubly confirm that.

Again, Indian filmmakers rarely have come to grips with this genre of filmmaking and lag far behind their Hollywood, European and other Asian counterparts in constructing cat-and-mouse chases. I can only think of 2 exceptions to thos rule in Kahaani (Hindi) and Ratchasan (Tamil) which were excellently made without any of the flaws mentioned above. We need more of those, not Mardaani 2.