Joker Game – 03

I was going to make this a full announcement but seeing as most of it is already known I might as well include it here. I now have full admin rights to the site which means that I now pretty much run the place officially. I managed to get in contact with psgels with the help of a certain passerby and explained the situation. On matters of whether psgels is coming back or otherwise I am afraid I have no comment on the matter. EIther way I have done some minor things such as fixing the headers and adding some user account. I don’t plan on making any major changes other than maybe updating that shoutbox to a more useful version.(If I can find out where it is in the control panel. WordPress is a finicky thing.) Our second bit of news has already been announced by our new writer below. We now have a third writer on board by the name of Helghast. So what that basically means is more anime coverage for you guys. On matters of taking on any more new writers I am hesitant and would prefer to see how things go for a season or two. If we wish to take on new writers then we shall put up a post specifically asking for them and if that does happen I want to make it clear that you should know exactly what you are getting into. I don’t care for disappearing acts at this point. Right then, moving on.

Joker game is turning out to be more episodic than I expected as it looks like we will be following a series of small stories about the team rather than a continuous narrative. Though the escalation of World War II looks to be an ongoing background theme. Today’s story was a decent one though I heavily dislike the use of one of the oldest trope of fiction. Namely the Easy Amnesia trope. Our super spy loses his memory from a bonk on the head and then regains his memory from another bonk on the head. I am no expert but I can at least confirm that you do not regain memories by bashing your head a second time nor is it this easy to gain amnesia in the first place. Otherwise boxers would be a forgetful lot. I am a bit disappointed that Joker game is resorting to using this as a means to make this episode more interesting, especially when their are better alternatives.(Like maybe him faking amnesia) Well our amnesic japanese spy is in a Germany occupied France with three individuals who are with the French rebellion. The Germans are right on their tail with leaves mister Japanese Jason Bourne to make use of his particular set of skills to get everyone out of the predicament. Our new characters aren’t given much development as they really only feature in this episode but at least there was enough here to care about what was going on. Though the episode was essentially a wait for our secert agent to regain his memories and let us know just why he’s here and going through all this in the first place.

Another ridiculously far fetched plot point is that apparently spy school teaches you to embed your mission objectives into your subjective unconscious, just in case you happen to lose your memory on a mission. Hold the phone on that one Joker Game. I am willing to accept the elite spartan spy training school but that doesn’t mean you can use it to excuse everything. I would have just as easy accepted that he recalled his mission objectives due to it being the last thing on his mind before losing his memory. To say that he did it on purpose is pushing suspension of disbelief. It’s strange that they put this far fetched detail in when the end of this episode has a rather clever detail. Before entering the church our spy had one eye closed and he switched to his other eye once he entered. I thought it was a strange detail until I looked it up through reddit and found out that it’s a method of keeping your eye adjusted to the dark. Whats even more surprising is that this is the reason that pirates wore eyepatches. Not because they had some sort of strange habit of losing eyes. I also learned that real life pirates are significantly more boring than fictional ones. I still have a problem with the presentation which looks to be a byproduct of the original novel. It seems to assume the viewer cannot figure out anything themselves and decides to spell out as much as possible. I feel the story suffers as a result of this and if it’s going to continue then it could prove to grow rather irritating. The series still remains good and I am not exactly opposed to the episodic format. Though I would label this episode as just alright and I hope that these super spies don’t end up being overpowered.

~AidanAK47~