Flok Strips

Before I depart my decade as a twenty-ager, let's write down 1 final nostalgic post about the time when I used to draw and write my personal comics called Flok Strips as a teenager.

I was exceptionally bad at drawing characters then, and I still am now. I can copy someone's art by re-drawing it, but that's about it. That is why my comics, which is called stripboeken in Dutch, always featured characters which I could draw very easily.

These short stories would usually be about video game related themes, as I even recaptured the most memorable moments of the infamous Sony PlayStation E3 event from 2006, such as Old Snake pulling a gun inside his mouth, or the Genji 2 guy talking about crabs and massive damage.

Other comics would feature quizzes, ultra violence, mock high school life and many times, at several points I would be out of ideas on how to end the short stories, and I simply would let my characters suicide then, hah!

My main protagonist was Flok, who always was very hairy and had two very large front teeth, covering his entire mouth. Of course, I used to have two large teeth a very long time ago, and the comics exaggerated this.

Other characters included Killer, Flok's main rival, Absurdo, Joop Andersom and het Hoofd en Voeten, which frankly all hardly had personalities, heh. The comics would usually end after 4 frames so to speak.

I almost wanted to include a screenshot of one of these comics as an example, but I decided that this is a personal treasure of mine. Perhaps if you happen to meet me personally one day, then you too will be granted the privilege of experiencing the good old Flok Strips!

And with that said, I bid my teens and twenties farewell, and I look forward to the rest of my life!

Death Parade

Dead people are judged by arbiters to either be reincarnated or to enter the void.

Death Parade has style to it's games being played, and the intro song is nice, but most episodes are forgettable and don't offer much interesting content or satisfying climaxes.

As is the case for me personally, with anime, it's always a gamble as to how entertained and interested I will be, as I find the objective highly rated series very misleading. It's a true jungle out there.

Death Parade just turned into the shortest reviewed product on Flok Factory yet. Am I getting out of ideas?

Maybe it's time to rewatch Monster for a third time after all these years to remind me of my personal golden era of anime.

Rating: 6.0

Kingdom Hearts

Long ago in 2003, I bought this as a birthday gift towards my brother. As I borrowed it once, I never continued on when I was fighting in Monstro.

Now I have finally beaten it for the first time. The concept is exciting and it surprisingly works, Square Enix and Disney team up in order to bring you Kingdom Hearts, where Action RPG gameplay and Final Fantasy cameos meet the many worlds of Disney’s magical stories.

Combat is straightforward and Donald plus Goofy are likable, but I liked the soundtrack most of all(especially with all of the various battle themes), and the story with themes about darkness, light and hearts is okay and keeps the plot going. With optional challenges and a big enough of an adventure to venture through, Kingdom Hearts is a true surprise hit from 2002.

Rating: 8.3

Sora, Donald and Goofy go on a new adventure to find Riku and stop Organization XIII’s plans for domination, whom use the Nobodies as replacement for the Heartless.

KH II is improved with gameplay and customization, and the new Disney worlds are welcome additions next to the returning ones. The story is fine until it all gets convoluted near the climax, which apparently seems to be the status quo with this franchise.

After beating it I must say that I had about the same amount of fun as with the previous one, although the challenge is easier here. For now I will skip the other entries in this collection and return to them as well as the other compilation on the PS4 before Kingdom Hearts III arrives maybe this year!

Rating: 8.3 

And it should be no surprise by now that this franchise is infamous for it's convoluted story, but also it's horrible subtitles, such as "Final Chapter Prologue".

The Port Machine

After watching the latest Nintendo Direct, I can´t help but to label and criticize the company´s latest business model.

Although sales and third party are back on board, the amount of ports being made not only for the Nintendo Switch, but towards the Nintendo 3DS too, really make it way less interesting for me as I have pretty much played and beaten all of these before.

There are several definitions of what a port, a remake, a remaster and so on are, and in Nintendo´s case, they seem to either up the graphical scale, or add a minimum amount of new content, like Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze for the Switch for example.

Perhaps the worst feeling of dislike I now have is that essentially, at this point, the Wii U has become a black sheep of the family, just like the Virtual Boy. With only a handful of exclusive games on it left, why else would you ever want to be interested in one right now?

It's like porting over all of the exclusive and best N64 games to the Gamecube in a minimum of 2 years and pretend as if the N64 never happened, because that's what happening in my opinion with the Wii U and the Switch right now.

I thought that Nintendo would stop the production of 3DS games by late 2018, and focus on it's hybrid console from there on out and combine all of the developing teams, but instead almost the whole business at this moment  has become The Port Machine, and I don't like it.

I'm not forced to rebuy any of these, as I have them on my Wii U, and I know that new sequels and original content are happening, but this just became another reason for me to wait until I buy the Switch. E3 will certainly be a deciding factor depending on what else is announced.

But for now, I am definitely not feeling it, and I will go back to my PS4 for the time being, as Sony in my opinion and dare I say it, has a better flow of new exclusive releases than Nintendo has as I write this post. Let's see what happens next in 2018.