AP2 Draft 7, Chapters 1-10: COMPLETE!

There’s almost no need for AP2 news at this point. It’s just ‘I’m fixing minor mistakes and making small tweaks everywhere.’

Although I suppose there is news with my editor friend Kim: she got diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and has to have chemo treatments for six months. I guess that’s why she hasn’t felt like editing these latest drafts. 🙁

She wants people to pray for her, so please do so. I’m sure someone is reading this, right?

Anyway, let’s start the reviews.

Time for season three of Stargate SG-1 and Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth!

S3;E1: Into the Fire – Ugh, last season ended with a CLIP SHOW cliffhanger of all things. Thankfully THIS season starts out great.

We now see multiple SG teams go to rescue the captured Jack and SG-1, but Hathor has some crazy defenses ERUPT from the ground when they try to escape. Yes, her Stargate is protected by Egyptian-style obelisks topped with laser beam turrets.

It all ends with Teal’c and General Hammond himself piloting a Goa’uld ship, blowing away the turrets while shouting ‘YEEEEEE-HAA!’

I risked seeing spoilers to find it on YouTube, but I think you’ll agree it was worth the danger.

S3;E2: Seth – Whoa, one of the Goa’ulds never left Earth. His name is Seth, and he brainwashes people into joining his cult.

The most important part of this episode is that they explain the brainwashing as a being caused by a machine that can only be reversed by an electric shock. This FIXES the dumb resolution to how Teal’c’s son was saved from the vague brainwashing last season. Nice job, guys! 😘

S3;E3: Fair Game – Thor beams Jack up to his battlecruiser to tell him some bad news: The entire Earth is going to be destroyed by the Goa’uld. Yes, these alien warlords are sick of being killed all the time and NOT being worshipped.

Luckily, Thor offers to mediate a treaty that says the Asgardians will protect Earth. Unluckily, it’s a bluff because the Asgardians are currently fighting a WORSE enemy over in their home galaxy.

Also unluckily, the peace talks are sabotaged. Turns out one of the Goa’uld system lords are using cloaking devices to cause chaos and frame Teal’c for murder. LUCKILY the SG crew dealt with this tech already last season so they can reveal the villain. Afterwards, the Goa’uld are practically begging to sign the deal.

But they only agree to keep away from Earth. If any humans are found on other worlds they’re… FAIR GAME. 😎

S3;E4: Legacy – My goodness. MORE horrible parasites that wiggle around inside people. Why? Why did we need MORE OF THEM!? Is this Stargate’s legacy!?

S3;E5: Learning Curve – This is another one that had me thinking ‘where is this going?’ We start off on the most boring planet ever. They’re advanced, but the children here learn through nanites that invade their brains and store the information. Then they’re drained of their knowledge and the nanites are spread to the adults. “Learning.”

Jack is horrified that the ‘donor’ children are nearly brain-dead after the process, so he takes one of the children out to a school so they can learn how to play and have fun. The child is still taken to used as a donor for the planet’s knowledge, however. I was left thinking: what a feel-bad episode that was!

And then that ending hit. The SG team goes back to the planet, where the new knowledge has now spread. All the kids—previously emotionless—are now drawing on walls, skipping around, and just having fun. Jack taught an entire race of humans how to enjoy life. Even the previously-stoic adult pulls out a piece of paper and proudly shows off his stick drawing. So good.

S3;E6: Point of View – I guess we’re doing the mirror universe thing again, just like in Deep Space Nine. It’s the usual goodness, with the SG-1 team going to save the mirror world with Teal’c pretending to be his ‘evil’ counterpart on the other side.

My favorite scene is when they lose track of their home dimension through the mirror and Daniel tries to locate it again. As he’s flipping through the various realities he stops at one where Sam is waiting for him. He’s about to go through when he notices her rank—it reads captain. Too bad she was promoted to major in the Fair Game episode! Daniel makes a ‘whoopsie’ gesture and leaves the other Sam wondering why she got the shaft. 😆

S3;E7: Deadman Switch – And like ‘The Outrageous Onoka’ episode of Trek, we now have our very own ‘rogue with a heart of gold’ on Stargate. And like Onoka, I really hope this guy doesn’t come back. 😑

S3;E8: Demons – One of the Goa’uld system lords decided he doesn’t WANT to be a deity. No, he wants to be Satan! 😲

A pretty straightforward ‘evil pastor’ episode, even though I didn’t see the final twist coming. I was really just hoping the episode was over, honestly.

S3;E9: Rules of Engagement – Apophis may be dead, but his evil plan to train a bunch of human teenagers to infiltrate SG command lives on! But how will SG-1 get these kids to stop their deadly wargames training!?

Why, they show them the clip of Apophis dying from last season! Good thing Dr. Fraiser taped it. 🙄

S3;E10: Forever in a Day – Whoa, whoa. We’re getting our ‘Inner Light’ episode already!? Well, not exactly. Daniel finally catches up with his wife, Sha’re, who is still possessed by Amunet. As she brain-blasts him with the ‘ribbon device’ on her hand, Teal’c rushes into the tent and blows HER away with his staff.

Over the course of his remaining lifetime, Daniel first blames Teal’c for her death and then quits SG-1. But with Sha’re appearing to him as a spectral figure, she teaches him to not only forgive Teal’c… but to forgive himself. Then it turns out that Daniel has not really lived out another lifetime, but that it’s all occurring within the moment that he’s getting mind-blasted. Because the love from his wife carries through the beam somehow.

Oops, did I say lifetime? I meant like a week. Daniel lived out a week’s time in a day. He still learned to forgive Teal’c and let his wife go, however. See? You can learn lessons without being hijacked by alien probes for entire decades.

S3;E11: Past and Present – Wow, the ‘destroyer of worlds’ lady from the ‘Prisoners’ episode actually came back. I won’t explain it all here, but I really enjoyed this one.

And again, I LOVE how this show respects its own continuity. Escaped bad guys ALWAYS return. Missing wives ALWAYS get found and/or blasted to death. And any tech that the SG teams discover is—ZOUNDS—actually used in later episodes instead of being conveniently forgotten! (Looking at you, every Trek series.)

S3;E12: Jolinar’s Memories – Who came up with such a tame title for this one? The SG-1 team GOES TO HELL! Yes, the evil Goa’uld that wants to be Satan actually terraformed an entire planet to resemble Hell: complete with rivers of lava and cages full of people screaming.

Sam’s dad has been captured and taken to this infernal place, and she must rely on Jolinar’s titular memories to find a way to escape the Hell planet.

S3;E13: The Devil You Know – The supervillain Bullseye, clad in a knockoff Daredevil costume, is terrorizing New York City! Can Matt Murdock put an end to Dexter’s rampage before his superhero persona is besmirched forever!? And will Foggy ever confess his love to Karen Page?

No, I’m only kidding. This episode is a continuation of ‘Jolinar’s Memories.’ Not only does Satan finally appear, but Apophis reveals himself to be alive! He’s back with a new Cyborg Superman look, and he takes over Satan’s forces and begins his conquest of the galaxy anew!

Also, Sam’s dad is saved and the SG-1 crew escapes hell with Teal’c’s help. What a memory.

S3;E14: Foothold – Uh oh! An alien race took over the Cheyanne Mountain Complex while SG-1 was off-world! They’ve put everyone into gooey pods! And the aliens are now disguised as the captured humans! And only Teal’c, unaffected by the knock-out juice, can SAVE THE DAY!

It’s a wild one. A+

S3;E15: Pretense – Skaara, Jack’s little buddy from the Stargate film, has finally been found again. But first Jack has to play lawyer and get him off the hook from an alien court. There’s only one thing these aliens want to decide: does the human host keep the body, or the Goa’uld inside? With a Nox mediating things, Jack argues the meaning of life against a Goa’uld ‘prosecutor.’

Of course the trial is completely meaningless, YET AGAIN, because Teal’c found out that the Goa’uld were sabotaging the trial and planning to take over the planet anyway. 🙄

But hey, at least Skaara is back for good, free from the parasite! (Even though I have NEVER seen him again. I’m on season four as I write this.) 🤨

S3;E16: Urgo – See, this is why I love watching these shows blind. In this episode, Dom DeLuise shows up as an AI imaginary friend. He was installed, along with a tracker, into the brains of the SG-1 team.

I also just realized that Peter DeLuise, of 21 Jump Street fame, is Dom’s son. Peter is also the guy I keep seeing as an extra in various episodes, AND he’s been directing and writing episodes. I never would have guessed that THIS is how the actor turned out. 😅

S3;E17: A Hundred Days – Gotta be kidding me. ANOTHER ‘Inner Light’ type episode? I guess the twist here is that Jack is stranded on another planet for a few months… and it’s all real! No probes or mind tricks! It all starts when the alien planet’s stargate is buried by meteors. Now Jack is trapped, and must live the life of a simple farmer along with a widowed woman.

Teal’c, of course, comes to the rescue eventually. Jack must then make the hard choice to leave the woman behind that he’s been living with all this time. As a single person, I’m not exactly moved by this sort of thing, but I was intrigued by the part where they had to build a particle accelerator and fire it through the Stargate in order to rescue Jack.

And it was Sam who worked all those long hours to build it! Now that’s gotta be true love, right? Look, I have to guess, here! 🥰

S3;E18: Shades of Grey – Jack’s had enough! It’s season three and ALL of their alien allies have just been so STINGY with their technology! So on a visit to the super-advanced human world, Jack just rips a cool machine out of the wall and brings it back to Earth with him.

General Hammond is furious, and offers Jack another early retirement as opposed to a court-martial. ‘This is the final episode of Stargate SG-1.’

Turns out it’s all a ploy: Jack is soon approached by Maybourne and is offered a job at his secret, EVIL stargate program. Jack pretends to reluctantly join, then he dismantles the organization from the inside.

Even though I could guess what was happening after a certain point, it was still cool to see how this evil team was set up. With the second Earth stargate locked down now, the evil stargaters were based off-world. Then they’d go and steal all the alien tech they wanted from THEIR stargate.

Jack then asks the question: how do you get this stuff back to Earth? They happily explain that there’s a ‘man on the inside’ at Cheyanne Mountain Complex. Whenever he’s about to go on a mission, he uses a Goa’uld communicator orb to contact the evil team. Then they hurry to the planet first and drop off the goods in a secret spot.

What I DIDN’T guess was that almost EVERYONE was in on the scam. Hammond. The aliens from the start of the episode. Even THOR shows up in his battlecruiser to help ‘clean up’ the evil team.

The only people NOT in on Jack’s fake retirement are the rest of SG-1. Poor Sam and Daniel really thought Jack went crazy for who knows how many weeks. 😂

S3;E19: New Ground – Some humans on another planet dig up their stargate for the first time. However, their world is currently at war. There are two sides: those that believe they were created by the Goa’uld, and those that believe they were brought though a Stargate by wormhole aliens. So the stargate being found is a problem for the pro-Goa’uld faction.

S3;E20: Maternal Instinct – Uh, what was this one again? Oh, right, Daniel finds his wife’s baby at some temple somewhere. (Apophis was the father.) He goes through some mystic training where he learns that the child is best left with the guardian of the temple. Whatever.

S3; E21: Kingdom of the Next Phase – Daniel finds a Crystal Skull, just like in that famous episode of Trek. THEN he’s phased out of reality, just like that infamous Indiana Jones film.

S3;E22: Nemesis – Thor suddenly beams up Jack to his battlecruiser. Our favorite alien buddy has been injured and says “Remember that enemy I told you about that was greater than the Goa’uld? They took over my ship, flew it to Earth, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” 😬

These new enemies are called replicators, and they look like little toy spiders that eat matter and transform it into more toy spiders. Their plan is to replicate to obscene numbers, then land the battlecruiser on Earth for conquest.

I’m not sure why the Goa’uld have taken a backseat to tinkertoys, but I’m sure there’s a good reason. 🤨

 

Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth – I played the first part, Remake, on Steam. It was good, but there were some big problems. Nevertheless, I put the sequel, Rebirth, on my Steam wish list. 😅

So then Matt, being the pal that he is, gifts me Rebirth for Christmas. However, my laptop is over ten years old at this point, and the game doesn’t even run.

So then SquareEnix, being the pals that THEY are, release Rebirth on Switch 2. Hubba hubba. The ‘grass clutter’ on the ground may pop in, but it still looks way better than I was expecting.

So how is the game itself? It’s quite an improvement. First of all, the game is set up kind of like Xenoblade Chronicles: you’ve got a large open area to play around in with a ‘main story dungeon’ blocking off the path to the next open area. The game continues like this until the end, and for the most part you can backtrack to previous areas to complete quests or whatever you missed. And I love Xenoblade, so this was a big improvement over the limited Midgar hallways of Remake.

Second, the battle system has been improved. In the first game every enemy took pitiful damage until you filled their stagger meter. Then the enemy would actually become staggered, and you could FINALLY use your skills and magic to damage them.

This game keeps the same stagger system, BUT they added a ‘pressure’ status to the enemies. And when an enemy is pressured, their stagger fills up FAST. What makes this interesting is that EVERY enemy has a different way to become pressured. Some need you to block attacks. Some need you to dodge. Other enemies just need to take damage from specific elements.

The ‘pressuring’ keeps you doing different things for every fight, and I was never bored by it.

Aaaaand, I just checked to see if this pressure system was in Remake too. It was? Gotta me kidding me. Why didn’t it feel as good in that game? It took forever to kill anything. Whatever. This game fixed it. Somehow. 😅

It also helps that you have a full party from the very beginning of the game. Yes, you get to start off with Cloud, Barret, Tifa, Red XIII, and Aerith. (After a flashback tutorial area.) Sometimes the game does split up the party, but all the characters are fun to play as this time, so I didn’t mind. (The only one I didn’t like playing as was Cait Sith. His section of the game was a box-tossing nightmare.) 😣

The bosses are all fine for the most part. The only battles I didn’t really like much were the ‘duels’ where you only have ONE character to fight with. It just got so tedious tossing potions and sneaking in damage while constantly dodging.

And the dodging does NOT have invincibility frames. I guess they made it that way since you can just ‘spam’ the dodge button, but it feels so bad to dodge only to get hit because Barret slowly rolls like one foot away from the enemy attack. 😑

The game devs do have mercy, however: there are adjustable difficulty levels and even a cheat mode! The cheats are called ‘streamlined settings,’ and I used them a few times to streamline my way past some of the more annoying mini-games.

And there are quite a few mini-games. The mini-games required for story progress aren’t that bad. They’re lenient. But the side quests have tons of mini-games. Some have you play strategy battles. Other have you kill cactuars while death metal music plays. But my favorite was:

Queen’s Blood – I was so happy to see the collectible card games return from FF8 and FF9! This one is different, but it might be the best. And everything I hated about the previous FF card games has been removed! Now, every person you can play against is marked on the map. And they’re all waiting for you INSIDE TOWNS. No more missing cards because you didn’t challenge some random NPC on Lunatic Pandora.

And no more LOSING cards either if you get beaten. I mean, I’d just reset the game anyway. 😅

There is also a STORYLINE for the card game. The sudden static after a certain match actually shocked me. Then I got a cutscene of some tormented man rambling about the dangers of the cards he created. I couldn’t believe they were going the way of YuGiOh! and introducing an evil entity that plays cards, but I was ‘here for it’ as they say. 😆

The actual story – My main complaint with Remake was that there was too much filler. BAD filler. I was like “Why are we bogging down the story with an hours-long mission to pick up frickin’ BLASTING CAPS!?” I had been hoping that if new story content was added, it would flesh out the characters and ideas that mattered. But Remake loved spending time with NPCs that were just going to die and never be seen again.

Rebirth fixes that. Most of the extra filler involving dumb NPCs is limited to side questing. And thankfully the main story barely deviates from the original game. Most of the extra stuff expands on lore and even helps explain things that the original FF7 didn’t.

Like the Gi. You know, the evil spirits attacking Cosmo Canyon? Or maybe you don’t remember them because they barely got an explanation in the original. But in Rebirth you get an entire dungeon where their whole Gi history is explained and the origin of the black materia is revealed. (Although the enemies there were a pain.)

The ending was quite strange, however. I assume the final game, out next year, will explain all of that weirdness. And I looked it up: that final boss had TWELVE phases. Whew! Guys, save some for the finale! 😆

 

Supernatural S12 – Yes, it’s time. Although I only watched about six episodes so far. 😅

S12; E1: Keep Calm and Carry On – Uh, what was going on again? Right! Some British lady shot Sam. Except he’s just wounded. She takes him somewhere to interrogate him about how things are done in the States.

I’m not really into torture scenes, but there is some other stuff going on. The bros’ mom is back alive for some reason. I think God’s sister did that. Forgot her name.

Crowley is also doing something. Trying to be King of Hell again? Gosh, this is not a thrilling start to the season.

S12; E2: Mamma Mia – Lucifer takes over the body of some Rolling Stones reject. Again, I totally forgot what Lucifer’s situation was, but he’s still kicking, just like those rock groups tend to do!

Sam, still being tortured, has to endure love potions and other mind-numbing spells. He pretends to kill himself, goading the British lady in close, then he lashes out in an attempt to escape. He doesn’t quite make it, but that’s when good ‘ol Dean and mom show up to give that gimboid a good and proper smegging! (That’s how British people talk. Trust me; I’ve watched a lot of Red Dwarf.)

S12; E3: The Foundry – I guess it’s time for monsters of the week already? This time it’s some weird ghost that keeps kid ghosts around inside a house. While the bros fumble around, clueless, their mom hits the streets. To the bros’ horror, she doesn’t know about the internet and does things the old fashioned way—by talking to people!

Then in true Winchester fashion, she gets all angsty and LEAVES HER SONS at the end of the episode. Ha,ha,ha… what in the world? 🤣

S12; E4: American Nightmare – Does the title refer to this season of Supernatural?

S12; E5: The One You’ve Been Waiting For – Okay, here we go! I’ve been waiting for this one! I didn’t know about it, but after watching the Hellsing anime, I think I’m ready for a plot about necromancer Nazis resurrecting Hitler!

I always thought it was so weird that the show introduced a secret division of occult Nazis… for one episode. I mean, you could make a whole season out of that!

And the props for this episode were first-class. There was a scene with an ENTIRE ROOM full of Nazi paraphernalia. They even had one of those ‘Hitler Youth’ uniforms on a child-sized mannequin.

And the resurrection scene itself took place in a hangar with WW2 planes just parked inside. It was wild.

But anyway, the Nazis needed one of Hitler’s descendants to revive him. Or rather, their blood. They find and kidnap Hitler’s grand-niece and transfuse her blood into one of the remaining Nazi leaders. As Hitler assumes full control of the body, he shocks everyone as it seems he has also assumed the traits of a teenage girl!

As Hitler squeals about taking over the world with Twitter, Dean shoots him dead.

S12; E6: Celebrating the Life of Asa Fox – Some random hunter named Asa Fox dies, and the bros and Jody go to his wake. Turns out this Asa Fox was a near legend, and a large group of hunters gather to honor his memory.

Ah, hunters. Remember those guys? We used to see them all the time in early seasons, then they just kind of stopped showing up. A good portion of the episode is just hunters hanging out, and I was fine with that. Of course the bros’ mom shows up, causing some drama. Then a demon shows up and starts killing people. Can’t be all fun.

The demon they fight seems a tad bit too powerful here, though. At one point the fiend used some super-gravity spell to flatten down every single person in the room, including the Winchesters. I thought they said this was just some crossroads demon? I’ve never even seen CROWLEY do anything like that. 🤔

And the demon possesses the other hunters easily. Did the bros not let anyone else know about the anti-possession tattoos? The hunters in the episode weren’t rookies—they were casting spells and even had an angel blade. The tattoo seems like it should be a basic hunter thing.

That’s as far as I got for now. Have a great Independence Day weekend! Or if you’re that British lady, have a great “Smeg! We lost the colonies, Blackadder!”