prismatic

Never watched the Critical Role campaigns myself, just watched most of Vox Mach and now this. (No spoilers for S2 if you’ve watched the campaign I’m presuming this is based off of, please.)

Having watched the campaign, I'm actually not sure what they're going to do in Season 2. They have made a lot of changes. Some plot threads are happening much faster while others are much slower in weird ways. It's very strange in ways I can't detail without going into spoilers.

Anyway.

I like this a lot more than Vox Machina. That felt like a very unfocused parody and the humour just wasn't landing. A lot of that same humour is still here - but it works much better contained mostly to a comic relief character.

Also while the changes feel weird, the substantial rewrites I think make for a better TV narrative structure overall where as Vox Machina seemed more faithful to it's detriment. I realise I've only talked about the changes that didn't really hit for me below, but I do think overall it's for the better.

The Tiefling Circus performer (of apparently many names) Molly, fun character but having no memory felt a bit too “hand-wavy” at times. Nice tool to use for the GM but, eh… not my personal cup of tea in a character.

Yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about Molly either. He's used for really clumsy foreshadowing and broody introspection which just wasn't the case in the campaign. He didn't really care about his past, and that stuff didn't really come up until much, much later. It honestly makes me wonder if they're just going to cut out like 80% of the campaigns middle arcs and try to weld the ends together.

I’m a bit disinterested in the Beacon as this end-all-be-all overpowered contrivance. Hoping there is indeed more to it than seems. Bit of allusion that it could be so, we’ll see?

The beacon seems to be a fumble here. In the campaign, they stumble upon it at about the same point but with little clue of it's significance. When we do learn about it, it's not through the lens of Ikithon, who thinks in terms of power and practical usage which strips it of any intrigue, but as a cosmic mystery and an item of religious significance. You get something like Ikithon's perspective towards the end of the campaign from Essek, but even then it was posing questions, which are currently just absent.

Some of the voice acting, particularly outside the main cast was amazing.

Wow, I just looked up the guest stars for this and it's honestly crazy. Here's just some of them:

• Alan Cumming

• Nathan Fillion

• Jonathan Frakes

• Lucy Liu

• Ming-Na Wen

What the hell are they doing in this?

Very cool, though the quality leaves a bit to be desired.

For popularity>0, we got close to all tracks on the platform. The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s. Metadata was added without reencoding the audio (and an archive of diff files is available to reconstruct the original files from Spotify, as well as a metadata file with original hashes and checksums).

For popularity=0, we got files representing about half the number of listens (either original or a copy with the same ISRC). The audio is reencoded to OGG Opus at 75kbit/s — sounding the same to most people, but noticeable to an expert.

The slop ratio hasn't gotten better from abandoning that format.

There is some recency bias, but Pluribus as well. It's the only water cooler show I've come across in years where people actually want to talk about in real life.

Firefly, even after the deluge of post-marvel Whedonesque slop that has worn away some of the charm of the banter. Only a little bit though, it's fortunately not quite the same.

It managed to slip in just before they killed off episodic story telling for genre shows, but just after there was a very noticeable increase in production quality. So it's got that rewatch factor nothing made after like 2005 has but without my girlfriend rolling her eyes at sets and costumes that were designed to be viewed on a tiny 4:3 CRT.

Obviously there were other episodic genre shows made in this weird interstitial period but none have nearly as many banger episodes, even those that got additional seasons.

Maybe hot take but I'm still interested in Zero Parades, despite ZA/UM being stolen. A CRPG about a spy who is a burn out is extremely my shit and it's one of the few studios that have unionized.