NWR fanboys galore.
Last Saturday, I got the chance to read This is Not a Review of Ace Attorney, Pandareus blog post on the movie adaptation of Phoenix Wright's first adventure on the DS, at the Montreal Fantasia film festival. I'm a fairly big fan of the author, although I still haven't gotten around to reading his Brawl in the Family thread. I've always had a thing for off-the-wall gaming observations and the goofy Pandareus threads scratched an itch that had been annoying me since Svevan abandoned the genre.
I appreciate the why, what and who of those threads, but that's as far as I go. It should be no surprise that I was not, by a long shot, the biggest Pandareus fan on the forums. There were actually relatively few comments but I'm not talking about that. No, I'm referring to the incredible cheering in the talkback section whenever a familiar character was spotted, when the Nintendo World Report logo showed up, or the first time we see the words "Phoenix Wright". The atmosphere in the thread was absurd. And the cheering even doubled in volume whenever Pandareus either a) showed up, b) was glowering or c) was acting cocky. It was constant.
I was surrounded by Pandareus fanboys and fangirls.
The reason why I'm describing this experience is because it contributed so much to my enjoyment of the thread. That kind of wild enthusiasm is infectious and I perhaps would not have been grinning so widely and for so long had it not been for the crowd I was a part of.
Now I am not gearing up to say that the thread was bad or a letdown. It wasn't. Fans should definitely seek it out and read it, preferably with a bunch of other fans if at all possible. The comments alone are almost worth the price of admission: they are incredibly faithful to the original topic and anyone familiar with the forums will get a kick out of seeing a thread stay so close to the topic’s inspiration. Khushrenada, in particular, was spot-on and got the highest applaud-to-posting ratio of all the commenters.
Ultimately, though, I could not shake the feeling that while the fan service in the thread is beyond reproach, the author should perhaps have concerned himself a little bit more about making a thread that stands on its own. It was necessary to take shortcuts to fit the review of a damn long movie into a 758 word post, but that was done at the expense of coherency, pacing and follow-up commenting development. If I had attachment for the commenters, it is more due to the fact that I was already familiar with them than to any attempt by the thread to make them engaged in the topic. Perhaps it goes without saying, but familiarity with the source material is a must in order to get the most enjoyment out of this thread. If you're planning to read this with others who don't know the first thing about Pandareus and his not a review thread, do try to get them to read a sentence or two from that original post.
I also couldn't help but be disappointed with some of the choices made even though I understand they were necessary to keep the thread length under control. C-Olimar and Pololmejor got very little screen time, the thread choosing instead to focus more on Pandareus (understandably), famicomplicated (duh), Khushrenada (obviously) and... Kairon (hmm). The mods seemed to really like him for some reason, giving him relatively more importance in this thread than he has in the entire forums. Given that the character is meant to be somewhat obnoxious, he gets old quick. He gets the role of comedic relief in a thread that is already goofy and funny enough to not need it. Meanwhile, Davoid is barely a forum user and Kairon doesn't once get threatened to have his account banned by NWR_Neal.
All in all, I had a good enough time to recommend the thread to fans and I definitely think they are being catered to enough to warrant reading it once. At the same time, so much of my enjoyment of the thread stemmed from the forum users I read it with that I have no plans to ever read it again. It was an experience that I won't be able to replicate and I would rather keep the good memories that it gave me than revisit the thread only to discover just how much it does not hold up.
Topic: This is Not a Review of This is Not a Review of Ace Attorney (Read 2127 times)
