Live or Dai, Make Your Choice (original) (raw)

Here are two reviews, with several SPOILERS.

Saw X – After the last movie in the series didn’t use Tobin Bell as John Kramer at all (except in a photograph), this one is all about him. And instead of using a lot of flashbacks, it takes place between the first two movies, and is surprisingly straightforward. Kramer goes to Mexico for an experimental cancer treatment that turns out to be a scam, so he does his typical trap thing with the people running the fake clinic. Amanda shows up to help him, and apparently takes the doll and tricycle to Mexico with her. Most of the traps are made out of medical equipment, and as is often the case, they’re pretty gruesome. One guy has to remove a piece of his brain. Since the people being tortured are taking advantage of the vulnerable, they deserve it a lot more than some of his previous victims. The lady in charge of the scam provides a foil for Jigsaw, being surprisingly resourceful and having no real moral code, as opposed to a twisted but still somewhat consistent one. At one point, she makes a rope out of someone’s intestines, which seems like something from an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon. The trap that sucks out someone’s eyeballs is also along those lines.

Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai – I read a fan translation of the manga some years ago. I understand there’s now an official translation, but I don’t know that I’d need to read it again, although I’m curious about how it’s different. This is actually the second anime adaptation; I haven’t watched the first one. This show is one hundred episodes long, and I’ve watched it a few different ways over time. About half of the episodes were subtitled on HBO Max, then I saw some on Crunchyroll before they stopped offering them for free, and finally the last ones dubbed on Hulu. At least as far as I remember the story, which is pretty convoluted, it’s a faithful adaptation. I’ve heard they toned down some of the more perverse stuff, like with the wizard Matoriv, who’s slightly less of a dirty old man in this adaptation.

One thing that struck me was how often the characters talk to each other during battle, often giving away their strategies. A fair number of the villains have a sense of honor that might have something to do with this, but maybe it’s also an attempt to show a turn-based battle in real time. It’s big on special attacks that you couldn’t do in the games at that point, but they became more of a thing in later games. And everyone calls out the names of those techniques quite often.

Over time, there are a lot of characters who appear, some of them accompanying the main party for a while, and most of them showing up again towards the end.

I’d forgotten about the martial arts master who disguised himself by wearing a sheet, and called himself Mr. Beast.

Isn’t that also the alias of some dude on YouTube? I guess Brokeena did it first, though.

This entry was posted in Cartoons, Comics, Dragon Quest, Focus on the Foes, Humor, Magic, Monsters, Television, Video Games, VoVat Goes to the Movies and tagged anime, brokeena, dai no daibouken, hulu, manga, matoriv, morality, saw x, the adventure of dai, tobin bell, wizards. Bookmark the permalink.