Review: Jack of All Trades

There's a laundry list of reasons why one should accept USA Network's excellent dramedy Burn Notice as a legitimately good show, one of which is the fact that it generally doesn't take itself seriously. This lets the program deliver something that you enjoy, and in fact take seriously, while not having to put up with any arrogance on the show's part. This quasi-meta quality is embodied most noticeably in the casting of Bruce Campbell as Sam, Michael Westen's wisecracking, boozy ex-SEAL friend. Campbell is actually a very good actor, and he lends everything he does a winking-at-the-camera quality that prevents the stuff he's in from becoming ponderous. So on those rare occasions when Burn Notice is in danger of realizing just how good it is as a legitimate drama (most notably in both season finales thus far), there's always Bruce Campbell to steer it away. (That may sound like a backhanded compliment, but I assure you that I am legitimately praising Campbell's work.)

I mention this because it should give the viewer an idea of what Jack of All Trades is all about. It's a show starring (and produced by) Bruce Campbell and executive produced in part by Sam Raimi, uber-campy director of the Evil Dead and Spider-man movies. From this alone, we can gather that it goes to great lengths to make fun of itself. Indeed, it's so campy that you can't help but like it, particularly because it is in large part a vehicle for the one-liners that Campbell is so famous for: Campbell makes his first entrance by punching down a door and saying "sorry, I was gonna knock, but my fist had other ideas." Incidentally, another executive producer of the show was Alex Kurtzman, who has helped write any number of legitimately good TV shows and films, including J.J. Abrams' reboot of Star Trek.

Jack of All Trades was a half-hour live-action show that debuted as half of the short-lived Back2Back Action Hour on WB's Saturday night TV block, way back when I was in middle school. This was back when Xena and Hercules were successful on-air Saturday night shows. The other half-hour program in the block was called Cleopatra 2525, and all I remember about it is: A) it was rubbish, B) it was about a girl from our time who somehow ended up fighting in some sort of ultra-low-budget resistance in the year 2525, and C) it is the first time I ever recall seeing Gina Torres, who went on to play Zoe in Firefly/Serenity.

As you can imagine, the plot of Jack of All Trades was utterly ludicrous. Campbell plays Jack Stiles, an American secret agent in the year 1801 who is sent by President Jefferson to Palu Palu, a French-administered island in the West Indes. He is teamed up with Emilia Rothschild, a British secret agent played by Angela Dotchin, in order to disrupt the French rule. They are, of course, love interests, though Stiles is immature, boozy, and a womanizer. But when push comes to shove and rebellion needs to be fomented, Stiles ducks off-screen and becomes the Daring Dragoon, hero of the people, enemy to the incompetent Governor Croque. Emilia assists by running a wealthy import/export company and by inventing all sorts of crazy things such as (I kid you not) a submarine, a bulletproof cloak, love potion, and so on. As this suggests, it is a historical fantasy in the extreme, so much so that it is absolutely impossible for any person to take this seriously.

And therein lies the charm. Jack of All Trades goes so far out on a limb that it figures it may as well jump off. The show uses its historical setting to go absolutely nuts with history. For example, one recurring character is Napoleon, played by Verne Troyer. You may know him as Mini-me from the Austin Powers movies. Yes, a midget plays Napoleon. He's power-mad, horny, and comes up with increasingly ludicrous plots to take over the world, including building the Statue of Liberty as a Trojan Horse. Other guest characters include Blackbeard, Lewis and Clark (who have no sense of direction), Ben Franklin (who is a useless drunk) and King George III. Clearly, historical accuracy is not something that is aimed for here, which is fine: everything is done with a tongue-in-cheek attitude that always makes the show amusing, though not necessarily hilarious.

Past that, there's really not much more to say about Jack of All Trades. It was shot in New Zealand, so the outdoor scenes are quite lovely, and every plotline is always resolved neatly in twenty-two minutes. The writing vascillates between "quite good" and "reaching for the low-hanging fruit," but is still superior to most other half-hour shows. The action scenes are decent enough, considering this and Cleopatra 2525 were the first attempts at making live-action half-hour action shows since the 1970s, though I'd have to say that Jack of All Trades is more accurately described as a comedy.

So then, if you're a Bruce Campbell fan this is required viewing. If you're looking for something amusing to kill half an hour every now and again, this is definitely worth a Netflix or a torrent. But if you are not a diehard Campbell fan, you should definitely try it before you buy the complete series DVD set (all 28 episodes). Still, a very fun show that is equally happy to let you laugh at it as it is to let you laugh with it.

Review: Super Robot Taisen OG Saga Endless Frontier (DS)

The Super Robot Taisen series is one of those uniquely Japanese series that've been around forever in Japan, but are virtually unknown Stateside. In fact, besides this title, I can only think of two other Super Robot Taisen titles to be released in this market, both of which were GBA titles released a couple months after the DS hit streets in the US.

The point of the series is much like Namco vs. Capcom, another Japan-only title: an independent series with some original characters, but with prominent characters from other series making cameos or acting as playable characters. In this case it's Reiji and Xiaomu, the main characters from Namco vs. Capcom, and KOS-MOS from Namco-Bandai's Xenosaga. Reiji and Xaiomu haven't appeared in any games to be released in the US, but KOS-MOS was in the Xenosaga trilogy, itself a prequel to Xenogears (my favorite-ever videogame, incidentally).

Previous Super Robot Taisen titles have been standard 2-D strategy games with heavy JRPG elements, but this breaks with that tradition. Instead, it is a sort of hybrid between your everyday turn-based JRPG and rhythm games. When you attack, you launch your opponent into the air and try to keep him in the air with subsequent attacks. The more hits, the better, and if you have a teammate on your side you can tag him or her in when you're done. It's a difficult system to explain, but remarkably intuitive to use. More importantly, it is an absolute blast to play -- I've played for about 16 hours so far and I haven't even started to grow bored with it.

Other than that, Super Robot Taisen plays like a standard JRPG. There's magic, items, shops, a world map, and so on and so forth. You dungeon crawl, fight bosses, and do all the stereotypical JRPG stuff. Which is fine by me; my love for JRPGs of all shapes and sizes is quite well-known.Graphically, Super Robot Taisen isn't anything to write home about. Indeed, they are just unsophisticated enough to suggest to me that this was originally a GBA game, a notion that is supported by the complete absence of touch screen support. The world map/dungeon exploration graphics are simple in the extreme, though there is much more detail in the battle screens, which are reminiscent of higher-end graphics from the SNES era.

While I'm talking about the graphics I'll broach the subject of the, erm, well-endowed nature of the game's numerous females. It's anime-styled, so this shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. They do take it to a ludicrous degree, however: busty main characters, busty non-player characters, even busty shopkeepers.

But unlike with Tecmo games, you don't really feel creepy about the whole thing. The Dead or Alive series is technically great, but you always do feel somewhat skeevy when you sit down to play it. Super Robot Taisen isn't anything close to the technical achievement that the Dead or Alive games are, nor is the gameplay as deep. However, the localization staff did a great job with the translation -- the comical proportions of many of the women in Super Robot Taisen are generally a source of jokes instead of perversity. In fact, the localization work is so good that if I were still as deeply into anime as I were in high school, I'm sure I'd find the game to be fall-down hilarious. But I'm not, so I don't; it doesn't mean that I don't respect the effort, however.

Yet the excellent translation doesn't really make the story serviceable. Indeed, even though the story seems relatively straightforward, there are so many different characters, factions and worlds that it just becomes a mess of terminology. For example, there are no less than three different terms for one object in the game, all used with varying degrees of frequency. This is not uncommon for these very cultish Japanese games that depend on the gamer being at least somewhat familiar with other games in the series, even if those games have unrelated stories. The problem is that us Americans rarely get many (if any) of those titles.

Ultimately, Super Robot Taisen is not a great game. It's not even the greatest game I'm playing right now. It'll be lucky to acheive low-end cult status for even a year or two, let alone to be remembered in the US by anything other than a few incredibly hardcore portable gaming fanatics in five years or so. If you can accept that it'll never win any game of the year awards and just embrace it for what it is, you'll find yourself an incredibly fun little way to kill some time on train rides and the like. Just don't take it seriously. But then, I doubt you'll be able to.