Aizyk

Joe Rodriguez was, for some reason, erroneously credited for the role of The Director even though the character was actually played by Daryl Lathan (who also voiced a couple other roles, namely the Boryokudan boss, which he was correctly credited for).

The voice acting as a whole was not bad but sometimes not that good.

I might have rated the game a 7 if it weren't for the horrible, exasperating UI.

I like Sci-fi, but the interplanetary/distant galaxy somewhere far away in outer space setting of this game seemed mostly superfluous. I read in various places that the game took inspiration from Blade Runner, but the game didn't have any of Blade Runner's aesthetic flare despite its adequately noir tone. I enjoy a game that has (among other things) a great pixel art aesthetic that employs a vivid color palette, but the most noteworthy thing about this game's visual aesthetic was how uninspired, dull and smudgy it was.

What I found most compelling about the game was the story's concepts involving kidnapping, identity and "rehabilitation". It had potential but never quite reached the level of being thrilling.

I saw this movie when it screened at the Asian Film Festival of Dallas (a screening which I just now noticed was not listed or mentioned at this movie's official website--why exactly is that, huh??). It was the penultimate film officially scheduled to be shown at the festival and the last one shown that day. It was one of the free films shown in the secondary theater, following a buffet of short films, and I expected that after watching it for about 15 minutes or less, I'd get up and go home. I wasn't enticed by the film's description in the festival brochure--basically the interrelationships of a bunch of 20-somethings, living in a California city, going through changes, at turning points in their lives, blah blah blahhhhh... I expected it to be similar to another film I'd seen at the festival (and earlier, on Sundance) called Charlotte Sometimes, which was a dreary, unimaginative, self-important, pretentious waste of time for the most part, also starring an almost entirely Asian cast of west-coast 20-somethings and revolving around what on the surface seemed to be a similar theme. But, much to my pleasure and surprise, this film gracefully captivated me from the first moments it began, due to its cinematography, and eventually, due to its directing, its script, its cast, and their performances. Just perhaps, I might be more fond of this film than it actually deserves, (I gave it a 9) possibly because I was so pleasantly surprised after expecting another Charlotte Sometimes. But at the very least, this film definitely had a genuineness and creativity that the other didn't.

It's been a couple months since I saw this film at the festival, and after I got home I looked it up here on the IMDB and was surprised that no one had rated or commented on it. Now that I check it again I see that still, no one has done so, and I wonder why. I find that surprising because at the very least, I'd expect some of the many people involved in this film to have supported it here. Odd.