There Will Be Brawl, Episode Five: Monsters

 

There Will Be Brawl is a web series that creates--and then exposes--the seedy underbelly of well-known Nintendo characters with exceptional dedication and insane unpredictability. It's the entire internet in ten minutes. Minus the furries.

Nintendo's stable of recognizable characters and the staggering number of titles in which they interact makes a universe that is complex and contradictory enough that the editorial staff at DC would be hard-pressed to reconcile it, even if they released nothing but crisis comics for the next thirty years without resorting to Nintendo's time-tested strategy of never discussing it. "There Will Be Brawl" is notable in that it would sit as an equal with any end result from that kind of reconciliation; it makes a good universe.

There Will Be Brawl, Episode Four: Strange Bedfellows

There Will Be Brawl is a web series that creates--and then exposes--the seedy underbelly of well-known Nintendo characters with exceptional dedication and insane unpredictability. It's the entire internet in ten minutes. Minus the furries.

This series isn't supposed to be groundbreaking; it's supposed to wrap some established, childlike characters around the pillars of an established, adult genre. But here, it veers a bit into full-on parody. 

There Will Be Brawl, Episode 3: Questions

 

There Will Be Brawl is a web series that creates--and then exposes--the seedy underbelly of well-known Nintendo characters with exceptional dedication and insane unpredictability. It's the entire internet in ten minutes. Minus the furries.

For a series that's only ten episodes long, There Will Be Brawl is almost audacious to wait until the third episode to throw our protagonist (Luigi) into the central conflict. I'm assuming that one of the lesser reasons for putting that off is because that the acting doesn't spike up in quality to match the intensity of the characters. I hope that passion is a commodity that the creators sprinkled lightly over the series, because it just doesn't work and probably won't come to in the next seven episodes.

There Will Be Brawl, Episode Two: The Lost

With the major players introduced in Episode 1, The Lost focuses on forwarding the plot and giving a bit more attention to the supporting cast. While it still teases a lot of the history and peripheral figures, it does--as any early episode should--a good job of putting forward slightly more questions than answers.

Least Favorite Part: Wow, Link is terrible. His acting, casting, dialog. I'm just not sold on him at all. Who I am sold on is Kirby. Despite the all-too-literal Silence of the Lambs scene, his appearance here really did work. His voice is creepy. His puppet is the right level of departure from the adorable Kirby we're familiar with, making it just as gritty (yeah, I'm getting ready to bandy that word around each time I talk TWBB) as the rest of the setting.

There Will Be Brawl, Episode One: Twilight Ruin

A few weeks ago, Skiltao suggested I watch the "There Will Be Brawl" web series. I did. I once thought that the only way to add this much insanity to my life this quickly was to start making friends with women. I'm pretty sure the only way to make it this enjoyable would be to have sex in front of them.