The Valkryia Chronicles DLC is finally out in English this coming Thursday. Usually, this would be nothing but a cause for celebration, but with the way my internet has been performing recently, I’ll probably need to leave my PS3 running constantly for three days just to pull the files down.

So, as mentioned last week, I did end up going to see Dragonball Evolution. Judging from the box office takings, it seems obvious that not only am I one of the few who did, but also that I’m considerably stupider than most of the worlds population.

In case anyone was harbouring any kind of optimistic thoughts regarding this movie simply being one of those misunderstood by those critics reviewing it, I’ll tell you now that it’s no Speed Racer. Dragonball Evolution is basically just a pretty crappy movie. The big problem with it is that, really, it’s less a movie than it is a loosely related collection of scenes strung together with seemingly little consideration for what it does for the pictures coherence – on the one hand, it results in a movie that comes across as mercifully brisk, but on the other hand there seems to be a lot of “character development” happening off screen, and as a result we’re simply expected to take seemingly sudden changes in attitude as a given.

To be fair, I have to wonder how much of this was intentional on the part of the director, and how much of it was forced upon him once someone realised that the movie was unlikely to be particularly great. There’s a number of sequences that seem rather incomplete – there’s one fight sequence halfway through that hardly seems like it’s an actual fight, and the final confrontation is rather more brief and less spectacular than I might have expected. I can’t help but think that they ended up dropping a bunch of cuts where they couldn’t afford to complete the effects.

Not that I particularly think it would have helped make it a great movie, but the result may well have ended up as being less of a mess. It’s not like the movie is entirely without any redeeming features – if nothing else, the opening fight between Goku and his Grandfather was pretty neat – but for the most part I can’t really see this as being anything other than cult mockery-fodder once it hits DVD.

I finally got around to clearing Star Ocean 4 this morning. I ended up grinding my characters up through a dozen levels (though that didn’t really take too long), but as a result I rather breezed through the final boss without having to put any real thought into it. Unfortunately, the game remained pretty terrible until the end – the game itself played OK, but everything else that went into it proved to be fairly painful. The ending sequence just went on and on and on as well – my controller even turned itself off two or three times in it’s duration. They didn’t even have the decency to have Sarah devoured by a mob of ravenous catgirls in order to liven things up.

One vaguely amusing point, however, was that when the controller powers off, the games cut sequences pause – in all regards other than the music. As a result, the ending credits sequence, whose music is timed to coincide with the visuals, ended up being several seconds out of synch. Yes, I realise that’s not actually amusing, but I had to take what I could get from this game.

I guess I need to find something else from my copious gaming backlog to play now that I’ve finished SO4. I’ve no idea what, though.

On a final note, damn, there’s been a crap-ton of Japanese music delisted on iTunes over the last week – including anything published by Geneon for a start. Kind of a shame, really.