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January 2007 Monthly Collectable Item Critique |
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This month's items are Gift of the Goddess and Damascus Armor!
Warning
These items are obvioulsy multi-quips. Expect this article to be unfavorable at best. That being said, the guy in the art is pretty hot. The girl, on the other hand, reminds me a bit too much like Kikiyo from Inuyahsa.
The Mixed-Up Female Dog That Can Carry Construction Equipment With More Than Two Hands to Help McCartney's Post-Beatles Band
Right off the bat, you'll need three items to make a complete set involving the Goft of the Goddess. However, given how many Goddesses there are in the item, you'll be happy to know that the three items are not for ethnic choices. If anything they are for if you feel like wearing all three parts of a single diety.
The default Goddess, as poorly as that sounds, is Isis. She is the wife and brother of Osiris, mother of Horus, and was worshipped as the archetypical wife and mother. Her basic story includes not only marrying her brother and giving birth to both her son and her nephew, but raising said child in the desert until he was old enough to confront the murderer of his father/uncle by magically curing her child from scorpion stings and other ancient nasties that would kill your average incestial Egyptian child.
History asside (and there will be more with this critique, that I promise you), the three selections you have from Isis are indicative to the region. You can choose between her trademark crown, an Egyptian style necklace the likes royalty would wear, or another set of back wings!
The crown itself is not your usual trademark crown you would expect to see from The Ten Commandments or any other Hollywood movie representation of the region. In fact, the only thing that is correct is the bull horns holding the sun disc. Everything else on it is artistic lisencing at its finest. To give it that "full" look, one only needs to add the default version of the Solar Headress. It's the closest thing to that Pharoh look, to be perfectly honest. You could do the Masked version of the Solar Headress for that "Cult King" look, but then you would have to contend with a very awkward layering effect that results in the Isis crown umbrellaing over your head like a small mushroom top. If mushrooms had bull horns, that is. Another alternative, albeit a strange one, is to use the O RLY? hat in the defaul position. But I recommend against that option due to how much added volumn the hat creates. Try it and you'll see what I mean.
The necklace does make a nice accessory. However, your choice of tops to go with it will be limited depending on gender. For the guys, it's best to go shirtless. None of the shirts, vests, or even jackets that I wore looked right with the necklace. The girls may have a more difficult time, seeing how they cannot go shirtless, but since they do have more options than us guys, they should be able to at least find a bra that matches. I sugess going with the stereotypical white for this one. Both genders can try accessorizing with the Saris out there, but that's kind of a stretch depending on what color you use.
The wings in the Isis version are pretty much straight from the hyroglyphic writings and art peices inspired by them. You have two options, up or down. Both make you look like a jewel-encrusted beetle. That being said, the up versions work as wings, if only in the decorative sense. Keep in mind both the ethnic design and the colors if you are going to try to use this as part of a costume. Then again, you could go an entirely different route and dress up like a toy. The down version function quite well as a cape, but you can only appreciate this mode if you don't have anything else obstructing them. Or you turn your back towards us/the camera.
Overall, the Isis set of this item is very colorful, but a bit of a pain to try and pull off on their own. Not impossible, but very difficult.
Moving on to the next goddess in the area, we find three items from Athena! You know, goddess of wisdom, the arts, and the nobler causes of war? Best friend of Nike, the goddess of victory? Owner of the Aegis, which just so happens to be another item of hers in the Gaia Item Database? She's the pantheon's iconic goddess for the city of Athens, for crying out loud!
Her set comes with a crown, a mantle, and shoes. That's right, the goddess of civilization is the one that gives us shoes, because if you walk around barefoot, you're not civilized!
Athena's crown pretty much was designed to replace three items. For those of you that can't figure out which three those are, here's a hint: All three of them keep going up in price due to rarity. Give up? The crown was obviously an alternative to not just the Golden Laurels, but for the Mini Angelic Wings and Angelic Headband. It's as if those objects had a three-way and somehow produced this little baby! It's even accurate to the culture with an olive branch being featured as part of the laurels (although, I don't think olives are red in color). And because of the fact that it was designed to be an alternative of those three items, it should be treated as such. However, be careful as to what you accesorise it with, as some hats and other items tend to replace the crown entirely.
The mantle is labeled as a cape, but in reality, it is just a piece of flowing cloth attatched to two shoulder guards. There are some layering issues with the hair in the back if you have long locks, but the real error here is in the choice of animals. See, Athena's animal that is always by her side is an owl. I see doves. Fat ones at that. In any event, accessorizing with the mantle is going to be kind of tough. Unlike all the other capes, you can't really see this as a cape so much as a decorative and stringy scarf thing. On top of that, like all white items, it suffers from not being able to match properly with other white objects. Your best bet is to use it as an accent and not as an accessory. Wait... is there a differance between those? Well, you know what I mean.
The shoes Athena offers are pretty much a better version of the Winged Anklets. You get the shoes that Greek Messenger Hermes, only this time with better wings. Oddly enough, you can equip both the Winged Anklets and this mode together. Does it help you move twice as fast? Probably not. But at least you get the option of picking which shoes have wings with the Winged Anklet. You don't get that with Athena's shoes.
In the end, Athena's set is a nice and cheaper alternative to some of the items that it is designed to replace. It won't be enough to drive the price down in the market, but it will at least give the new users out there a chance to look just as cool.
The next goddess on the list is Kaguya. Or rather Princess Kaguya, as she is known in the mythos The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. You know, the girl that was born out of a stalk of bamboo, grew up to be the most beautiful girl in all of civilized Asia, made five guys do impossible tasks when they asked to marry her. They made an Inuyasha movie based off the oldest narrative in Japan (AKA this one!).
True to her nature, Kaguya gives us a very difficult item to pull off. Technically, there are three different modes to her set, but in the end, they are the same item. It's pretty much her sleeves of what may have been a very nice robe.
And there inlays the problem. As beautiful as the coloring and design is on this item's main mode, it is nearly impossible to pull off anything that matches with it without limiting yourself to either the Asian oriented items or any item in red. And of the ones that I own that fit that catagory, none of them looked good with Kaguya's sleeves.
In the end, the only thing Kaguya's mode may be good for are the cranes, which you can thankfully have without the sleeves. If you do pull of the sleeves as well as the avatar in the announcement picture, more power to you.
The final goddess in this pantheon from above is Durga. In the Hindu faith, she is the embodiment of all things feminine and creative. She is also depicted as a warrior goddess of sorts, often seen riding a lion. Unfortunately, that's all the information I could understand from Wikipedia.
Durga gives us her crown, necklace, and four of her eight arms. Those of you that invested in buying a Sari, now is the time to break those out.
The crown is pretty much the same iconic headdress that both stereotypes and is indicative to the Hini religion. However, the design of the crown is so huge that it nearly doubles the visual weight of your avatar's head! No other head gear comes close to achieving this, with probably the Empirer Headdress in the Hat Shop being the closest competition. But this is visual weight I'm talking about, which means it just looks bigger than it really is. It's a design thing. And speeking of design, the crown appears to be designed exclusively for the Saris. There's very little way around it unless someone knows how to make your avatar look like Captain Jack Sparrow at the end of the first Pirates movie.
The same can be said about the necklace, which holds more visual weight than Isis's necklace. Similar in design, but Durga has more gold on hers. However, unlike Isis, you are not limited in what you can wear. The design of Durga's necklace can be read as a grand medal of achievement. Put this on an avatar with one of the many war general outfits, and you have yourslef a freshly decorated war hero! Unfortunately, the official Art Arena medals that have disappeared into the rarity of the Angelic Halo look much better, but what can you do, right?
Lastly, Durga lends us a hand! Or rather four. Here, there is another cultural mistake! In each of Durga's hands, there is suppose to be a weapon of some kind. Granted she is the goddess of all things feminine, but she is also a warrior god. We have the Trident, the thunderbolt, and the bow. But who put the flower there?! They could have at least given us a snake to go with the other animals that have been appearing with this item, since that is one of the items she holds. Other than that, if you are going to be using this mode, you will be hard press to use it by itself. The arms don't carry that much visual weight compared to the rest of Durga's set, but at the same time, they are very indicative to the enthic background they are based off of, mostly because very few cultures feature multiple-arm dieties.
Sadly, Durga's set suffers from the same problems as Isis's set. You can't really do much with them without being stuck in the ethnic dress from which they come from. Saries seem to be a must with this set.
Whew! There! We made it through the end of only one of the two items this month! And what is the verdict from this Gaian? Well, while each mode is designed extremely well, the amount of flexibility each items offer is very limited. In fact, Athena's set is the only one out of the bunch that has the widest range of flexibility simply because of how many items she is replacing that are already in some kind of established fashion pattern. It's kind of sad, really, given how beautiful the visual quality of the items are.
The capital of Syria must be a dark place.
I don't know how I feel about the third oldest inhabitable city in the world being an armor that is suppose to be the dark counterpart of the Mythrill Armor given the cultural accuracies and inaccuracies in the last item. But seeing how this is a site primarialy based around roleplaying and fantasy, I guess I have no say in the matter.
Like its lighter counterpart, you will need to buy multiple items to get the complete set. Six, to be percise, which is two less than the Mythrill armor. Other than that, it's pretty much standard operation. Each mode is a different part of the armor. But wait! You have the option of turning on the dark energy from hell that lives within the armor, thereby changing the color of it to... purple. At least that's the color on my monitor.
The default mode of the Damascus armor is the chestplate armor. This time around, they included the shoulder guards to the brestplate instead of just keeping them separate. However, the design of the armor reads more like a shirt or some kind of bullet-proof vest. That being said, it does lend itself to that futurisitc cop look. So for all you people that want to cosplay as the made character from Judge Dread (those of you that haven't whiped that terrible movie from your memory, at least), now is your chance! Provided you find the right helmet. Otherwise, you will just end up looking like one of those generic armor-clad targets from the various shooter games they are releasing. F.E.A.R. comes to mind.
The helmet for the Damascus Armor looks like the head of an antelope. A dark and demonic antelope, but an antelope nonetheless. Its design is similar to how the armor is designed in that one anime about the Zodiac Armor that I can never remember the name of. Incidently, this mode has a better visual balance compared to the Mythrill Helmet even though both are similar in design base. However, the Damascus Helment lends itself nicely to the ability to cosplay, or at least attempt to, as one of those shadowy things from Lord of the Rings! And if you can't figure out how to make that look good, you can always dress up as the Dark Lord of a cult worshiping demonic antelope.
If Gaia was ever going to produce an item that was a rip off of the popular toy known as The Hulk Hands, the Dark Grip mode is it. Only it looks more like a dark, metalic version of The Thing's hand from the Fantastic Four. To get around this, simply throw on the Guitar of Demona in the Demonic Arm mode! The two make a beautiful, albeit creepy, pair of hands for anyone who has sumbitted to the dark side of Gaia in the fullest sense. For everyone else, they are just a really sharp looking pair of boxing gloves.
I don't care who you are or what you know, but the next mode in the Damascus Armor's line up is a codpiece! Don't know what that is? Look it up. I'm not saying any more about that mod, mostly to save my own perverted little self from all the sexual suggestions for costumes I could list.
The boots for the Damascus Armor are actually full leg-length armor. This is a 1-up on the Mythrill set, which featured only shin guards. Unfortunately, like the gauntlets, this mode seems based in pop culture. With the Dark Energy turned on in particular, these pair of boots look a bit too Borg-like. They do not read as dark and evil armor so much as they read as something dark and organic taking over your legs. It should also be noted that the boots don't reach the bottom of the codpiece, so you will need pants. Or at the least some kind underwear that doesn't immediately read as underwear.
The last mode is known as the Dark Mantle, but to be perfectly honest, I don't think it reads as such. If anything, it appears to be the aforementioned shoulder guards that were included with the default mode by themselves. Joining them to one side is a pair of sharp mini-wings, a la most artistic reprsentations of a certain one-wing angel minus a lot of the wing, that spews out the Dark Energy that turns your armor purple. To be honest, by itself, I can only see it working as some kind of post-apocolyptic mutation that may or may not happen in most anime set after another doomsday explosion caused by yet another nuclear device. Damn the US for creating a cultural trauma that resulted in the stiffling of the Japanese people's creative collective.
The armor, as a set, thankfully doesn't make your avatar look like an obvious block. This is mostly to the absence of a cape to add to the block design. It has a lot to do with the fact that black in general makes a figure look slender and skinnier than usual. While this is an advantage to the Mythrill Armor, you still end up looking like a block as far as visual balance goes. It just won't be as obvious from the begining.
Overall, however, you'll never look as hot as the guy in the drawing wearing this armor. You're better off just getting one piece of it and then adapting your costume, or it in some cases, to whichever mode of the armor you pick.
Beautiful Design, No Flexibility
It seems the item with the most beauty is also the one of the least felxibility. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to balance out with the other half of this month's offerings. If you are going to pick one, you'll need to commit to it. There's no way of adapting either of them to your various individual style of dress unless you adapt yourself to theirs. Which is a very big disappointment.
 Zeek Slider · Tue Jan 16, 2007 @ 12:23am · 6 Comments |
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