#also whenever i type the full name i hear the line from the skit in my head | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

earwaxinggibbous · 5 years

Text

Eminem - Worst to Best

So I was watching theneedledrop and thinking I could do this too. That’s all the prefacing you’re gonna get.

I know it’s hard to believe I can judge Eminem from an objective standpoint considering I’m such a big fan that I ranked Kamikaze as my favorite hit song of 2018 (my actual favorite song was probably When You Die by MGMT or Stop Smoking by Car Seat Headrest for the record) but I am able, physically, to have negative opinions even about the rap god himself.

My only rule is that this only includes his full-length studio albums. Infinite won’t be here due to my lack of knowledge regarding it, but everything else is fair game. This will be heavily opinion-based.

Let’s go and start from the worst!

9. Revival (2017)

Initially I was gonna put Encore below this one. After all, in my opinion, there’s nothing egregiously awful about Revival in my mind. It just sort of existed to me, like that dead roach that stayed in my high school’s gym for over a month before disappearing without a word about it.

It wasn’t until I gave a few of the tracks a re-listen that I realized Revival has nothing going for it. This is Em’s sellout album, the one where he collabs with Beyonce, Ed Sheeran and goddamn X Ambassadors in the vague hopes that it’d get him a hit. Songs that don’t bother having clever writing because all they need to do is slap a semi-important pop singer on the hook.

It’s easily Em’s most ballsless album. In a universe where Kill You and Same Song & Dance exist, there is no need for Framed, Em’s almost saddening attempt to return to his Slim Shady roots even though, let’s be honest, the years of Shady are long behind us.

I’m not saying I need Em yelling slurs and talking about murder every five seconds, I just want him to be, for lack of a better word, the most authentic version of himself he can be. And this really isn’t it to me. No amount of politics or wordplay can hide that this is a sham of what an Eminem album should sound like. I don’t need diss tracks, or songs about serial killing, I just want him to say what he wants and not hold back.

Everything about the album is weak and tired. Every song melds into one another, without thought or purpose, only broken up by the celebrity hooks that define them. It’s the blackest mark on Em’s discography, and easily his worst album to date. Not even worth sneezing at.

8. Encore (2004)

I guess we shouldn’t let Em do whatever he wants...

Encore has the opposite problem that Revival does, and it’s a problem I empathize with. Encore is essentially word vomit in album form. It’s the musical equivalent of Jack Kerouac’s spontaneous prose, loud and incoherent and kind of gross. It’s what happens when ambition goes unchecked, and Em just leans a little too far into what the media says about him.

This was also deep in the throes of Em’s drug abuse problem, and it shows. This album feels like a bad drug trip, sludgy and gross and heavy, in a way that makes it hard to move your arms and legs. With these absolutely god-awful sung choruses on songs like My First Single, Eminem dares you to make less sense than him as he rambles like a crazy person through song after song, only taking breaks from his half-attempts at comedy on tracks like Mosh, Like Toy Soldiers and Mockingbird, which try to be serious. But it’s hard to be serious when you’re essentially getting choked in a soup of valium and regret.

I don’t hate Encore like I do Revival, because in some ways I can understand where it comes from. It’s trying to do the same sort of thing its predecessors did, with silly songs and serious ones. But the funny songs are so weird and frankly gross that it quashes any attempt of seriousness. It’s like Eminem thought the only way to make his songs better were to take what his detractors hated about him and turn it up to 11. Songs like My First Single are complete nonsense complete with gut-churning sound effects and a shitty beat, whereas Just Lose It, a song I’m ashamed to admit I enjoy, fills itself with baseless offensiveness and weird reference humor to function. And that was the big hit single off of this album.

Really I think Just Lose It was the best way to sell this album. What says Encore more than a song insisting that Eminem diddles little boys? FACK would’ve been in place on this album, which is not a compliment.

7. Recovery (2010)

Recovery shares a lot of problems with Revival, a lot of radio-bait songs featuring pop artists that have no business being within ten feet of Eminem. But I’ll admit its singles were far superior to that of Revival. No Love was far superior to anything Revival spat out.

I just kinda don’t care about this album. Other than how Love The Way You Lie was permanently ingrained in the cultural consciousness around 2010, I have very few thoughts about it. I remember hearing most of the singles when I was in elementary school, and they were all just kinda fine. Space Bound was okay (other than that coked up line about love being ‘evil’ spelt backwards) and Not Afraid was sincerely underwhelming considering what it was going for.

It’d been diminishing returns for Em for years, so I’m not shocked he needed some time to get back on his feet. But there’s just not much to say about Recovery. I feel like Em was a lot prouder of it than anyone else.

6. Kamikaze (2018)

At some level, I feel like Kamikaze set itself up to fail. And it did pretty well in spite of that.

The album’s main selling point was that it was dissing everyone. Shady’s gonna name names, I remember hearing, as this album dropped right the fuck out of nowhere in the late summer of 2018. Diss track drama has never really been for me, since oftentimes it pits artists I like against one another over petty bullshit. And hearing that Em slammed people simply for disliking Revival only made me more nervous about what Kamikaze’s outcome would look like.

I’m glad to say it was not nearly as bad as I was expecting.

I’m sort of on the fence about this album. While I think it is punchy, and pretty fun lyrics-wise, it definitely doesn’t hold a candle to any of his older stuff. It doesn’t even really hold up against MMLP2. It’s less that I enjoy this album, and more that I enjoy the possibility of Eminem managing to pick himself up after Revival and move into the new age while still being himself.

Easily the worst moment on this album is Eminem calling Tyler the Creator the f-slur and even implying he’s pretending to be gay, which he has since apologized for. However, the scariest thing to me that the line represents is the possibility that Eminem’s personality is too anachronistic. That in an era of young-adult trap rappers with very experimental homemade beats, there’s no longer room for a famous, albeit angry man in his 40′s being backed by a studio. It’s the years of Soundcloud, where anyone can be a rapper, and someone as old and frankly polarizing as Eminem may never truly have the limelight again.

Em’s style has simply fallen behind the times and he will never be content with updating himself, because that isn’t who he is. And while I love that about him, I think it might speak disaster for his career.

I like the songs though.

5. The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013)

Now we’re getting into the good shit. The Marshall Mathers LP 2 starts off with a bang, the first song being Bad Guy, a direct sequel to Stan and an incredibly powerful sequel at that. Eminem asks questions about his fame, his identity, and most notably, he fucking gets murdered at the beginning of this album.

MMLP2 strips off all but one skit. No Paul Rosenberg cameo on this one. This was him getting serious after the relative failure of Encore and Relapse. This was, frankly, what Recovery should’ve sound like. With Berzerk being a fun sort of party hit, Rap God is what really got him back on the map. The song asserts his lyrical dominance. It is a brag track, and it earns that right.

Despite it being of incredibly high quality, this is nowhere near Em’s best work, which speaks highly for his track record. The fact that something this well-made is comparatively mediocre when put next to the top four is incredible to me. This album is more of a revival than Revival was. It’s Eminem reaching out of the dirt after being buried and yelling “Hey, I’m not dead yet!” It’s the hearbeat running through a comatose body as they return to consciousness.

But when it comes down to it, I love what this album represents to me more than its content. Aside from Berzerk, Bad Guy and Rap God, none of the songs really stand out either way. It’s all good, of course, but none of it can match up to his older work. Regardless, this album means a lot to me on a spiritual level. Whenever I listen to this I feel like a proud parent, and Em is my son who just completely crushed his elementary school talent show.

It’s a good feeling.

4. Relapse (2009)

At this point it was sort of like picking my favorite child. My number one is obvious, but deciding how to order these three was trouble.

People will probably argue with me saying that Relapse is one of Em’s best, but fuck that. This album is severely underrated among the fanbase, and is an incredibly powerful listen. This album is an auditory representation of rock bottom, in the best way possible.

This is one of the only albums to really define a split between Marshall and Slim Shady, with Slim being a deep-voiced demon and Marshall being a fucked-up middle-aged man who just came staggering out of a rehab center. The way the characters play off of one another is beautiful, Slim trying to manipulate Marshall into his ways and wiles. This also easily has the most horrorcore-type sound and content out of any Eminem album, with Slim occasionally playing the role of a serial killer, such as on 3 am or one of the standout tracks, Same Song & Dance. Insane tells a story possibly regarding Slim’s father, or maybe representative of something else entirely.

One of my few issues with this album, aside from We Made You of all things being one of the singles, is that one of the best tracks is only on the deluxe edition. My Darling ties off the Slim and Marshall story in a nice little bow, plus Careful What You Wish For sweeping up all the themes and putting them in one place.

This album is beautiful, it’s cinematic in a way. It’s deep and powerful and incredibly, incredibly scary, with Em at his lowest point in his life and career. Sadly, it was not well-received critically, which I think is a shame. Clearly they weren’t seeing what I see.

3. The Eminem Show (2002)

Screw Revival, this is easily Em’s most politically powerful album yet. I listened to this whole thing on a boombox I got at Best Buy for 20 dollars and I felt like I had fucking transcended.

This album pulls out all the stops, immediately starting out on White America, a song so goddamn strong that every time little me heard it on the radio I immediately got down and lost my shit. I didn’t even understand what it was about, all I knew was that it was big and important. And it is.

While his first two big albums tried to be weird and threatening, The Eminem Show just wanted to be big, and talk about big things. Eminem fearlessly tears into heavily-charged concepts in White America, Say Goodbye Hollywood and Square Dance. Then on the flipside he aims the gun at himself on tracks like My Dad’s Gone Crazy, Cleanin’ Out My Closet and even Hailie’s Song. It’s a gut-punch of an album, this is where Eminem is truly fearless.

I’ll also say I feel this album is a little bit more accessible, weirdly enough, than Em’s earlier stuff. It’s much less crude and aggressive, but still carries his trademark style. It’s got the skits, he yells a lot still, but the topics are easier to swallow than his earlier albums. I’d say it’s a good entry-level Eminem album if you’re threatened by rape jokes and Em yelling the f-slur constantly. And unlike what Teens of Denial was for Car Seat Headrest, I feel like The Eminem Show manages to be that entry-level album without completely castrating Eminem’s lyrical content.

But even longtime fans can gain enjoyment from this album and how loud and proud it is, how fearless Eminem really is on this album. This one, more than anything, is the unfiltered Marshall Mathers experience. No filters, no jokes, just him and his daughter and Dr. Dre.

But easily the best part of this album is the DVD extras thing where you get a free episode of the Slim Shady Show. Fuck yeah.

2. The Slim Shady LP (1999)

The Slim Shady LP was Eminem’s first really successful work. It was also the first thing he ever put on a CD. Yeah, Infinite was on cassette only. And this album is fucking great. It’s a perfect debut for Eminem. It’s got his first big hit, My Name Is, and a myriad of other great tracks. It’s just good late 90′s rap, with fun beats and interesting lyrics. As much as I love SSLP, I don’t really like talking about it because... yeah, it’s good, I’m just never sure what else to say.

And that might make it sound like I like it less than The Eminem Show, but no, that’s not it. As much as I think political Em is great, I’ll forever prefer nasty rat boy Em any day. This is the Em that inspires me the most, the grody, crude one that reminds me of myself. Best tracks include 97 Bonnie and Clyde, Bad Meets Evil and of course My Name Is. This is also the only album where Ken Kaniff is played by Aristotle. There’s your fun fact for the day.

1. The Marshall Mathers LP (2000)

FUCK everyone else, I respect YOU!

The Marshall Mathers LP is a defining rap album. It’s lyrical perfection, the hooks are god-tier, and it is without contest the best Eminem album of all time. I doubt he’ll ever top this, and if he does it’ll probably break space-time.

MMLP ticks all the boxes an Eminem album usually should. It’s quirky, it’s comedic, it’s dark, it’s angry, it’s violent, it’s everything I could want and more. But beyond that, it’s the thing that really proved what Eminem can do. He can tell stories, he can do lyrics, he can flow, he has good beats, he can murder his ex-girlfriend, he can get his own songs censored on the uncensored version of his album, he can do it all.

The songs on this just put me in a good mood. Even though they’re horrible, and I don’t mean they’re bad songs. The content is absolutely fucked, this album is not for the faint of heart. But it makes me feel represented, not for being gay, trans, mentally ill or short, but for being a fucked-up weirdo who lived a fucked-up life and just wants to scream and lose his shit. More than anything, this feels like an album that’s there for me, for better or for worse.

The standouts on this album in my opinion are the two “named” tracks, Kim and Stan. These tracks are incredibly disturbing, but they both mean a lot to me and are incredibly written and acted. The Real Slim Shady is still an amazing single with an awesome, hopping beat. I’m Back is incredibly solid, Criminal is cleverly contradictory, every track on this album is great without any misses. If there were enough words in the English language to describe how much I love this album, I’d probably use all of them.

This album couldn’t exist today. If this came out today, it’d probably be thrown to the wayside for a myriad of reasons. It’s too late 90′s, it’s too dark, it’s “problematic”, we have like 500 white rappers now, but for the record: Anyone who writes this kind of music today owes it to Eminem, ESPECIALLY all of the white rappers who insist they’re better than him. (Looking at you, MGK.) Even if he’s not doing that great now, even if you don’t like him, it’d be foolish to not acknowledge what MMLP did for rap. And not only was it influential, but it still holds up to this very day.

So there you have it. All of Eminem’s full albums (besides Infinite oopsies) listed from worst to best. Have any differing opinions? Leave a reply. Just be polite, you filthy animal.

#worst to best #eminem #music review #music criticism #panda posts

6 notes · View notes

impurelight · 7 years

Text

Tales of Zestiria - Forget Not Your Duty But Be Not A Slave To It Either

I just beat Tales of Zestiria. And wow, it is unlike any game I’ve played before. The story is gripping. The music is amazing. There are fights in this game that are so intense that after beating them you just feel exhausted. Or maybe it was because I was mashing the left mouse button way too much. Maybe I should get a controller some time. Hmm…

So is Tales of Zestiria my favourite Tales game? Well that’s a tough question. If I just stripped Zestiria down to it’s highlights then yeah, I’d have to say it’s the best. But here’s the thing. Between those highlights there are long stretches of time that you’re not doing anything.

There’s tons of backtracking. You have to complete sidequests and get 15 of these random items. There are objectives that are counter intuitive and you’ll need to Google them or you will have no idea what to do. There are unanswered questions and the story just doesn’t feel well put together. And that final boss… From what I hear it’s basically impossible unless you spam Rose’s dream slasher arte whenever he’s going to use his cheap one shot move which violates the number one rule of ending video games: don’t make the final boss overpowered.

So let’s start with the most important part first. The camera. Everyone has to know about the camera. Honestly it’s fine. You’ll just be button mashing for most battles anyways. I don’t know why people complain. To be honest it’s more funny than annoying.

There was one time I found the camera to be annoying. In a boss fight early on. With a boss named ‘Dragonewt’. Basically this guy will kill you in like 2 or 3 hits and you do basically no damage against it so you have to keep dodging until a cutscene triggered. And it was in a small room which made it difficult to dodge.

This is sort of a once in a game sort of a boss. Most of the bosses are easier but the bosses are still pretty tough. You get an option to retry a boss if you fail without having to reload a save or anything which is cool. I think I beat every boss within 3 retries with most beating them on my first try. Died a lot though. There was even this giant elephant boss that killed everyone in my party in 1 hit so I had to come back later.

In fact there are a lot of hard ‘boss’ enemies on the map. I’m not sure if this is a new thing, it feels like it could be in a previous Tales game but it’s new to me. Basically they’re weirdly coloured sometimes, although not necessarily always, huge monsters on the map. There’s usually one per map with other monsters on it. They don’t respawn. Don’t battle them immediately as they’ll most likely tear apart your entire team. Wait until you’re over-leveled, go back, and kill them for massive grade.

Speaking of grade there’s this new mechanic called the Lord of the Land. It goes with the plot of the game that you’re supposed to clear malevolence from the world. The Lords of the Land… well I’m not really sure what they do but it definitely has something to do with malevolence. The first 2 are part of the main quest and the rest are side quests. Basically they give you boosts when you’re in their land once you gain enough grade while in their land. It’s a fun little mechanic that makes you actually want more grade before the inevitable grade shop at the end.

But of course the biggest change is the new combat system. You’ve probably heard how battles take place on a modified version of the minimap rather than on a separate screen. It means no loading at the expense of the camera angles. There’s also no surprise attacks however you can get multiple enemies attacking you at once in a ‘dangerous’ encounter.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to changes to the combat system. The biggest change are the seraphim. Your party will usually consist of 2 humans and 4 seraphim which is good because you need at least 1 human fighting for every seraphim. Don’t ask me why that’s just how it is.

The Seraphim come in 4 elemental types: water, fire, earth, and wind. And there’s also quite a focus on elements. You even unlock the ability to use each of these elemental types outside of battles to get to new areas. It’s not quite metroidvania but it’s nice.

Also the big thing about Seraphim is you can switch them out during battle and while they’re switched out they can actually heal. Plus there’s a new armitization feature. Basically a human, except Alicia for some reason, can combine with a seraph (seraphim is the plural of seraph; I beat the entire game without knowing that) to be more powerful. Some people think this is overpowered. I don’t think so because you basically lose one party member while you’re doing it which on the harder fights, the ones you actually want to be strong in, is incredibly important. But I use armitization because a dead human and a seraph can armitize which will revive the human saving a life bottle. This sort of makes seraphim feel disposable.

I feel bad saying that because the seraphim are the best characters. Especially Edna the sarcastic one. I thoroughly believe if she was not in this game the game would turn out completely different. She delivers some of the most memorable lines in the game. And her interactions with Michleo, which she gives various names to such as Meebo, are just priceless. Also she has a really good side-quest with her brother Eizen, who I’m told is making an appearance in Tales of Berseria. Definitely beat this one even though it’s right at the end of the game when you’d rather be beating the final boss. It’s a real tear jerker.

The other characters are great too, although they’re a bit stereotypical. Also there’s Alicia who everyone seems to be disappointed didn’t get a large role in the game. One of the big things in this game is that most humans can’t see Seraphim which is a really big deal in the beginning. And makes for quite some drama. But at the end it’s almost like a forgotten fact and not brought up at all.

There’s also a lot of dialogue in this game. When you fight new enemies you will get a little dialogue about them. And there’s a bit of dialogue when you’re walking around but not too much. And there’s a new skit style, but to be honest it feels a bit unnecessary and change for the sake of change when you realize to fit all the characters on screen at once some are always covering each other especially Edna and her umbrella. It actually reminds me of something a reviewer said about Dawn of the New World. See this is what happens when you listen to reviewers. Also many of the skits can only be played at save points which is weird to say the least.

Also this game must have been a pain to translate for. There’s puns and jokes everywhere. However I don’t really like the parts of the game where two people say the same thing at the same time. It just seems unnatural to me.

Back to battling. There is really a lot to the battle system here. I don’t think I can cover everything in this article because, well, I don’t know everything about the battle system. It’s really complicated. They try to explain it with the monoliths and skits but to be honest they’re not really well paced and most of the time I didn’t really care and just wanted to kill hellions.

But even if they were done better I don’t think I could have learned everything. There’s just too much stuff. But I can tell you the basics. There’s this new SC system which appears to be a replacement for MP, or whatever the Tales games called it. Now every attack uses it and it recharges really fast. You start with full SC at the beginning of a battle but as you battle more and more you start with less and less. Until you go to an inn.

By the way you now need to buy a food item from the inn to stay there. Which is weird, I had to Google it to find that out.

So anyways if you don’t go to the inn you’ll be guarding a lot during battles to up your SC. Which I guess is sort of realistic. There’s also BG but that’s just your energy for mystic artes and armitization.

Back on the inn thing. There are a few dungeons quite far from inns which is disappointing. You may want to fast travel but this takes quite a lot of gald (it’s actually % based).

Also the reason why there’s fast travel is there’s no world map. In most Tales games I’ve played there’s a world map and half way through the game you get a way of flying wherever. Not the case in Zestiria. You’re not a comically big giant next to a city anymore. The world is divided into a bunch of maps like what you’d find in other games. I really don’t like it. There’s just so much backtracking now. Don’t cheap out like me and not use the fast travel. It’ll make the game so much more bearable.

Zesteria is one of the first Tales games to be released on PC. So how is it on PC? Surprisingly good actually. I heard some people say this is a ‘poor PC port’. When I think ‘poor PC port’ I think no mouse input, having to use arrow keys for everything, and in general a terrible experience for anyone playing with a keyboard and mouse.

So by that definition Zestiria is definitely not a ‘poor PC port’. The mouse and keyboard feel just like how it would normally work. The only problem is some of the keybindings are a bit off and the right mouse button is sometimes used in place of the escape button. I think once you start moving the mouse it switches from keyboard only to keyboard and mouse controls. So for some things like adding accessories (which is separate from costumes in Zestiria), it’s better to avoid moving the mouse. Also the ‘reload’ option sometimes reloads the wrong save. But it’s not that much of a problem.

But other than that it’s a perfectly usable PC port. Although if you have a controller hanging around I’d still recommend using that. There’s too much clicking in this game. Made me feel like I was going to get RSI at some points.

But there’s a few other things that make this game not pass for a native PC game. For one the battle keybindings are on the main menu. Who does that, right?

Also apparently it’s capped to 30 FPS. I wouldn’t know, I played the whole game with a mod that ups the cap to 60. Although it’s a little weird when you get to cutscenes which are still at 30, actually they’re at 24.

Which brings me to the best thing about Zestiria. In many games there’s just that one feature you wish every game would copy. Well this is it. When you keep on trying to walk through a character you actually walk through them. This is genius and would have been so great in Fallout and Far Cry.

Also the side quests are much easier to find now. No longer do you need a wiki to find them. They’re now marked on the map. However sometimes I wish I had a quest log to keep track of all the random quests. Also quest objectives are marked on the map (only if you’re on the same map) which is sort of weird because they’re too frequent and when there’s no objective it’s really hard to tell where to go. But I guess it’s fine.

The map has also changed. A lot of locations have a lot of vertical height and the way the game chooses to handle this is now the map displays content based on your height and you can scroll to look at higher and lower locations. Also the only way to move the map is to use the WASD keys not clicking and dragging like any normal game. Oh well. The map is not quite intuitive. I wish they did it a bit better.

One thing I saw mentioned in this game are the locations look generic. Which is true. Some locations look cool but most of them fall in your generic temple, outdoors trenches location, indoor cave, and water temple. Actually I think the water temple is another case of people picking on something because it’s just fun to pick on. And it’s true, the water temple is pretty annoying. Although the wind temple is also pretty bad; it’s just so big.

So in conclusion I really liked Tales of Zestiria. Sure, it doesn’t have the trademark final-boss-that’s-really-only-the-half-way-boss and no one betrays you in this game. But it’s a really interesting and fun game which I really enjoyed playing after playing so many serious western games.

Reviewing Zestiria is hard because even though it does so much right it also does so much wrong. Especially the very mid-game that just feels like it’ll drag on forever. And the story isn’t particularly memorable. But you can’t overlook the fact that Zesteria has some really nice ideas, characters, and plot points.

OK, so maybe it’s not the best Tales game ever. But if you had a shortlist of most complicated Tales games ever Zestiria would definitely be on that list.

5.0/5.0 enjoyment + 3.0/5.0 quality -> 82% Overall.

How I calculate review scores.

0 notes