Budj's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[TOME Episode 04]

This series is good, but not perfect. One thing that bugs me is the characters. While the personalities vary and their interactions work, they are all cliche anime stereotypes. You have the head strong egotistical character, the overpowered loner, the annoying comic relief, the group leader and the attractive female that obviously has a crush on him. I mean they aren't that interesting or unique, they are the same characters we have seen hundreds of times over.

Also, too much dialogue and recycling of animation. The voice acting was good atleast, but rather than having that text box come up, you should focus on animating the whole thing properly as apposed to mostly talking with a few animated cutscenes thrown in. Those were the parts I liked the most.

Yes I know you can look at the massive pack of 5 star reviews with people saying stuff like "YOU'RE AWESUMMM, UR STUFF AMAZES ME!!" and that's cool, but remember there is always room for improvement and I see plenty here. Try and mix the characters up a bit and focus more on animating it instead of those recycled poses during the droning talk scenes.

Overall though, I look forward to the next one :>.

[War of the Shyguys]

Great stuff! I can see you improved the audio a bit more even after the beta test. Anyway you know how I felt about this already; great voice acting, excellent original score and good sprite animation. Well done :>.

Eastbeast responds:

Haha Thanks again for all the work beta-ing and advice! Everything has been said, but you did help me get all the details right on. Looking forward to future stuff :)

[Parallel Memories: Ep 1-1]

Well... well... WELLLLLL!!!!!

I guess the first thing to touch on is the length. I mean by my clock it went for like 40+ minutes, which to me is way WAY too long. I will mention the fact that you put alot of care into the sprite animation and the action sequences because it really does show, but as teejay said the whole thing story wise was too thin. I found the fight with that little bird thing extremely confusing too, I dunno if I missed something or what but then the random characters popping in got a bit annoying, and I didn't know whether to laugh because it was making fun of itself or if these characters were part of the story somehow and it was just confusing.

I see potential with this series, thus I implore that you DO NOT use SMBZ/DBZ styled fights in the series. It's overused and hurts the experience I think, I appreciated the fact you used different sound effects for the punches and kicks too. Also voice acting instead of text boxes is always a big plus, and I thought the voices were pretty good.

Overall I will admit I found it interesting, and the use of sprites was exceptonally good and I am interested to see what happens next. Remember anyone can do sprite fights, but only those with REAL talent can write a good story so you should focus on making that. Go for a bit shorter next time, maybe around 15-20 minutes maximum? Apart from that, keep it up.

Pienkaito responds:

First of all, thanks a ton in acceptin' my request.

Yep, a few mentioned that it's a very lengthy flash animation. I'll try my best NOT to overdo the animation next time and keep it straight-forward.
The story continues in episode 1-2 for real, so it's no big deal.

About the junkyard scene, don't crack your brain about it. It's like commanding a banana to be a melon.
There's no sense to it in any way and has absolutely nothing to do with the plot.
Don't worry, I'm a guy who tries to be unique. I can assure you that I'll try not to mimic any animation style, since it's really not my type.

Thanks for praising the VA by the way. Even though I'm pretty bad at it.

And again thank you for taking your time and writing this helpful review, which is very helpful.
Did I mention that it's helpful?

[SMB: The Mushroom Hero 10]

It wasn't too bad, but it fell into the same traps I see other sprite animations like this fall into.

First thing, Mario, Wario and Waluigi should never have dialogue. It never EVER suits seeing them talk in full sentences, especially when they say out of character stuff like "shut the hell up, I'm gonna kick your ass". Is this Mario or DBZ? The two don't mix as far as I'm concerned, so you need to decide. That's another thing, the fight scenes. The auras, the effects, the tweens. It reaks of SMBZ.

The thing is this Flash had nothing defining about it that will help me remember it like compared with all the other SMBZ clones out there. It's "just another sprite flash". You may not think it's a clone or immitated off of it but believe me, it is. You should work on making this series your own rather than riding the popularity train like all the wannabes out there.

[PKMN World of Chaos Ep 7]

Quite simply, well done with this. The interactive battes are a very nice touch, and the voice acting is still very well performed, even though the cast was drastically cut since last time. Love how the story is progressing so far as well, it's a much darker take on the Pokemon series which is normally very corny and kiddy, yet it doesn't take itself too seriously. It really makes me want to crack out the Gameboy and play the games. I noticed the plug for Eastbeast's Shyguy Flash too. I've seen the beta and think you guys did very well with that too.

As for the negatives (don't worry, there ain't much) I still feel that some of the animated poses of the Pokemon during battles are a bit jumpy (Houndour for example). As for the line art you made during the credits, could I suggest you stay clear of gradients? Sometimes you can get away with them with backgrounds etc, but I just feel for characters (especially anime style) they need to be shaded manually otherwise they look out of place. Takes a little more time, but the end result looks that much better.

All in all though that's all I could find wrong with this. Well done on Daily 4th, I'm just glad there are still some good sprite flashes left out there. Good stuff. :>

teejay-number13 responds:

I didn't do the sprites for the Pokemon in battle, so I have to take what I can get. Personally, I like the animated ones versus using a static picture, but some of them have 100+ frames of animation so it's hard to manually repair them totally.
As far as the gradients, for some reason when I converted the ending from 720 to 852 the gradients got all messed up. I thought I had fixed them, but maybe I missed some? Either way, I'm still not that great an artist so my shading may look worse then the gradients.

[CPS - WTF Collab 2]

Not funny and apart from the last one they all looked like they were made in Paint. :<

raremasta responds:

Pivot actually lol. The last one was flash. I understand your feelings tho, but seriously not funny :(

[Mario's Castle Collab 2]

Trolling review.

Quite frankly, I don't know what to say about this. I didn't laugh at any of the parts, but a couple of them were interesting ideas. The intro (done in After Effects I assume?) was crafted very nicely as well. I didn't care too much for the over-glorified ending, but it defiantly was the best part.

My biggest problem with this is the fact that Travis, the collab leader, put such a minimal amount of his own work into this and has pretty much relied on everyone else to make him look good. That there, is borderline pathetic. By the looks of it, all you did was compile the parts together and upload them, yet you still couldn't put a shred of effort and thought into just that! A part plays before the intro, the preloader doesn't work, the menu is ugly and the sounds don't sync properly. Everything looks like it was done so cheaply. What did you do, notice the low scoring day and rush it into the portal to secure an easy award? Wow man, how sad.

Quite frankly I feel sorry for everyone who took part in this collab because you've essentially all been used. But hey, don't worry, you got a Daily Award out of it at least. Don't make a third one, for the love of God.