Waaah.

http://www.drunkduck.com/Final_Blasphemy/

I tried, really I did, I tried to read through this comic.

It just didn't work for me. Not only am I lost on the references made by the comic strip, I felt that the art was very busy. I will admit that it was evident time was taken to make the art clean, but the charcters were very small, especially in the beginning.

Because I don't know the reference for this strip I didn't get the humor at all.

I'm sorry I can't say more about it because my effort to understand the comic failed.

This comic pretty much suffers from all the usual sprite comic aliments.

First off, the "art". The sprites are used in an extremely unappealing way, with the characters often so small in each panel that it is literally impossible to tell what's happening. The fact that the camera angle never changes within a script gives the comic a flat feeling overall. All the sprites appear to be borrowed, so no points for pixel originality. Really, I just mean, it's sprites, and sprites that are so small it is impossible to tell what's going on, which makes the weak jokes even harder to understand. There we numerous pages that left me utterly baffled. So yeah, this could used some work.

The writing, I have sympathy for. Even though the comic is going down the utterly beaten to death path of forth wall-lessness complete with an omnipotent author character in the comic, talking about the comic, with megaman characters and... er. I honestly just realized how bad all these things are as I tally them up. This is virtually every sprite comic cliche ever aside from profanity. Both mario and megaman are present though. The compliment, was that I thought the writer's block bit was a somewhat clever idea, but totally ruined in the exection. Which could be said of all the jokes, really. The writing itself is compitent and easy to read, forming (mostly) coherent sequences of event from script to script. The problem however is that the author has no sense of comedic timing and that many of the jokes are utterly predictable. Oh hey, I just found a funny joke, the "I sustain myself on hatred bit". That seems to be the only one I can find though.

Overall, the sprites are far, far too small, the backgrounds are repetative, and the writing, while compitent, contains horribly timed jokes and an overabundance of sprite come cliche's. Sorry bub, this is a typical sprite comic.

Man....finally read through that archive....that took longer than anything I've read for the purpose of reviewing before!

I'm afraid I must disagree with Eggbert, having read the whole thing, I'd say that this isn't your common sprite comic, it's something very epic and ambitious in scope which has just got a bit tangled up in itself and become hard to understand as more than a typical sprite comic. I shall explain myself with this review:

The main problem here is that the plot the creator has come up with is so big that you can't understand the basic plot for several chapters. The basic plot is that the world, or at least the world in which these young people inhabit, has been changed into a version of the world, but rendered in the style of old video games. The protagonist discovers that his student council from high school have been brainwashed and turned into enemies set after him as he travels through Final Fantasy 1 to 6, meanwhile another group of youngsters are stuck in Toronto, which now is a cyber city, fighting a core computer that has taken over the city, meanwhile, luigi and yoshi are trying to save the king of the mushroom kingdom, while elsewhere Link fights problems in his world and Megaman characters monitor what's going on, then over somewhere else, a girl has been armed with the good and evil swords, masamune and murasame, to be a warrior of balance...
There are simply so many plot threads, that I was left thinking for a long time, that the creator was getting bored and just kept changing the comic. After a while though, things do eventually begin to converge, and plot-threads are slowly starting to come together. The problem is that they're coming together only just now, meaning at this rate, no conclusions or progress will be found for hundreds of pages!
Personally, I think the comic would be vastly improved by cutting out the stuff with Link and Mario. It was pretty superflous-seeming and slowed the plot down.
The dialogue isn't badly written, but I find the tendancy to use a couple of little one line speech bubbles on some panels, followed by huge, panel-sized speeches on others gives the dialogue a stop-start, jerky feeling. A better sense of flow and conversation could be reached by using this technique less.
As is pretty much the norm with a sprite comic, it assums that you have a knowledge of classic video games. I can't imagine reading a sprite comic without liking old games, so though this would make it hard to enjoy for any non-gamer, I wouldn't say it's a bad thing. I was surprised though by how relatively few of the jokes are actually relating to the games or gaming. Most of them seem to be more if comic ignorance or stupidity on the part of some of the characters, or unexpected situations or reactions.

Art-wise, the comic has to be praised for its effects. The creator, especially later on, is able to do some quite novel things with the sprites, and use effects like explosions, thunderbolts and speed blurring well. Not all the sprite edits are perfect, some look a little clunky, but overall, the comic tends to look a cut above most, especially later, when it moves onto using proper comic style panels and stuff. It has decent-looking speech bubbles, which is a plus.
On the negative side, it suffers from the old problems of sprites. Firstly, sprites look tiny in some panels, especially when they're from 8-bit games like Zelda and FF4, leading to some serious eye-pain, and then there's the old problem of sprites being rather expressionless and flat. In some panels, the creator tries to combat this by using close-up character art shots, but often character's feelings only come across by their dialogue and actions. With the seriously large number of non-game characters in this comic, I think more needs to be done to give them a sense of unique personality from each other. Most of them seem just like they're there for the sake of being there right now.


So really, all-in-all, it's a comic which would benefit greatly by being trimmed and edited down to a more condensed form. As sprite comics go, it's better than I'd expect, but it needs to be made a bit tighter to be really good.