![]() When playing on a mobile device, players can swipe on the screen with their finger to select multiple targets to attack. When in combat, the player controls a small party, where during the player's turn, the player can deal physical damage to a single enemy, use items to aid themselves or cure status ailments, or use skills that require magic points such as offensive magic attacks or attacks that hit multiple enemies. During these battles, the game changes to a turn-based RPG. As the player navigates the world, random encounters occur where the player must fight a small group of enemies. Such fleeting physical pleasures are how we get through a world that’s irretrievably on fire, after all even with a hose in its hand, “Will-o’-the-Wisp” takes the same shrugging attitude.Screenshot showing the diorama style used in Fantasian and the HUD that appears during a battleĮxploring the world of Fantasian involves players tapping on a location, which Leo will then navigate his way to. ![]() As with many of the film’s most filthily irreverent quips and visual jokes, it’s underpinned by caustic truth: “Will-o’-the-Wisp” takes aim throughout at the sanitization of sexual expression and political conflict that passes for politesse in the upper classes, a suppression that can flip right back into active homophobia and racism when challenged a little.īut Rodrigues, ever mirthful and sensually restless, never lingers long enough on such sentiments for a screed to take shape, seducing us instead with the supple, smoke-veiled moves of Rui Poças’ camerawork, an eclectic, on-shuffle soundtrack of Mozart and tingling Portuguese pop, and the fleshly gifts of the cast on generous, sometimes gawk-worthy display. (His word-perfect recitation of Thunberg’s famous “how dare you” address falls on deaf ears, as his mother instead makes a symbolic effort to snuff out dining-hall candles.)Īfonso, too, mocks the naive prince’s attempts at self-redemption: “He believes revenge on his colonialist ancestors comes from giving his ass to Black guys,” he jokes. There’s little doubt here that Alfredo is more useful in his chosen vocation - even amid all the terpsichorean distraction - than in his inherited one, where his lofty family members fret emptily about natural disasters while making no more than a token effort to combat them. The erotic idyll cannot last, however, as royal duty beckons Alfredo away from his true calling, the anticlimactic tragedy of which rather underlines “Will-o’-the-Wisp’s” distinctly skeptical attitude toward such archaic, aristocratic class structures. “How can we defend the forest if it’s not an object of desire?” Afonso asks. As a unit, they appear to spend more time on Caravaggio-inspired choreography than on dousing any flames needless to say, sparks fly between Alfredo and Afonso, and it’s not long before they’re sliding down each other’s poles in one explicitly tender al-fresco scene. After being reluctantly admitted by a butch, bullying female commander (Claudia Jardim, a hoot), Alfredo finds an immediate ally in experienced Black fireman Afonso (André Cabral), who shows him the ropes - and plenty more besides - in a station where every male employee just happens to be a lithe, jockstrap-sporting Adonis. But the lad wants to begin, so to speak, at the bottom. His mother is aghast at the idea of the future king taking such a job his father, more supportively describing them as “generals of peace,” encourages Alfredo to use his status to jump a few rungs on the fire services ladder. A few years later, with wildfires sweeping the country - as they did, to headline-making effect, in 2017 - art history student Alfredo honors that promise by announcing his intent to become a fireman. Early-twentysomething Alfredo (now played by Mauro Costa) is an ingenuous princeling with a toned, twiggy physique and a halo of blond curls he has no head for politics, though he takes to heart his father’s plea to protect the “royal pines” of Portugal’s hallowed Buçaco Forest. We’ll surmise why soon enough, as the action rewinds to 2011. ![]() His young great-nephew (Vasco Redondo) plays idly beside him with a toy firetruck his highness, it turns out, has no issue of his own. The decades-spanning but threadbare narrative begins, with what turns out to be a certain puerile appropriateness, in the year 2069, as the elderly King Alfredo of Portugal (Joel Branco) withers away on an austere deathbed in his cavernous palace. ![]()
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