Games Revue

Rez

PS2

Big fish, little fish, cardboard box

It’s one of those accepted conventions of media, that if your premise is suitably weird or OTT in some way, it is [reference point] On Drugs. Gives you something to base your expectations and tells you that this is the next manic step forward from that. It’s Father Ted On Drugs, Angel on Speed, Tron mainlining Jack Daniel’s while getting into a chainsaw fight with Evangelion and Fullmetal Alchemist as Babylon 5 watches and takes notes, grabbing handfulls of impressively-coloured pills ‘purely for medicinal purposes’. Be impressed by the man whose life’s work is described as, say, “what FLCL takes to get high”, that’s a man who knows where it’s at.

So, following on from that logical progression, Rez is Panzer Dragoon at a 72-hour rave doing lots and lots of E with a few hits of acid for good measure. That’s it, review’s over, you can all go home now.

What, you’re still here? That wasn’t enough?!

*sigh* Fine.

Rez is an on-rails shooter that’s remarkably difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t played it before. Which kinda defeats the purpose, since reviews are generally there to aid people who haven’t played, read or watched something before. The plot, for what it’s worth, is that a supercomputer AI called Eden has become overwhelmed with knowledge, making her doubt her own existance. As a result, she’s shutting herself down, with an impending catastrophe on the way. The player takes on the role of a hacker, flying through her subsystems in an attempt to get Eden to pull herself together. This is acheived with the powers of wireframe graphics and techno, apparently. So it turns out Hackers was actually spot on. Who knew?

A stage goes like this. Your avatar flies along. Enemies pop up. You lock on, they explode. Eventually, a password cube comes along. You shoot it enough times, it opens, you go to the next layer of the stage where the music is more intricate and the graphics are slightly more detailed. Repeat until you get to a boss, kill the boss and that’s it, on to the next stage we go!

To give you some kind of reference for the next part, here’s how the game looks in action, since that’s the only way to actually get a feel for it. The Video’s of the 360 HD version, but it is, to all intents and purposes, the exact same game:

So, let’s take each element at a time. Gameplay is lifted directly from the Panzer Dragoon series. You can’t change your direction at all, and while you can move the camera around, it’s almost always facing in the right direction for you to deal with any oncoming threats. You hold down the fire button to lock on to enemies (up to 8 at a time) or you hammer the button to fire rapidly. You occasionally encounter items that give you Overdrive attacks, smart bomb-like items that target everything onscreen, which can be useful if you’re going for that all-important 100% shot down ratio. You also find health items, but rather than directly increasing the amount of damage you can take, they go into a bar. Fill the bar and your avatar evolves. Take a hit, and no matter how full your health bar is, you’ll go down to the previous form. Take too many hits and you’re booted out the system.

Rez, however, is one of the few games where I can say gameplay really doesn’t matter, since that’s not where the main draw is. This is a game all about the visuals and sound, though not in the obnoxious way most other games are. The word for tosay is “synesthesia” which, depending on its use, is either a neurological condition where senses become slightly skewed, most commonly perceiving sound as having shape or substance, or an artistic attempt to get several senses working in tandum, in this case, sight, hearing and touch. Everything that happens is synced up to the soundtrack. The graphics pulse in time with the beat, your shots basically hit when it’d sound best (but never interfering with your hit percentage or making you take damage). The soundtracks start off bare-bones, only a few skeletal beeps and notes to give you the impression that there is something there. As you progress, more effects are added, filling out the music slowly. It’s a great effect and gives an interesting feeling of progression, far different from almost any other game out there.

The graphics follow a similar path of gradual enhancement. If you’re someone who always demands the absolute finest from your machine at every turn, you’re probably going to be put off here. The visuals rarely ever progress further than basic textured polygons, so anyone seeking fancy shaders or lighting effects, this is not the droid you’re looking for. For everyone else though, the graphics work with everything else. When you actually start seeing something other than flat angles and pretty lights in the final stage, it’s oddly impressive, and gives you the feeling that this is going to be something different.

Downsides? Well, it’s hard to say really. It’s difficult to tell what’s actually a threat and what isn’t until it’s too late. And since you can only ever take, at absolute most, about 4 or 5 hits before dying, that not only results in you being blindsided more often than neccessary, it also makes boss battles more frustrating than hard, since when they attack, there’s usually a ton of missiles onscreen and working out which ones are actually going to hit you is guesswork at best. The boss battles themselves are arguably too long as well, some of the later ones being complete brick walls when it comes to taking damage, one having the added bonus of being super-fast, making hitting him trickier,and also having a shield of rapidly-shifting cubes! The whole thing hinges almost entirely on your enjoyment of the provided music as well, a problem common to every music game on the market, so if dance and techno cause you to erupt in a painful rash, you may want to steer clear. For my money, I actually like it, and I can’t stand most dance music, so take that as a recommendation if you will.

Rez is utterly unique, and for that reason alone, it’s worth a look. There’s a few similar games on the market – Synaesthete probably being one of the best-known, Darwinia sharing a similar visual style, but little else – but Rez stands virtually alone, I couldn’t tell you if it’s art, since I find the whole ‘games as art’ argument laughable at best. But I can tell you that it’s a solid game, short, but definitely worth your time, and that’s really the only thing that needs to be said.

Robert Rankin – Raiders of the Lost Car Park

350 pages

What is this I don’t even

Writing a review is, despite what some of you might think, bloody hard work. Yes, it’s mostly ‘this is why X sucks/does not suck’ when you get down to it, but it’s also about making sense of what you’ve seen/read/played in your own head. Hard enough at the best of times, and that’s when the thing actually makes sense to begin with. Take Raiders of the Lost Car Park, for example. It’s the second in the Corenlius Murphy trilogy, but don’t let that put you off, it’s not like it’ll make the book any easier to understand. In the last book, he discovered that mankind is actually being secretly oppressed by the Hidden King of the World, that the world itself is a hell of a lot bigger than any of us have been lead to believe, and that his father is actually the legendary Hugo Rune, a guru of Absolute Wisdom, a ladies man enough to put Errol Flynn to shame, and the arch nemesis of Bud Abbot. Involved in this adventure were a clan of mad Scotsmen, an electric blue Cadillac Eldorado, his loyal circus midget friend, Tuppe, and a train named after a Greek god that went ‘Yabba Dabba Doo’ instead of more conventional train sounds.

Cant say you weren’t warned.

Your enjoyment factor for this book will directly proportional to your tolerance for the absurd. It’s fair to say that if you have no time for pointless asides, running jokes or meandering stories that may or may not have anything to do with the plot, you’re going to hate it. The plot, such as it is, is little more than a framework to hang said jokes and stories on. It involves a quest to open the Forbidden Zones, where the hidden wealth of the world is kept, with a reinvented ocarina, Prince Charles, Santa Claus and a gigantic rock concert held in Brentford.

Again: you can’t say you weren’t warned.

Like I said, it’s hard to state definitively whether this is a good book or not. I mean, I enjoyed it, it’s a good quick read, the funny bits are actually funny and there’s a fair number of references that brought a knowing smile to my face. But this is definitely not a book everyone will enjoy. The reliance on asides and running gags in lieu of actual plot borders on the self-indulgent at times, and there’s a definite feeling of ‘repetition = funniness, right?’ more often than I’d like. This is easily the most love it/hate it thing I’ve encountered in quite some time. Definitely give it a try, especially if you want something different, just…

…oh bollocks, it’s become a running joke, hasn’t it.

Tokyo Gore Police

110 minutes

Blood, blood, gallons of the stuff, give them all that they can drink and it will never be enough

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: in the far-off year of 20XX, the police force has been privatized, and they now run around with tactical samurai armour and Steyr Augs. At the same time, a new threat to mankind has arisen: the Engineers. Engineers are modified humans who can form weapons out of any wounds they suffer. As the film opens, our heroine, Ruka, hacks at her arm with a blade, before being called out to deal with the latest Engineer, a man swinging around a chainsaw. After the police shoot the weapon out of his hand (and the hand still holding it for that matter), it swiftly sprouts a new chainsaw, covered in gore and muscle, that’s also attached to another chain, allowing him to swing it around and launch it. Ten seconds later, he’s the only one left standing. That’s when Ruka shows up, and after a short battle, slices the Engineer in two, vertically, blood spraying from the wounds like a fire hose.

Now, did you, at any point, stop me there? No, of course you didn’t. That’s because Tokyo Gore Police isn’t like anything you’ve seen before.

In terms of themes and style, this is pretty close to the Tetsuo movies (Tetsuo: The Iron Man and its sequel, Bodyhammer). But while those were very dark, the cinematic equivalent of a panic attack in a car crusher, this is… well, calling it ‘light-hearted’ or saying its ‘played for laughs’ doesn’t work so well. It’s not a film that takes itself seriously, by any measure, which is probably why it can even remotely get away with anything it does. The Tetsuo movies were good, but way too hard going, grinding the viewer down as they watched. This is a film with its tongue so far in its cheek, it bursts out the other side and becomes a shotgun, maiming a family of three.

How weird does it get? Well, let’s see, remember Robocop or Starship Troopers? The fake TV ads? They’re in here, ranging from ads encouraging people to join the police, to the stylish and cute ‘Wrist Cutter G’ (‘makes the blood taste sweeter’, apparently), to the most violent Wiimote attachment ever, to… It’s difficult to tell if they’re trying to make some statement on Japanese culture and law enforcement, or if they just sat around drinking one afternoon going “You know what’d be cool?” Then again, even in Robocop, half the ads seemed more like one-shot gags, so if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.

Then there’s the mutations. Remember, this is a film where wounds = weapons. The guy with the chainsaw at the beginning? He’s smalltime. During one fight between Ruka and the big bad, she scores him across the face with her sword. So, he does what you’d expect anyone to do in this film and… no, I’m not spoiling that one for you, but the resulting weapon is definitely going to linger in your mind for a while. The body modification club/brothel, on the other hand, contains a dancer with a line of carpet staples across her breasts, another who’s become a snail woman, and a third who has altered her body so much, she’s become a chair. You read that right. It’s impressive in a way that, after all the tactical weirdness strikes assaulting you every other minute, seeing someone lactating acid barely even raises an eyebrow.

And then we have the violence. Hands up who’s seen Fist of the North Star? Any version will do. Or Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-Chan? Or Kill Bill, or Brain-Dead or anything like that? You know those moments where someone suffers a papercut, then, 5 seconds later (because there’s always a delayed reaction) the streets are running red and the wound’s spewing blood about a hundred feet in the air? That’s this film in a nutshell. If there’s even the slightest injury, it’ll bleed like a broken dam, to the point where Ruka’s actually pushed down a corridor by the force of one character’s injuries. Such high-pressure bleeding is even taken to its logical extreme in the final and oddly impressive moments of the film. As for the gore, well, imagine if the Power Rangers decided to go for an 18 cert with about half the budget. If papier mache and latex sprayed red gets your stomach churning, you might want to give this a miss. Otherwise, you’re probably going to be too busy laughing or rolling your eyes to notice.

In the end, Tokyo Gore Police is definitely a movie that lives up to its name. While other movies run on the Rule of Cool to get away with their more ludicrous stunts, TGP runs on the Rule of Sure Why Not. The police chief walks around everywhere with a pet gimp? Sure, why not. Random fight between a policewoman with a naginata and a schoolgirl with a boxcutter for an arm, neither of whom have had any significant screentime til now? Sure, why not. Woman turns herself into a chair? Sure, why not. After a while, it’s easier to just throw your hands up and say ‘y’know what, fine’ in an exasperated manner than call bullshit on anything. Tokyo Gore Police isn’t a film you watch for plot or story or anything mundane like that: you watch it, people explode, you go away wondering what the hell you just saw. Everyone needs to see something like that once in a while, and for that reason alone, this is probably mandatory viewing for most.

Clive Barker – Cabal

268 Pages

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man

Clive Barker’s had some terrible luck when it comes to movie adaptations. Sure, he’s got Hellraiser 1&2 under his belt, two of the finest horror movies of all time, and Candyman was fairly decent, but aside from that, by and large, he’s gotten the shaft each and every time. The Hellraiser sequels have ranged from ‘surprisingly good’ to ‘oh sweet lord, no’, Lord of Illusions was either hilarious or pitiful, depending on who you asked, and the most recent adaptation, Midnight Meat Train, was, in a word, abysmal, being related to the original short story in name and basic concept alone. Which would’ve been perfectly acceptable if the movie hadn’t committed the cardinal sin of being terrible. Of all the adaptations, however, Nightbreed holds a special place for many. Helraiser aside, it demonstrates arguably the greatest breadth of Barker’s vision, the freaks and monsters that populate his mind. The quality of the film itself is debatable, but for sheer visual impact, it’s definitely a keeper.

Cabal is the book it was based on, and with a few deviations, the two are remarkably close to each other. Our main character is Boone, a man with some serious mental issues, to put it mildly. While being treated by his doctor, Deckard, he comes to realise that he may be a serial killer, responsible for the deaths of dozens. One unsuccessful suicide attempt later, he has a purpose: he heads to Midian, a necropolis of the lost and damned, where monsters like him can find respite and absolution. But upon arrival, he’s attacked and told that, despite his beliefs, he’s actually innocent. Running from his assailants, he’s discovered by the police and shot down on the spot.

Of course, the story doesn’t end there.

Cabal is arguably Clive Barker by numbers. All his typical themes and obsessions are here: transformation, both overt and otherwise, the sacred and the profane, the thin line between the mundane and the magical and, of course, his obsession with the flesh. Midian is filled with the Nightbreed, monsters of all shapes and sizes that have banded together for mutual protection. The breed are a true phantasmagoria of the weird, grotesque and bizarre, from the dog-headed painter to the man made of a flock of birds. Most of them are just mentioned in passing, but it gives a fascinating view of the larger world.

Less impressive is the main central theme. So let me get this straight: the Breed are the ones who look all scary and weird, but the ignorant hicks that want to stomp them out immediately upon discovery are the real monsters here, you don’t say, do go on. It’s a tired, hackneyed theme and, unfortunately, it’s not one that’s particularly dealt with well. The only character from the town that comes across as having any real decency is the priest, held over a barrel by the arrogant sherrif for being a transvestite, and even he’s unfairly treated throughout the story, his only real role being to show how not everyone is a complete bastard while simultaniously having the literal and metaphorical crap kicked out of him. He also seems to be setting up a plot hook for a sequel, which would explain a lot more, but it’s been over 20 years and we’ve not seen much more since, so who knows.

Worse are the two sex scenes which… well, Barker came out as being gay some years after this book was published, and in retrospect, it’s not entirely surprising. You ever seen that episode of South Park where Mr. Garrison tries to write a book, and everything ends up having a fixation with wangs? It’s like that. Each scene basically boils down to “Penis penis penis, penis is awesome, penis penis, did I put enough detail into describing the penis? Alsonakedgirlmasturbatingonabed, okay, back to the freaks!” Without that knowledge, it seems a little suspect, and with, comes across as outright hilarious. More so especially if that South Park episode happens to pop in your head at the time.

If you’re looking to get into some Clive Barker, this, along with the Books of Blood collections, is a great place to start. Yes, as I said, it’s somewhat formulaic, but it covers everything you’d probably want to know about the man’s work, and it’s easier to get into than something like, say, Weaveworld or Imajica. It’s short, reasonably to the point and filled wth some nice moments of action and horror, with some occasional moments and lines that shine wonderfully. Consider it the literary equivilent of a ‘Best Of’ album and be done with it.

The story of the Nightbreed was continued in a series of comics, published in the early 90s by Marvel’s Epic Comics imprint, alongside a Hellraiser anthology. The comics primarily take the canon of the film with elements of the book added to fill out the gaps. The Hellraiser comics have been reprinted recently, so there’s every chance the Breed will rise again. For now, we, like the characters at the end of the tale, will need to wait and see.

Persona 3

PS2, 2008

And I swear that I don’t have a gun…

WARNING: This review contains spoilers. Proceed at your own risk

Persona 3, for many, is a game of mixed blessings. On the one hand, it arguably revitalised the Shin Megami Tensei franchise in a way nothing else had. After its release, the level of interest in the series simply exploded, resulting in more games being announced and localised in the space of 12 months than we’d seen in the last few years. Of course, this was not without its drawbacks, according to some. Upon first look at the game’s revamped artstyle, people were quick to react, largely with horror. The designs were being handled by Shigenori Soejima, who did some minor work on Persona 2 and Trauma Centre, rather than series mainstay Kazuma Kaneko. The game would be set primarily around a school, and deal with day to day life to a strict time limit, rather than cheerfully allowing you to set your own pace. And, as people were so very quick to point out, you just know that where there’s a fandom, there’s people ready to write really messed up fanfics where they grab the characters and smoosh them together like dolls, making kissy noises as they do so (you know exactly who you are, don’t try to deny it!). But this article is called “The Best Game Ever” and not “Reasons Why People On Both Sides Of Fandoms Suck”, so we’ll move on for the moment.

Behold the main character, saviour of us all! He has an official name in the canon, but I can’t remember it right now, so for the purposes of this article, his name is Kazuma. Kazuma Tenryu. Kazuma’s transferring to a new school this year, and is moving to the local student boarding house. On his way there, however, things get kinda… weird. Weird as in the sky turning a queasy green colour, all liquid turning to blood and, oh yeah, everyone around him spontaneously transmogrifying into coffins. And as he arrives, he’s immediately confronted by a creepy kid who has him sign a contract of some sort. And then he has a gun pointed at him. It turns out the girl on the other end of the gun, Yukari, is one of his classmates in his new school, and the event is waived off as part of the school club she’s a part of. Of course, that doesn’t entirely explain the massive control room in the upper part of the dorms. Or the fact that they seem to be spying on him as he sleeps. Or the weird visions that he’s having as he sleeps. Or the fact that everyone turns into a goddamn coffin on the stroke of midnight every night!

His suspicions that something is amiss are proved a few days later when the boarding house is attacked by a gelatinous blob monster wielding a mask and too many hands. Yukari drags him out of bed, hands him a sword and tells him to follow her. Unfortunately, they make it as far as the roof before the monster catches up to them. As a last-ditch effort, Yukari pulls out her gun… and turns it on herself? The monster, known as a Shadow, knocks the gun out of her hand, the weapon landing at Kazuma’s feet. Instinctively, he picks it up, puts it to his own head, and pulls the trigger…

“Per… so… na…”

And thus, the game begins.

Persona 3 takes place over the course of a year, and can be neatly split into two parts: day time and night time. During the day, you’ll go to school. This is far more important than you’d believe, since this is where you’ll build up your Social Links. In gameplay terms, Links are required for the enhancement and evolution of your Personas. As its explained in-game, a Persona is a facet of your inner self that can only be released with an Evoker – the gun-like item Yukari tried to use at the start. Everyone has it within themselves to be, at turns, a wise mentor or a cruel bully, a crusader for justice or a vicious destroyer. These take the form of beings of myth and legend, gods and monsters and everything in between. The Social Links themselves all correspond loosely to cards of the tarot, as do the Personas themselves, and the stories that unfold are oddly compelling. There’s the friendly rivalry you encounter with a fellow athlete (The Star), the girl you meet in the online RPG (The Hermit), the shady businessman who offers to take you under his wing (The Devil) the shy treasurer of the student council (Justice)… all of these stories are woven into the bigger picture, and as the Links develop, you find yourself warming to them. You find yourself making time for them, not just because it has a practical effect on the game, but because you actually like these people, and seeing them work out their problems and dilemmas gives you a small sense of pride at having helped them. Your influence, as they point out, has changed them, and your friendship has made them stronger. Of course, as each rank of each Link grants bonus experience to a Persona during fusion, their friendship has an arguably greater effect on you.

The night time part is where the majority of the game takes place. On the stroke of midnight, we enter the Dark Hour, a secret time between 12:00:00 and 12:00:01. During that period, the game’s only dungeon, Tartarus opens up. Tartarus is a 260+ floor randomly-generated dungeon that, chances are, you’ll rapidly grow to hate. You won’t be able to tackle it all at once, thank god, as new areas are only opened after certain events, mostly boss fights. Added to that, is the fact that your characters will suffer from fatigue the longer you stay in the dungeon, potentially rendering them unusable for the next few days. This only really affects you at the beginning of the game, and past the halfway mark, probably won’t even factor in to your decision-making, but it’s at the beginning of the game that you’ll want to spend as much time as you can in there, not only to gain money and experience, but also to get a feel for the combat, and limiting you in such a way is frustrating.

More than that, the dungeon designs are, frankly, poor. The decor only changes when you complete a full block of the dungeon. There are a total of about five or six blocks in the whole game. The game takes place over a year or so. Get used to seeing the same bleeding floors quickly, because they’re not going to be changing any time soon. Of course, when they do change, it’s not always for the better. The progression of the first couple of areas is nice, leading on from one area to the other visually, keeping the same motifs, but towards the end… come on, who thought it was a good idea to have an area that’s best described as ‘blacklight disco party freakout’? And then decided this was a good area to put black enemies in? Don’t be surprised if you spend most of your time watching the radar in the corner of the screen than the game itself, because otherwise, you ain’t seeing shit, buddy. Then the block after that goes even more into whiplash by apparently being made entirely of crystal. It’s like the designers went “Yeah, I know we’ve been trying to have each area thematically consistent with each other, but we’re, what, three weeks away from deadline, let’s just throw in some wacky crap and be done with it!” Smooth move there, guys, doesn’t show at all, really.

Of course, the Tartarus music isn’t that much better. It starts off low-key, subdued, but, as with the level designs, it only changes with each block. And when I say ‘changes’, I mean ‘gains an extra instrument’. It’s horribly repetitive and droning, and it was only with the aid of an mp3 player at my side constantly, that I was able to tolerate it. Of course, that leads in to the main battle theme, Mass Destruction. The Megaten series has a reputation for some of the best boss and battle themes in gaming – Hunting: Comrades from Digital Devil Saga and Battle For Survival from its sequel, the boss theme from Nocturne and so on – and as a piece of music by itself, it’s great. Seriously, can’t fault it, I love it. However, those of you out there reading this, quick question: how quickly did you come to dread the words “Baby baby baby baby”? Like I said, it’s a great song, but they always play the track from the very beginning each and every time. When the intro rapidly acquires the Pavlovian response of your hand hitting the mute button, it’s probably a sign that you should rethink putting lyrics in a battle theme (or not, since Persona 4 did the exact same thing, albeit with a slightly less irritating song intro).

Actually, much of the music in the game suffers from this problem, as anyone who ever felt like da da-da-da-dah can attest. It’s not that its bad, its just that it’s repetitive, and it has to start from the very beginning of the track each and every time you enter a new area. And trust me, you’re going to be doing that a lot. As I’ve said before, lyrical themes are a great idea, but only if they’re used sparingly, otherwise you’re going to be driving a lot of people hopelessly mad on a scale your average Elder God could only dream of.

And then we get to the combat itself. The Press Turn system from Nocturne is reused here, but with a minor difference: any character who scores a critical attack, or exploits a weakness gains an automatic chance to attack again. If they do the same thing again, this time on a different enemy, they get to attack again, and so on until they miss or run out of enemies. If they manage to do this, the enemy (or character, as it can happen to you as well) is knocked down and has to waste a turn getting back up, assuming they’re not hit with a physical attack in the meantime. If all enemies are down, you get the option for an All-Out Attack, where everyone bum-rushes the enemy dealing massive physical damage to everything. Needless to say, exploiting weaknesses is arguably more important in this game than others in the series. Unfortunately, that’s not particularly easy with the AI exhibited here.

If you know anything about the game, it’s probably this: you only directly control the main character throughout the game. You can issue orders to the others, which they will follow, but it’s mostly broad suggestions like ‘support the group’ or ‘hit the enemy with everything you’ve got’, and its up to the game how they choose to interpret that. For example, if you get someone to act in support, they’ll immediately heal any and all damage or status affects. Great in theory, but that means they’ll heal all damage, no matter how insignificant, effectively meaning they’ll never heal otherwise. Tell them to cut loose? Enjoy watching Mitsuru use Mind Charge or Ice Break, thus wasting a turn that could’ve been used just stabbing the damn thing! Of course, if your character is incapacitated for whatever reason – status effect, knocked down, whatever – you’ll be incapable of ordering them at all, further flirting with death. And, in proud Megaten tradition, if you die, it’s all over. Your milate may vary, of course: some have found the system perfectly agreeable, and have never had the computer make stupid mistakes on their behalf. Personally, I prefer direct input as to what happens. Call me a control freak if you will, but I like to know any deaths are the result of my screwups, not anyone else’s.

The only other main flaw comes in the voice actresses for two of the main characters, Fuuka and Ken – Ken starts off bratty, before becoming dull, and I’m sorry, but no high schooler should sound like a 30-year-old housewife. Of course, this is balanced by an otherwise phenomenal cast. You’ll recognise most of the characters from other previous roles (the cast has credits from series such as Fullmetal Alchemist, Bleach, Digimon and Disgaea to their names), but after a while, you’ll be hard pressed to imagine anyone else in their roles, the voices are that perfect. Special mention has to go to Derek Stephen Prince, voice of Takaya, who manages to straddle the line between controlled madness and charismatic evil. In a game filled with a stellar cast, the fact that he’s able to outshine them all tells you all you need to know. The man knows how to play a charming villain on a par with Crispin “I’m Allucard, y’know” Freeman, and that’s a hell of a compliment to both.

The characters are, without a doubt, what makes this game. Most of you will probably find yourself liking Junpei most quickly, because, when you get down to it, he’s the easiest to relate to. He likes games, he’s fairly laid back, in a lot of ways, he’s a lot like us. When he finds out that sealing the Dark Hour means the loss of his Persona, he goes into a slump. In his mind, his powers make him a hero, and if he gives that up, he’s back to being a nobody. In that, it’s hard not to feel even the merest twinge of sympathy for him. He doesn’t want fame or recognition. He just wants to be somebody, something more than he is, and who hasn’t wanted that? Then there’s Akihiko, who initially comes across as brash and imposing. As you start to learn about him, you realise he’s not such a bad guy after all. Then, a close friend, practically a brother, is murdered in front of him. Rather than running off wildly for revenge, however, he uses this to drive himself further onward to try and live up to his friend’s memory. Honestly, I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen someone do that in a game, standard protocol is to charge head on, screaming like a lunatic.

And then… then there’s Ikutsuki, and here, the game plays its cruellest trick. Y’see, in the previous games, there was a character called Philemon, a benevolent (sort of) deity (kinda) who gave the characters their powers, known for wearing a camel-coloured suit and a porcelain mask adorned with a butterfly. You never had much contact with him, but, by and large, Philemon was on the level. Philemon himself isn’t in this game, but here’s Shuji Ikutsuki, head of the team and, by and large, a guy who’s seemingly on the level. He’s dressed in a similar outfit, and while he didn’t expressly give you your powers, armed with this prior knowledge, you’re probably more inclined to trust the guy than someone unfamiliar with the series. And then events unfold, and you realise how much of a fool you were to believe him. The game told you he was okay, but while everyone playing it was fooled, series veterans would’ve been fooled that much harder. You went the extra mile. No one else did. It’s heartless and messes directly with the player. I loved it.

Persona 3, more than anything is a story about stories. Everyone has one, from the main characters, to the social links, to even the people standing around doing nothing. Everyone has a tale to tell that unfolds slowly as the game progresses. And at the tale’s close, when you find out exactly how much you meant to everyone, even the people who didn’t know what you were doing at midnight every night, it’s hard not to sit up that little bit straighter. You’re no longer playing a game. You’re fighting for these people. You’re fighting to ensure the sun rises tomorrow. The effect it has will vary from person to person, but if you’ve made it this far, it’s impossible not to get swept up in the story by now. And with the ending… I can’t spoil that here, not even a little, but if you didn’t find your eyes just a little moist, you have no soul. Even now, writing this, the throat’s tightening just a little, and at the time… let’s just say I lost a little of my manly composure and be done with it, huh? The end is played beautifully – another five minutes and those final moments would’ve been positively heartbreaking. As it is… there’s no way I could see it as sad. It doesn’t end badly. It ends exactly the way it was intended to. The way it had to.

There was an updated re-release, FES, with an extra 30+ hour epilogue that caps the whole saga off. I haven’t played it yet, so I can’t comment on it. In all honesty, I’m not entirely sure I want to. It’s not that the extra content is bad or anything, more that… I liked the way it ended. It was a subdued ending, the likes of which you don’t often see in games these days. A quiet, melancholy finale that lets the game wind down to a natural stop. No. Better to leave Kazuma, sitting on that bench, enjoying the warm Spring morning, as a hand strokes his hair softly. He’s earned his rest.

To Kazuma Tenryu. The young man who fought a god to a standstill. Twice. I can think of no better tribute, than starring in a game such as this.

Devil May Cry 3

Capcom, 2005

PS2

The adventures of a narcissist with OCD on a quest to beat up his brother.

When you were a kid, someone – probably a well-meaning elderly relative or aunt or something – told you that no one likes a show-off. It’s one of those things everyone had to go through at least once. Well, Grandma Hilde, I’m afraid to say you were so horribly wrong. Showing off may not be big, and it may not be clever, but it is awesome and it makes you awesome. This is Scientific fact, and trying to say otherwise makes you a fool. Just look at Dante.

Dante, as I’m sure you’re all aware, is the walking personification of Awesome incarnate. Everything he does and says has to be as OTT as possible, no matter how mundane, and, as a result, he winds up reeking of the Awesome, and possibly pizza. Or strawberry sundaes, if the anime’s to be believed (which we’re all hoping it isn’t). Devil May Cry 3 is a prequel to the series as a whole, detailing the events some time prior to the first game. While setting up his titular (as yet unnamed) agency, Dante receives an invitation of sorts from his long-missing twin brother, Vergil. Seems he’s planning some shenanigans, and wants Dante to come along with party favours for all his friends! Except by ‘shenanigans’ he means ‘summoning a demonic tower in the middle of the city’, by ‘friends’ he means ‘demons’ and by ‘party favours’ he means ‘violence’. So, Dante, never one to miss a shindig, ventures forth to figure out what in the hell his brother is up to. And, I dunno, stop another demonic incursion into our world if possible, or something.

This is the intro to the very first stage:

That tells you just about all you need to know about the game. Over the top acrobatics? Check. A cocky main character just the right side of obnoxious? Check. A fantastically thumping soundtrack? Check. Riding enemies like the devil’s own skateboard, firing and whooping like a lunatic all the while? Oh hell yeah, check! Of course, if the game were all improbable sword-slinging and nothing else, it’d be a pretty piss-poor show. Thankfully, the DMC3 has the chops to back up its boasts, with chutzpah to spare.

So, after the intro, and once you’ve stopped laughing at how insane that opening is, you finally get to take control of Dante himself. And it’s good. The controls are as fluid as you could ask for, and while they do take some getting used to at first, once you have them down, pulling off the myriad combos will be child’s play. It’s okay if you start feeling every bit as cocky as Dante when you start facing down the legions of enemies ahead of you, we all do it ourselves from time to time. Even better though, showing off actually has a practical application in the game. The style meter, trademark of the game, makes a return appearance. As you beat up on demons, the bar fills. The more impressive the combo, the more red orbs, the game’s currency, you get after they die. In the grand scheme of things, you don’t have to invest much in the combo system: it makes things easier for upgrading and the like, but, other than investing in a couple of key moves and some extra health, you can easily murder your way through the underworld with the same basic attacks. The very existence of the bar, however, almost guarantees that, like it or not, you’ll be driving yourself to reach the upper ranks as often as possible, for no other reason than the fact that you can. After all, you’re Dante! No way in hell he’d do anything less than the craziest moves known to man or demon!

The soundtrack is similarly fantastic. The ambient music that makes up the majority of it is inoffensive and fits into the background easily. Not that you’ll really be hearing it that often, as the game’s main battle theme, Taste The Blood kicks in each and every time you encounter an enemy. And there’s a hell of a lot of enemies. If you’ve played games like, say, Persona 3 and 4, you’ll know it’s hard to have a battle theme with lyrics in it. It’s a nice idea in theory, but it all falls apart when you remember that your average player’s going to be hearing it several hundred times during the course of a normal game. More so if they’re grinding for whatever reason. Thankfully, unlike the Persona games, Taste The Blood and its variants work well as both a stand-alone piece of music and as a battle theme, probably due to the emphasis being on the music rather than the voice (and due to it fading in, rather than crashing in with the same repetitive intro every time). The boss battle themes are, likewise, of a high calibre, being, at turns, dark foreboding pieces, as in the case of the Cerberus fight, or frantic electronica when you’re fighting the succubus Nevan. The game’s overall theme, Devils Never Cry is easily the standout piece. It accounts for what seems like half the tracklist by itself, showing up in various remixes and rearrangements and as a piano version on several occasions. Give the song its due though, it’s a fantastic track, and while your mileage may vary, it’s not a bad piece of music to riff on.

Devil May Cry 3 was eventually re-released as a budget-priced special edition. While there were a few extra modes – Bloody Palace, a 9999 level endurance mode, extra costumes and art and so forth – two spring to the forefront most clearly. First off is the ability to play as Vergil. While this is touted as a separate storymode, that’s actually something of a lie. There’s a few extra cutscenes as Vergil, mostly at the start and end, but between stages, there’s nothing. There’s not even any difference between the stages or the order you tackle them in – the first stage takes place in Dante’s office, note for note, for God’s sake! Vergil mode basically amounts to little more than a palette-swap with a new set of moves and no story, rather than a ‘true’ new gameplay mode, and while it’s a nice addition, it’s really nothing to get excited about.

What’s more interesting is the re-jigged difficulty levels. We all know how crushingly hard the game gets on account of the difficulty levels being moved up a notch during the translation to Western Shores – our ‘Normal’ is the Japanese ‘Hard’, our Dante Must Die mode doesn’t even technically exist over there, and so on. With the release of DMC3SE, they decided to throw us a bone and moved the settings closer to the original Japanese settings. The end result is a game that’s not exactly easier, as much as it is less frustrating. Lots of people out there wanted to like the original, but were put off by the monumental challenge it offered, even on the sarcastically offered Easy Mode (to unlock: die. That’s it). With this, and a few refinements and tweaks here and there, the game is finally within the reach of even the less than godly of us out there.

DMC3, if you haven’t already guessed, is a phenomenal game, and easily one of the best ever seen in the action genre. The cutscenes are wonderfully overblown, and there’s a healthy vein of self-mocking humour running through it from end to end – anytime Dante does something cool, and takes a moment to congratulate himself on it, events never fail to remind him that he’s still an utter goofball. The controls, the gameplay, the graphics, voice acting and characters all come together to produce an absolutely amazing finished product. It’s even more amazing considering it came out after the second game in the series, an offering so laughably poor, even Capcom themselves are doing their best to distance themselves from it. When a company is more ready to consider a cameo in another company’s game (see Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne) more canon than an actual instalment of the series itself, it gives you some indication of just how dire that offering must be. DMC3 puts you in the boots of a qualified badass and lets you go wild with some of the most demented attacks and weapons you’re ever likely to see – if you can find a weapon more spectacular than an electric guitar that doubles up as a scythe that also fires electrically charged bats with every riff that, fyi, was also originally a virtually naked succubus not ten minutes ago, for the love of all that is holy, keep it to yourself, less its magnificence tear the very fabric of the universe asunder!

Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening is, without a doubt, the craziest party you’re ever likely to visit. Let’s rock!

Baroque

PS2

RPGs are a weird breed. For all the crowing made about pushing the boundaries of gameplay forward, by and large, the settings are inevitably the same: the same cod-Tolkein medieval landscape, the same large expanses of nothing with the same few hamlets and forests, and the obligatory village of ninjas and samurai, despite the rest of the world ostensibly taking place in 14th century Europe. And on the few occasions when they take place in a more modern or futuristic setting, there will always be, without fail, one person, more than likely the hero, running around with a sword. Or a laser sword.

In any case, it’s rare that anyone actually tries to do something different with the setting. There has never been, to the best of my knowledge, an RPG set in the Renaissance. I’ve never seen a film noir strategy game, and if you want something in a recognisable modern day setting, if you don’t like the Shin Megami Tensei series, you’re pretty much boned.

Baroque is something different. Following a catastrophe that nearly destroyed the world, known as The Blaze, the land is left in a twisted state. Twisted abominations known as ‘meta-beings’ roam the earth. The only semblance of order and authority comes from the False Angels of the Order of Malkuth. Their leader, the Archangel, claims to have God trapped at the bottom of their former headquarters, the Neuro Tower, and charges the main character with purifying her. If he does so, he will receive absolution for the terrible sins he has committed – sins he has trouble even remembering.

Right from the off, you’re thrust into a landscape charitably described as ‘hellish’. The sky is a painful crimson, the buildings crumbling down to girders and rusted metal gratings and beyond that, blasted sand as far as the eye can see. The only building of any real worth in the area is the Neuro Tower, home to the game’s main quest. The area’s not completely devoid of inhabitants: there are several people in the area you can talk to who will offer help and advice, after a fashion. The Bagged One will hold items for you, the Coffin Man talks about building the world’s greatest dungeon (goddamnit), while the Baroquemonger will read any Idea Sephirah, glowing pearls that contain the thoughts and feelings of its former owner, that you’ve found. Other characters, like the neurotic Longneck, the cryptic Horned Girl, and the worryingly pleasant Bagged One offer up interesting tidbits of background and advice depending on your actions. Eventually, you head towards the tower. As you near it, a vision of the Archangel appears and hands you the Angelic Rifle, reminding you of your mission to purify God. Picking it up, you enter the tower, and the game proper begins.

Baroque is a Roguelike, a modern-day version of the classic dungeon-crawlers of yore, exemplified by games like Diablo 2, Azure Dreams, Nethack, and, to a lesser extent, games like the Marvel Ultimate Alliance series, and that means one thing: crushing difficulty. If you haven’t already noticed by this point, you have two main meters onscreen: the first is your health, which is pretty self-explanatory. If you take damage, it recharges itself over time as long as you avoid more hits. The other is your vitality meter. No matter what you do, this is always ticking down. When it empties, it starts draining your life meter at the same rate until you die, so its in your best interests to keep it topped up as much as possible. There’s a few ways to do this, but the main way should clue you in to what kind of game this really is:

You eat the hearts of your fallen enemies.

Yes, for all it’s RPG trappings, Baroque is really closer to the survival horror genre. The environments are lifted right out of Silent Hill, the atmosphere out of a David Lynch movie and the enemies right out of that unsettling dream you could never quite remember. They start off reasonably enough – mutant fish, hopping bugs that are easier to step on than hit with your sword – but before long, you’re encountering wicker and mesh manikins that fire balls of dark electricity at you, fake walls with grotesque faces that try to consume you, and floating monstrosities with more appendages and status effect attacks than is strictly necessary. This is a game that manages to put the creatures of Silent Hill, long a World Leader in the export of Freaky Shit to shame, though they’re usually less outright horrifying, and the sense of isolation is easily on a par with it. You never really get to a point where you feel capable of taking on everything with ease: in the back of your mind, you always know there’s a trap or a group of enemies that will shut you down for good, so you’re always on your toes. And all the while, you’re eating the hearts, flesh and bones of your foes. No one said this was a happy game, after all.

Eventually, after some probable mishaps, you will encounter the God of the Order of Malkuth, and more than likely do as instructed by the Archangel. One confusing cutscene later, you’ll be dumped back outside the tower with none of your equipment or levels, and even less of an idea of what’s going on. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the two core mechanics of the game. The first is that you’re going to be assaulting the tower. A lot. Be prepared to restart from nothing repeatedly, because that’s the only way to unlock the story and further floors of the tower. Woe betide anyone who forgot to give Eliza their Idea Sephirah on the 15th floor, because you’re going to have to do the entire thing aaaaall over again. Granted, while the tower itself is always randomized, the NPCs that appear on each floor are almost always on the same floors, so if you screw up, really the only one at fault is you. Thankfully, you’ll level up fairly rapidly just by killing enemies as they appear, and items are always plentiful, so a lot of the time, restarting is more of a hinderance than a game-breaking flaw.

Of course, you’ll want to repeat the tower, because this is the only way you’ll uncover the other main draw of the game: the storyline. It’s drip-fed to you in the most agonizing way possible. At the start, all you’ll know is that the world is ruined, and that, somehow, you were the one responsible for this. As you continue to assault the tower, you start piecing together the background to the story. You’re told fairly early on that the Archangel knows more than he’s letting on, which even the least attentive of players will have worked out, but then you begin to start understanding how much he’s not telling you. Then you find out exactly what happened. To the game’s credit, no matter what you thought was going on, somehow, it’s even more twisted than you ever dared imagine. It’s almost a shame that Baroque isn’t a more traditional RPG as the darkness of the story is easily one of the most intriguing I’ve ever encountered. It’s so hideously warped, and it’s a wonder that it manages to surpass even the darkest of expectations, and if I could recommend a game based solely on its premise alone, this would be getting the highest marks imaginable.

Unfortunately, I can’t and I have to judge it on gameplay, and there’s several gaping flaws here, first and foremost being the difficulty. It’s a Roguelike, so you expect there to be a steep learning curve attached, but somehow the game manages to outdo itself at every turn. It’s hard to feel like you’re making any progress at first, and when you finally start gaining some ground, you’re inevitably dumped back outside with no equipment again. Characters will eventually start dropping hints as to what to do to – how anyone would work out what ‘pure water’ actually means without a gigantic leap of logic is beyond me – but the going is slow, and the majority of players will drop out long before they uncover the good stuff.

Secondly, for all the items the game throws at you, it’s oddly stingy in some respects. Good weapons and armour are maddeningly difficult to acquire, and wandering around with a Puny coat and Junk sword does nothing for morale. That wouldn’t be so bad if, like in other Roguelikes, items to power up your equipment were plentiful, but here, you’ll be lucky to encounter a single stat-up item every half-dozen tower runs. Of course, that doesn’t stop certain enemies tossing around weapon-degrading attacks like confetti at a funeral. Keeping items from run to run is also needlessly hard. On certain floors, you’ll encounter a fixture known as a Consciousness Orb. As well as being an important plot element, any one item, and one item only, thrown in will appear in the item collector’s inventory back in the town. You’re guaranteed to encounter at least two on the final (enemy-free) floor of the dungeon, allowing you to keep your sword and armour between runs. Unfortunately, you’re not likely to encounter many more than that. So if you also happen to find a really awesome item the level before that you’d like to keep for the next journey, tough noogies, it ain’t happening. It adds a maddening degree of unfairness to an already hard game. Surely letting us keep anything equipped, and using the orbs to send back extra goodies would be a far better idea, with the bonus of making the game that little less masochistically hard.

It’s a shame that the difficulty and repetition will put of just about everyone who plays Baroque, because in every other way, this really is a fantastic game. The levels are nicely atmospheric, the music is fantastic, a heavy industrial influence underscoring the journey well, the enemy designs are gleefully grotesque, even the swords are fascinating, being less sharp bits of iron, more borderline organic slabs of metal. There’s also a ton to unlock, with every voice clip and cutscene going into a gigantic directory, and an extensive list of every character and enemy in the game. If you have a high tolerance for basically restarting a game over and over again, or a lot of patience in the face of ludicrous difficulty, this is well worth a look. If, however, you’re like me, and just want to try something different, you could do a lot worse, and if you can get through the difficulty barrier, you’re in for a real treat. A shame then, that that single barrier will put off most everyone who’ll play it – even the ones who’d enjoy it most.

Blue Gender

26 30-minute episodes

Mankind sucks. You know it, I know it, even the Earth itself knows it. Thankfully, despite our immense propensity for failure, She’s not decided to do anything overt about it. Well, not that any of us knows, at least. Other worlds out there, on the other hand… not quite so lucky about it.

Yuji is a Sleeper. Infected with an unknown, seemingly incurable disease, he is placed into cryogenic storage for a year or two while a cure is worked on. Unfortunately, when he’s finally awakened, 20 years have passed and mankind is no longer in charge. Gigantic insects known as the Blue have wiped out the majority of humanity and forced the rest to the stars. A few scattered enclaves eke out an existence here and there, but by and large, this is not our world anymore. He’s found by a group of soldiers from Second Earth, an orbiting space colony where the remnants of humanity live. They’re looking for Sleepers to assist them somehow in their war against the Blue. Unfortunately, over the course of a few skirmishes, the unit is all but wiped out, leaving Yuji and Marlene, the only other survivor to make it to home base alone.

Blue Gender is a weird show. It forgoes many of the traditions you’d expect to see in virtually any show. Characters are vaguely introduced with original, non-generic designs and you expect them to be important later on. Except they’re not, and they won’t because they’ve just be eviscerated by a stag beetle the size of a minibus, all without any warning at all. Blue Gender is not shy about offing characters left and right by any measure, and it’s rare that anyone mourns them. Any other mech show, be it Real Robot (“war is hell) or Super Robot (“war is awesome and makes you a MAN!”), would at least have a flashback montage for the death of a long-running character, but not here. It makes a refreshing change, and it does keep you on your toes, since anyone and everyone’s a target, but it also makes it damn near impossible to care about anyone when you know they’re potentially seconds away from becoming bug bait. Literally, considering the majority of the deaths in the show are literal ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ moments, sometimes comically so.

The other weird thing about it is the random sex scenes. They thin out a lot as the show progresses, but at the beginning, it seems like you can’t go ten steps without someone groping you. Yeah, I know, it’s supposed to highlight that everyone knows there’s a good chance they’re going to die horribly any second now and they’re desperately trying to find any kind of comfort they can whenever they can – several characters explicitly state this on more than one occasion – but when you see two women molesting each other in the middle of Ops while others look on, barely batting an eyelid, it starts looking a little less than credible.

Thankfully, the fight scenes are much more impressive. The Blue are remarkably resistant to damage, with the result being that a single bug can easily wipe out a whole platoon. Okay, so we’re talking about bugs with armour that can deflect bullets about half an inch in width, and it doesn’t help that the mechs in this show seem to be made of candyfloss and sunbeams as far as armour plating goes. In any case, the fight scenes are nicely fast-paced and suitably brutal. The mechs themselves receive remarkably little attention, and there’s virtually no fanfare whenever a new one is introduced. Indeed, other than one model, which has a very distinct plot-related hook to it, there’s every likelihood you won’t even notice a new model’s been rolled out until several episodes later.

The story itself is decent, if a little heavy-handed on the environmental message, though it all falls apart in the last episode. Blue Gender was released about five years after Evangelion had made its impact (no pun intended) on the scene, and for some unfathomable reason, someone on the production crew thought it’d be a fantastic idea to end this series with a similar metaphysical ending that, again, makes no goddamn sense. Fine enough, except, barring a few ideas about the Earth itself triggering an ‘extinction gene’, there’s no real reason for it. And don’t get me started on the ‘rocks fall, everyone in space dies THE END’ post script which literally comes out of nowhere, that was just taking the piss. In its defence, however, the last few episodes are dedicated to wrapping the story up neatly. Absolutely fantastic considering how many shows, both Eastern and Western wind up running the closing credits before the Big Bad Evil Guy’s corpse is even lukewarm.

Blue Gender is a fine action show that tries too hard in the final stretch and takes a wrong turn at Batshit Junction. Ignore the moments of misplaced titillation and the painfully bad closing minutes and you’re left with a solid series with some great moments and pleasingly icky enemy designs. And if that still doesn’t grab you, imagine its a Starship Troopers spin-off. With the casual nudity seen in both the show and the original movie, it’s a closer fit than you’d ever think, and that’s before you remember the power armour that they forgot to include in the film.

Lunar Legend Tsukihime

12 30-minute episodes

You think you’ve got problems? Try being Shiki Tonho for an afternoon. for one thing, he’s having to move back to the family estate after the death of his father, meeting his sister for the first time since they were kids. For another, there’s a series of strange murders going on after dark in the area. And for another, he’s just zoned out and awoken in a pile of a girl he doesn’t recall dismembering for some reason.

Yeah, I’d say he’s got you beat.

Y’see, Shiki is blessed with suck. He has what is known as the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception. Dumb name, I know, but hear me out. What this does is let him see lifelines as a physical presence. Everything has them – you, me, cats, dogs, chairs, running all over us like scribbles. By running his trusty knife along these lines, he can effectively ‘kill’ the object, no matter what it is. Still doesn’t sound too great? Try imagining what would happen if he tried doing it to a block of steel. Or a building. Or the Earth.

As the story opens, Shiki is trying to get accustomed to his new life with his almost needlessly strict sister and their two maids. While taking some time out at a nearby park, he spaces out as a young woman passes by. When next he wakes up, he discovers he’s sliced her to pieces and, unsurprisingly, freaks the fuck out. When there’s no news of any dismembered women on the TV, he heads back to make sure it wasn’t a dream. He’s a little surprised when he not only meets the woman again, but she then proceeds to tell him, in great detail no less, exactly how he carved her up into 17 neat pieces. It turns out the woman, Arcueid Brunestud – Arc for short – is a vampire, and was on the hunt for another before Shiki sidetracked her into little pieces. As penance, she asks him to help her, since there’s no way she’d be able to stand up to her quarry in her weakened state, and he is somewhat responsible for her current predicament. Feeling just a little guilty, Shiki agrees, and soon realises that absolutely no one around him is exactly what they seem.

Tsukihime is part of the larger Type-Moon universe. If the name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve encountered it in the better-known Fate/Stay Night series, or the Melty Blood fighting games. Or at the very least, the phrase “A CAT IS FINE TOO‘ All of these take place in the same shared universe, though, Melty Blood aside, there’s very little crossover between them. Tsukihime was one of the first projects in this shared universe, and began life as a visual novel. The game, started as a simple piece of amateur work, quickly gained in popularity, becoming one of the most popular games of its kind, even compared to more professional commercial games. Japan being what it is, the game was swiftly snapped up and a manga and anime produced alongside it.

The original game is renown for two main reasons: first off, there’s the plot. Like all VNs, it features a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style form of play, eventually branching off into one of two distinct storylines. The writing, however, is widely regarded as exceptional, with some of the best world-building and character-based moments seen in the genre. Unfortunately, it kinda goes a little downhill when you encounter the other thing the game is famous for: the sex scenes. Y’see, both Tsukihime and Fate/Stay Night feature several fully-illustrated and scripted sex scenes, and while, in fairness, they are integrated far better than in most other games (none of this ‘Oh, she’s unconscious, perhaps loosening her clothes will make her feel better’ nonsense here) the writing is, well, painful to read. There is an option to turn these scenes off, but the game will always have a sad reputation as a hentai game, turning a lot of people off.

Thankfully/unfortunately, none of this is in the show. I say thankfully, because the sex scenes are, as I said, hard to read. I say unfortunately because much of the character of the game is somewhat absent from the show. Don’t misunderstand, it’s still well worth your time, just that much of the sparkle from the original source material has been lost in the transition. For one thing, the designs aren’t as visually pleasing, somehow becoming a lot flatter. Sure, the original art was a little amateurish, but it had character. In ironing out the creases, they’ve ironed out the detail and it hurts just a little. As for the writing, that’s mainly the fault of it being an adaptation. You’re constantly shown tantalising glimpses of a bigger world with more depth just around the corner. Of course, being a linear show, they can’t even begin to cover any of it, and with only 12 episodes, even what they do cover is fairly glossed over, vitally important clues and details being given a vague allusion to before being ignored. The pace, on the other hand, I’ll cheerfully blame on the writers. After the first main story arc, the entire thing grinds to a halt. Compared to the game, which carried the momentum with its writing and dialogue, it’s horribly slow, and compared to the manga, which carries it by being more action-packed, it’s positively glacial.

What the series does do that’s interesting, is give the proceedings a strange dream-like atmosphere. The show floats along idly, and it made me wish they’d capitalised on some of the weirder moments from the game: the words ‘this chair is an eyesore’ spring rapidly to mind, as does Arc ‘rewarding’ Shiki with a visit from one of her minions.

Watching Tsukihime, if you’re at all familiar with the parent series is frustrating. Again, it’s not entirely the fault of the show itself, though the bland designs certainly don’t help. By itself, it’s a nice primer to the universe as a whole, and in tandem with the manga, a far less daunting excursion to the series than the game alone would be. As a show itself though, its disappointing. Nothing happens for long periods of time, and it doesn’t help that it keeps dropping hints at the bigger picture, making you wonder if you’ve just seen something significant or not. If you’re looking for a basic introduction to the Type-Moon universe – something I’d highly recommend, for what it’s worth – this is a decent place to start. If you’re looking to watch a solid show, on the other hand, check out Fate/Stay Night or Kara No Kyoukai.

A

It is the year 1979. Star Wars is already well on the way to becoming an unstoppable cultural juggernaut. Buck Rogers is having shiny spacesuited adventures in the discos of the 25th century. Star Trek is slowly but surely making a comeback, reminding us all that peace, tolerance and Orion Love Slaves are the keys to making the galaxy just that little bit better. Space and the future is, in every way, a bright and happy place to be.

Alien changed all that.

We all know the story by now. In an unspecified future, a crew of glorified space truckers on the return trip to earth are awoken from suspension by a signal coming from a nearby planet. Investigating, they encounter a colossal derelict spaceship of unknown origin that seems to have been there forever. As they enter the ship, one of the crew disturbs an egg pod and winds up with an alien parasite attached to his face.

Hilarity does not ensue.

It’s interesting to note that, before Alien, there weren’t many horror movies set in space. Sure there were plenty of films in the 50s that used aliens as their star monsters, but very few that were actually set out in the black, and even fewer that stand up today as solid films in their own right. But 30 years on, Alien is still as effective in its shocks as it ever was. The duct hunt is tense, the scene with Harry Dean Stanton searching for the cat is played wonderfully, set to the sound of falling water and chains, and the famous chestburster scene still retains its impact, even after a million billion parodies of the scene.

The future in this universe is a worn down one. While the Millennium Falcon had a warm, almost friendly decrepitude to it, there’s no way you could describe the Nostromo as ‘homely’. With its cold interiors and identical corridors, it’s almost a forerunner to the cyberpunk movement that would come in the following years. The Nostromo is a corporate vessel through and through, and it’s a nice touch that it almost subliminally reinforces the idea that no matter what, this is an unfriendly place to be.

And, of course, how could we forget the real star: over six feet of relentless death and merciless instinct. I am, of course, talking about Sigourney Weaver the Alien itself. Ascribe all the rape and Freudian metaphors you want, the alien is one of the most terrifying creatures ever to stalk the screen. The director, Ridley Scott, wisely chose not to show the full alien at any point, always hiding it in shadow or closeup, and it becomes all the more terrifying for it. Even with more recent films seemingly doing their damnedest to destroy the mystique of the beast, the original maintains an inhuman menace few other movie monsters have ever managed to achieve. H.R. Geiger has been repeatedly screwed over by Hollywood in the decades since, which is a shame, since the potential to see more monsters and landscapes based on his art would’ve been like mainlining pure nightmare fuel.

The Director’s Cut doesn’t add or alter as much, compared to the DCs of the other movies in the series. There’s a few extended scenes, a couple added, but more interesting is that some scenes have actually been trimmed or outright deleted. Granted, most of these are just people walking around, staring intently at things, that kind of nonsense. It’s a shame that the DC doesn’t add as much as I’d like, but maybe it’s a testament of sorts to the movie that it doesn’t really need it. Everything’s already there to begin with, padding it out any further is superfluous.

Alien is a classic, not just of the genre, but full stop. While the series would eventually take a slightly different turn into outright action over the years, the slow-burning tension is, without a doubt, the perfect introduction to the series, and as it stands alone, one of the best horror/thrillers ever made.

Next Time: That One Film Everyone Knows