Akira Review

PRODUCT NAME

Akira


BRIEF DESCRIPTION

Multistage adaptation of Otomo's best known film.


RELEASED BY

International Computer Entertainment (I.C.E.)


COPY PROTECTION

Disk-based

Not Hard Drive Installable


MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

Amiga 4000/40 w/wb3.0

2 MB chip / 12 MB fast

Seagate ST3144AT 130 MB HD, Maxtor 7345AT 320 MB HD

AIR 880k external drive


REVIEW

                            A Brief Explanation

    The computer adaptation of Akira is little different from any other
movie license, and does not really need an in depth review. In fact, it
doesn't really deserve a review at all. Were this game not a product of
something important to me, I wouldn't even give it two words. But because I
feel as strongly about it as I do, I will endeavor to describe the
expectations and disappointments that are I.C.E.'s Akira. In order to
explain this, the background behind it must also be explained...

                           Anime - Watashi no Koi

    Japanese animation, or "anime", has long had a rabid, albeit small
following in the western world, but only recently has it gained much
attention in the popular press. For many years most people only thought of
anime as the source of the poorly-dubbed children's shows which aired in the
less-favorable hours of Saturday mornings, for that was all they had
experienced of it. Europe and, even more so, America were to remain largely
oblivious to the art form, even with the somewhat greater noteriety it would
garner in the present day. And so while the mainstream has coursed down its
narrow, deep path, the true enthusiasts of the genre have long  endured in
shadow.


    Small clusters of fans would eagerly trade and distribute generation-
worn but beloved copies of their favorite shows, and with vaguely-translated
script (if available) in hand, they would settle back to view them. Not many
knew more than a smattering of Japanese, but with the aid of any translation
that was available they would struggle to make out every nuance, pun, and
figure of speech. When they met in groups, often there was only one script
on hand, and one person would have to stand and read from it aloud as the
show progressed. When even a script was lacked, it was the responsibility of
the more fluent viewers to call out running translations of the dialogue,
and occasionally explain the twist or turn that the plot had taken. Most
people would find this pasttime tedious, if not downright silly, but for the
fans the joy of seeing and understanding the shows they loved was more than
enough to warrant the effort.


    But it wasn't the animation itself that they loved so. Indeed, it was
often poor, lacking in fluidity and scope. It wasn't the quality of the
artwork either, although they certainly appreciated the style and detail
with which the individual frames were drawn. It was the STORIES that
compelled them to watch. Plots were not restricted to a single motif, and
were able to break the confines of the simple, straightforward thread
without resorting to mindless mayhem. Characters were not flat, unchanging
entities defined by their indiosyncracies, they were capable of independant
thought, and could react realistically to their environment, even as it
shaped them. They did not embody such concepts as "good" or "evil", and the
viewer was not expected to identify solely with the protagonist. Morality
was more often not the primary focus of the show, and when it was it usually
was expressed through the thoughts and emotions of the characters, not a
triumph over a diabolical foe. Death and love beyond the platonic were not
scorned, but celebrated as a part of life.

                               The New Fans

    Yet when the mainstream western audience finally started to become aware
of anime beyond the children's shows of the early morning, most were
incapable of seeing the qualities that the fans so admired, what they saw
was sex and violence, which had become taboo in what was percieved as a
children's medium. Even anime directed at younger audiences offended western
sensibilities, for it often portrayed death, and sometimes contained brief
(and largely incidental) nudity. To most western viewers this became the
distinguishing mark of anime, and the artistry and power of the medium was
lost to them. The fact that these superficial concerns over incidental
content were completely unknown to the Japanese was ignored.


    From this attitude arose a new, much larger legion of fans who cared
little for the underlying story but instead watched anime to see rape and
murder in a (gasp!) CARTOON. (This is not to say that the original fans
disliked the inclusion of such material, but rather that they saw it as
merely peripheral to the plot.) Businesses sprung up to import and translate
anime that would cater to the desires of these new fans, sometimes
displacing the few professional subtitlers that had emerged to support the
true fans. One of these new companies, Manga Video (known to anime fans as
Mangle Video), was able to wrap most of the European market around its
finger to the point where the terms "anime" and even the sometimes offensive
"japanimation" were replaced with "manga videos". Unlike the true fans,
these new fans disliked hearing a language that was not their own, and
accordingly the companies serving them released dubbed anime. It didn't
matter that the voice actors were bad, that the translation was wrong, or
that music was replaced, because all the customers wanted were decapitations
and young girls being fondled by slimy tentacles, preferably at a high frame
rate. They DIDN'T want to hear "slanty-eyed-speak".

                               The Movie

    Not all of these new fans were that extreme of course; many just wanted
an action flick with some blood and guts and titty shots thrown in. Probably
the most popular show among this crowd was a movie called Akira. Its high
frame rate and violent action scenes enthralled most viewers. The true fans
liked it too, but not to the same degree, for despite its spectacular
techinical quality and amazing depth of imagery it had a rather mediocre
plot. This has not stopped Akira from becoming what is probably the most
widely known piece of Japanese animation in the western world. In its dubbed
incarnation it can be found in almost any reasonably sized video store.
While not the triumph of anime that some people believe it to be, it has
certainly been a commercial success.


    Akira, in essence, created the popular western anime market. Hordes of
guts-and-porn fans, and even a few true fans, look back to Akira as their
first experience with anime. With the growing profitability of anime, it is
not surprising that Akira became a prime candidate for a computer game
license. What was surprising was that International Computer Entertainment,
a relatively unheard of British software company, was awarded the contract.

                             A Computer Game?
                             

    I.C.E.'s announcement created a great deal of interest and anticipation
in Europe, especially in Mangle Video's dominion - the United Kingdom. The
fact that it was going to be released, at least initially, only on the Amiga
was treated as a good sign. (This also had the side effect of insuring that
it remained almost totally unheard of in that dull, grey land of MS/DOS
compatibles - the United States.)


    Computer game adaptations of anime are nothing new in Japan, but this
was a breakthrough for Europe. It would be the first computer game based  on
anime to be marketed as such in the western world. It would also be the
first commercial video game based on anime to be written in the west.
(Though there have been western computer games that were eventually made
into anime later.) 


    It would also (this is why I was excited) be one of only TWO anime games
to be released on the Amiga. (The first was U.N. Squadron, an adaption of
the coin-op, which was called Area 88 in Japan. This was an adaption of the
anime and manga of the same name, written by the immortal Kaoru Shintani.) I
eagerly waited for it. I got the cool 1994 calendar poster with Kaneda on
it. And I waited some more... I was anticipating really great things,
because they were putting so much time into it! I was so eager that I didn't
even stop to remember the last release from I.C.E., the completely awful
Total Carnage.... Perhaps this realization would've saved me, but I doubt
it.


    It took forever. I waited and waited for it to appear, but it didn't
show. I counted off the days on my Kaneda calendar until there were no more
days left on it to count, for it was 1995. I considered taking the poster
down, but it looked cool so I decided to leave it. Besides, it kept
reminding me to look out for the game.


    It was almost a year after the initial announcement that a friend told
me of its release. I picked it up the very same day. I was happy. That
didn't last very long.

                              First Look


    Skipping over the rather flimsy documentation, I immediately threw the
first disk in. It wouldn't install. I was pissed at yet another company
screwing the user over with a shitty trackloader. I sighed, I could live
with that. It was an anime game. I didn't care.


    After a period of gronking I saw the intro come up... Wow! It was just
like the movie! It showed a framegrabbed animation of Tokyo blowing up, and
cut to the crater, showed the nice big red title, and played the cool drum
sounds from the movie. The animation looked like it was only 8 colors. I
could live with that, hey it's the game that counts! It then loaded the menu
screen, superimposed over the jukebox from the movie, which appeared to be
in only 8 colors as well. It played an uninspired adaptation of the theme
from the motorcycle chase. It had all the excitement of marshmallows. I of
course didn't notice, as I was still psyched from just HAVING the game! I
clicked on the menu option to start the game....

                               Potholes


    After looking at another grainy 8 color picture, the first level came
up. It supposedly deals with Kaneda fighting against a rival gang - the
Clowns. It looked more like Kaneda was fighting with his bike to get from
one end of a stretch of badly maintained road to the other. Of course that
is what the real goal of the level is. 


     In addition to that worthy objective, you are also shown the true goal
of Akira: filling up a bowl with pink goop. (I think this is supposed to be
the psychic scanner from the movie, but it doesn't look like it. It looks
like a bowl full of pink goop.) In this stage you get pink goop by going
right. When you get all the way to the right end of the level, your bowl is
full of pink goop and you go on to the next level to get more goop.


    Kaneda's bike does NOT move like it does in the movie. It handles about
as well as a tricycle with the handlebars welded in place. It cannot go
faster than about 15kph under its own power. I kept looking at the bike,
trying to find the foot pedals.


    There is no real combat here. You have no pipe to bash the Clowns. You
have no gun. The road is littered with police, innocent bystanders, other
people on motorocycles (which don't go very far), massive chunks of concrete
(?), boulders (!?!?) and flimsy-looking picket barricades. If you touch any
of them, you die. What amazing combat.


    Even better are the massive gaps in the freeway that you have to jump
over. The potholes are killer in Neo-Tokyo. *WHY* am I on this stupid thing
if it's got these gaping holes in it? To make the jump, you need to hit a
ramp. If you miss the ramp, you're dead. If you go up the wrong ramp, you're
dead, because two screens ahead of you, where you can't see, is an innocent
bystander waving his arms, and you can't turn fast enough to avoid him.


    Even better are the "bonus" pickups. Approximately 3/4 of these are
absolutely vital to completing the level. If you don't pick them up, you
die. Oh, not right away, but if you don't pick up the "bonus" grenades at
several points, you can't use them to blow up the boulders, which you then
run into at 1kph and die. If you don't pick up the "bonus" speedups, you
don't get enough speed to make it over a ramp, or outrun the police (who
kill you). If you don't pick up every single can of fuel, you die (curiously
enough you eat gas at the same rate regardless of speed, I thought the
Japanese valued fuel economy.)


    Oh yes, and then there's the boulders. You see, occasionally there are
boulders blocking the freeway, and the only way to get by them is to throw a
grenade at them. The problem is that you can only throw grenades a fixed
distance. If you don't throw the grenade at precisely the right distance,
you're screwed. If you throw anywhere closer to the boulders, then the
grenade just overshoots them, and you wind up doing another 1kph
collision-with-fireball. You can't back up, you can't aim closer, you can't
get off your bike and set the grenade on the boulder. If you are closer than
about 3/5 of the screen to the boulder, you will die.


    After about an hour I was finally able to clear the first level,
whereupon I was presented with another level of the same. I gave up, it was
really that bad. I wanted to persevere for the sake of the review, and I was
finally able to do so in the form of a cheat you can enter on the password
screen. (Yes, it's another of those level code annoyances that force you to
use the joystick to enter letters when you have a perfectly good keyboard
for stuff like that.) Using this I was able to crawl through the remaining
three levels of the tricyc- er, motorcycle sequence. (I was even treated to
another 8-color picture after the second level. It seems that every two
levels you get a grainy picture. Great.) 

                              Booger Globs


    It's of course obligatory to have one of the sequences be a platform
game. In Akira, there are five of them, four of which have two levels each.
The first three cast you as Tetsuo, who, having recently been granted
psychic powers, is now trying to escape from the government laboratory so he
can take over the world, I think. Tetsuo has the power to kill his enemies
by throwing what look like either psychic bolts or booger globs at them.


    Once again the real goal is to fill a bowl full of pink goop. Obviously
this is what Tetsuo really wants, as he refuses to leave the level without
his goop. Goop is obtained by killing doctors, nurses, businessmen,
airships, automobiles, bunny rabbits, teddy bears, and small children(!?).
You need to kill almost all the other beings on a level in order to get
enough goop to do whatever it is you're supposed to with it.


    The platform sections not only require pixel-perfect jumping, but punish
you for screwing up by having you fall down holes in the floor that take you
back 50% of the way through the level. Considering that each level takes
more than an hour to complete if you play it well, this is not very amusing.
The levels are artificially huge, and incredibly monotonous. Every
screenfull looks like every other screenfull, though you get to know certain
parts very well from being sent back to them all the time.


    The first two levels take place within a high-security hospital. In
order to reach the exit you must have the necessary security cards to get
through all the elevators between you and the exit. This is vaguely
reminiscent of the platform sequences in Technocop, only with the added
annoyance of having to go through all the elevators in order. Security
passes are carelessly left around the level, though cleverly placed so that
if you want to get out you have to walk the maximum possible distance.
Curiously enough, you cannot aquire passes from all the doctors and nurses
you kill with booger globs. They have pink goop, but no security passes. How
do they use the elevator? Even more curious is the fact that in the movie
Tetsuo simply blasted down doors, security be damned. He never actually used
an elevator in the movie either. Why should Tetsuo have to do this in the
game? Afraid he might collect his pink goop too quickly?


    The next two levels take place in an amazingly vast playroom, with lots
of floors but curiously enough, no elevators, stairs, or ladders. The only
vertical mobility you can obtain aside from jumping is the occasional fiddly
little rising-and-falling-anti-gravity-platform-game-block. The infernal
security passes are gone, but now you have to kill four times as many other
beings to get enough pink goop. In addition to the old enemies, you get some
new things to kill. Now there are businessmen who shoot you, miniature
airships that bomb you, automobiles that puke on you (I don't  recall this
causing damage in the movie), teddy bears that claw you, and bunny rabbits
that, well, hop on you. The other obstacles of note are the ones on the
ground. There are jack-in-the-boxes with killer teardrops coming out of
their eyes. They don't actually DO anything except cry. You have to time the
teardrops and jump on top of the box at the right time to let you run under
the them. The problem with this is that you could quite easily walk around
them, if the game would let you. It's hard to describe without a picture,
but it is really irritating. The same problem arises with these really tall
piles of legos that you can't jump over. There is OBVIOUSLY a path you could
use to walk around them, but the game staunchly insists that you can't.
Well, Tetsuo did have a nasty bump on the head, and wasn't really thinking
TOO straight...


    It should be said at this point that I was in considerable pain after
slogging for 5 hours of this awful game, but I kept on going... It was my
duty... Dear god...


    The next two levels were yet more of the same, only this time in the
play castle at the top of the military laboratory, home to the children who
were previously cars with indigestion, myopic bunnies, etc. The odd thing
about this castle is that it is so mind-numbingly-bored-to-death huge. It
wasn't much larger than a small cottage in the movie. But, I.C.E. have
faithfully scaled it up FOR YOUR ENJOYMENT. Now instead of covering a few
square yards of incredibly dull unplayable platforms, you can enjoy an area
of a half dozen football fields of incredibly dull unplayable platforms!
After throwing booger globs at uninteresting targets to get identical globs
of pink goop for 5 hours, you can rest easy in the knowledge that you have
another 2 hours of tedium to enjoy! There's even the temporarily enjoyable
exercise of mindlessly and heartlessly exterminating the small children (who
now look like small children) to suck the pink goop from their lifeless
bodies! And because it's sooooo much fun you get to repeat the thrill of
mass pedocide OVER AND OVER to a seemingly infinite number of incarnations
of the SAME THREE sprites! Cackle in glee as you leave the  drained
carcasses of a hundred Thin Frail Little Girls (tm) behind! Perfect fodder
for the streak of necropedophila in all of us! Feel your heart race with joy
at the thought of killing yet another dozen Small Wimpy Snot-Nosed Boys
(tm)! And don't forget to turn your stereo up, you wouldn't want to deny
your ears the extasy of savoring the beautifully sampled explosions as your
great globs of doom strike a blow of vengeance against the innumerable
clones of Fat Kit Who Needs a Hovercraft to Get Around (tm)!


    And then, suddenly and sadly, after 7 hours of the same thrilling
run-jump-fall-through-gap-in-floor-and-get-sent-back-8-screens gameplay, it
is over. Tetsuo's mission for pink goop is complete... No more can you
experience the elation of being obstructed by a tall, narrow pile of
legos... No more can you immerse yourself in the wild abandon of hurling
wads of snot at a billion otherwise respectable doctors gayly throwing
hypodermic needles at you... Your happy days of repetition and rendundancy
are over...
    And we are glad. It's about fucking time.
    
                         Kaneda Gets Sensible

    After sneaking into the military complex with members of the underground
revolutionary terrorist organization, Kaneda decides that it's HIS turn at
starring in a lame platform segment! Why should Tetsuo have ALL the
aggravation and tedium? Surrounded by soldiers, rats, and being strafed by
really slow, unsteady hovercraft, Tetsuo must wreak more destruction and
mayhem, snuffing hundreds of lives so that HE TOO may posess the Sacred Bowl
of Pink Goop Sucked From Dead People!


    This segment actually comes close to being enjoyable, a claim which none
of the other stages could even hope to dream of making even if they were
lying. For one thing, Kaneda packs a gun. This does considerably more damage
than Tetsuo's weapon (which supports the hypothesis that those were in fact
booger globs, and not the psychic bolts of doom of the movie). Kaneda has a
head on his shoulders. (Now if only he would stop riding his unmaneuverable
motorcycle-cum-hippopotamus over freeways with deadly  boulders and 30 meter
wide gaps.) The segment is also not even remotely as frustrating as the
others due to the fact that the sewers seem to have been designed to be
better suited to habitation than the building itself. There are no
inexplicable gaps in the floor. There are no Bizarre Little Platforms that
Mysteriously Float in Midair. There are no two-dimesinional obstructions
that appear to occupy three-dimensional space. There are amazing devices
known as "ladders" that can take you up or down a level without having to
leap on Bizarre Little Moving Platforms that Mysteriously Float Around the
Room in Midair, and you don't need to hike across the entire map to get a
security pass to use them.


    But the fact that this part of the game, unlike the other 88.2% of the
game, does not make you want to scream in utter frustration and do something
impolite like, say, shooting your neighbors' kids, deep frying the entrails,
and returning the freshly-cooked viscera as a christmas gift, does not
actually mean that it is any fun. You still must wander around through two
massive levels, in which any one part in virtually  indistinguishable from
any other, killing dozens of identical-looking people  and collecting the
pink goop that they leave behind. And while this is  clearly the best part
of the game, all it meant was that I was granted a  brief respite from the
sheer agony that is the rest of Akira, and was able to relax in relatively
blissful state of abject boredom.

                              Deja Vu


    At last comes a segment which is not a platformer. It is, in fact, a
shoot-em-up. A shoot-em-up in the spirit of the computer game that is
Akira!


    Kaneda apparently gets fed up with obtaining his goop drop-by-drop from
a hundred identical corpses, and decides to pursue his traditional means of
goop acquisition -- moving to the right. To facilitate this process he,
accompanied by his revolutionary underground terrorist girlfriend, steals
one of the military's hovercraft. Unfortunately for both the military and
our hero, the hovercraft appears to have been manufactured in the same
factory as Kaneda's motorcycle. But rather than crawling inexorably forward
and steering laterally with the grace and power of a beached whale, it
crawls inexorably forward and steers VERTICALLY with all the grace and power
of a beached whale. Fortunately it is not armed with fixed-range grenades,
but with a semi-useful laser cannon and optional heat-seeking missiles. And
while neither of them do much damage, at least they allow the removal of
obstacles that are closer than 3/5 of the screen away.


    The whole thing resembles the retarded offspring of a tryst between the
motorcycle stages and R-Type.

    Oh, and of course they have to do the obligatory "shoot through the
tunnel really fast" segment, which, given the performance of your vehicle,
is almost entirely unnavigable. The forks in the tunnel that lead to
unforseeable, unavoidable, and instant death are also quite annoying.

                   End the Suffering, End the Pain!

    After escaping from the compound, the game goes into fast-forward.
You're treated to a set of three grainy 8-color pictures this time, rather
than the one you've been getting every other level. This is all very well,
because I would much prefer to end this piece of tanuki turd rather than
suffer through a Tetsuo-flying-like-Kaneda's-motorcycle segment, or a
Tetsuo-killing-lots-of-soldiers-on-the-way-to-the-stadium-to-get-pink-goop
segment, or (god forbid!) a Colonel-overthrowing-government-by-moving-to-
the-right-and-collecting-pink-goop "bonus" round. ("bonus" meaning that if
you don't get it you wind up dying for some stupid reason later)


    And so... Hurrah! It seems that my perseverance has finally paid off!
I've made it to the climactic finale! I'VE REACHED THE FINAL BATTLE WITH...
with... um... something. I'm not quite sure what it is, but it didn't appear
in the movie or the manga. It's some sort of flying organism that
occasionally releases worms that wriggle about randomly. The captions
beneath the grainy 8-color pictures said something about fighting inside of
Tetsuo-turned-blob, but that can't be right, as there's asteroids and
buildings and legos in it. It could be a representation of the debris of the
city floating within the sphere of destruction catalyzed by the coming of
Akira, but that doesn't explain what the floating thing with the tentacles
and eyeballs is. 


    In any case, true to form, your ultimate goal is to gain one last bowl
of pink goop. In order for Kaneda to get the goop he must fire his
handy-dandy laser rifle at the big tentacle thing. Varius pickups around the
level allow you to increase the power of your laser, and even convert it
into a rocket launcher (how'd Kaneda pull that one off?) The more powerful
the weapon, the more goop you get from shooting the tentacle thing. Once
you've filled up your bowl of goop, the tentacle thing dies, and you get to
see the nifty, grainy, 8-color framegrabbed ending animation, and the
credits roll. (Well, actually they kind of JERK up the screen, the scroll
routine was apparently written by an ambitious group of gerbils. I kind of
wish they'd written the whole game, as even gerbils could do a better job
than I.C.E.!)

                         What Does it all Mean?

    This is definitely one of the worst games I have ever laid eyes on. It
makes Total Carnage look like an inspired work of art. It makes even the
worst of Ocean's and Psygnosis's movie titles seem like faithful
adaptations. It makes such classic chunks of crusty crap as Trump Castle,
Spaceport, and The Honeymooners seem enjoyable. The best segment of the game
(the sewers) could perhaps be considered platform fare as enjoyable as
Huckleberry Hound, one of the worst platformers ever.


    The graphics, while not horrible, are completely uninspired, and in no
way resemble the anime they are supposedly based on. The digitized stills
and animations from the movie are extremely coarse, but still manage to look
good compared to the pedestrian efforts of I.C.E.'s artists. Audio is
unimpressive, consisting of either sparse uninspiring sound effects, or
flat-sounding "enter the notes and you're done" renditions of the movie
soundtrack. Gameplay is simply hideous, as you probably have already
surmised.


    I.C.E. is clearly hoping to cash in on the name of the movie, attempting
to stick unwary consumers with crappy software, and take them for what
they've got. Obviously the market they hope to attract are the somewhat
dim-witted "new fans" I discussed at the beginning of the article.
Unfortunately a good many true fans, or even interested outsiders will
probably be caught as well. Don't let it happen to you or your friends --
this is a waste of money. It isn't even worth the disks it comes on.


    Even worse, I have heard that I.C.E. offered to give a pre-release
evaluation copy to a British Amiga magazine provided that they give it a
rating of at least 80%. If this is true, then these people are unredeemably
slime. Don't buy any of their products (not that you'd want to anyway).

             If It's This Bad, Why Is This Review So Long?

    This game could be easily summed up in a single acronym -- POS, and I
DON'T mean Point Of Sale. Yet for some reason I felt compelled to write this
much about it. I wanted to explain *WHY* I was so heartbroken at how bad it
was. I wanted to explain *WHY* I loved anime and longed to see more Amiga
games based on it... I also wanted people to know the sheer agony that I
went through playing it start-to-finish for this review (and that was with
the CHEAT MODE ON!).


    Probably the main reason I explored this game, however awful, in such
sickening detail was its official, though not spiritual, link to the anime
art form. It was ugly and unserviceable, but it still was a bridge between
my two favorite pasttimes, and there was little else to span the gap.


    I don't know if a great anime adaptation will ever come to the Amiga,
and I don't know what form one would take if it did, but should the day of
that great release come, may it be showered with tenfold the devotion that
has been wasted here, on the blasphemy of I.C.E.'s Akira.


OVERALL

Sound:       Poor

Graphics:    Poor

Gameplay:    A violation of the Geneva Convention.

Lastability: Attempting to play it for longer than 60 seconds may result in
             suicide.

Value:       Nonexistant.

Overall:     The lowest of the low, and even lower than that. The only
             thing which is lower are the people who created and marketed
             it. This is a product of greed.