Remember when I said licensed game month was over? Yeah, me neither, let's cover one more for the road.
Ghost in the Shell (Also known as Mobile Armored Riot Police in Japan) is a comic written by Masamune Shirow in the early 90s. As I understand it, it's about some hardcore future cops who kick a lotta ass and solve mysteries of the week. While it was popular in it's home country, the series also made a pretty big splash in the states sometime in the mid-90s after the tie-in film was translated for american audiences.
And spanish audiences. Here's the entire film in spanish, because why not?
As such, licensed video games were hastily translated from Japanese to English and shoved into stores, so let's get us one and have a peek!
Right, so the game centers on the usually crew from the manga, Public Security Sector 9, as they go out to arrest and/or assassinate members of a terrorist organization, The Human Liberation Front. Specifically, the plot centers on YOU, the new recruit to Sector 9; as you more or less single-handedly slaughter an entire army while everyone else is jerkin' off in the mobile operating base.
Here's what the gameplay be like: You get plopped down in the middle of a warzone, bullets whizzing everywhere, and you're given a task to complete; usually killing select enemies in the level, or reaching a certain checkpoint to progress to the next map.
You do so by piloting a bigass metal spider called a Fuchikoma, spraying hot lead at your enemies with an unlimited ammo, lock on machine gun, or a very limited ammo grenade launcher. As you might expect if you know anything about GitS, the Fuchikoma can strafe at high speeds and easily slide up vertical walls and over bumps in the terrain, highly encouraging mobility and dodging projectiles.
Here's the plan: crawl up onto the highway and shoot the guys up there, then crawl back under it and shoot the tank on the road, then wrap back around to the side and jump across to the building.
While I greatly apreciate this dedication to the source material, and scampering all over the walls and ceilings IS fun, the A.I. in the game is VERY basic. Enemies refuses to lead you, meaning you can effectively circle-strafe almost everyone. To add to that, most enemies seem to have poor response time in general, so you can usually shoot them from a wall or ceiling before they even have time to aim at you.
I'd also like to take a minute to bitch about the voice acting, while we're here. The game uses hand-animated/CG hybrid cutscenes between missions by the same animation team as the film, and they got the voice actors from the english dub, but the lip animations weren't redone for the US version; So the voice actors have to awkwardly stammer out their lines roughly in time to the lip flapping, making them sound very stiff and unnatural.
On the plus side, everything else sounds pretty good. The music is sort of generic techno garbage, but it's serviceable, and never compelled me to switch on Spotify in the background. The sound effects are pretty good through, gunfire is pretty punchy, explosions sound alright, and the game even surprised me by offering the option to use a fake surround sound, very impressive.
Shame it refuses to boot in EPSXE, the game also has BUILT IN WIDESCREEN!
Yeah, this game's got some pretty sick features for a playstation game. I also like the first person mode, which was very helpful for the indoor missions where camera space is a problem. Although that's not usually the case, most of the levels are free-roaming through large city districts, with only 2 or 3 auto-scrolling chaise sequence levels. Every mission ends in a boss, and these have some pretty awesome designs.
I think my favorite level was probably Mission was probably Number 7, "Villains Lurking in the City". It's a more free level where you can just run around and explore the surprisingly big city while you fuck up a bunch of mechs and tanks that are rampaging around. This was a good level to play around with the strafing and wall-climbing mechanics, very fun.
This level makes me feel like Batou
Overall, it's a pretty good game. Although it's not a great introductory game for someone who's new to the Ghost in the Shell franchise, as it doesn't really explain anything about the universe. The game is also pretty damn short. With 12 missions in total, I beat the game in an afternoon and went back to playing shitty games on my phone.