Deep Shinonome Yin Yang Maiden (Switch)

 

 Upon seeing the screenshots of this game, and apparently not bothering to read the description, I bought it assuming it was a more horror-themed Kikikaikai-style shooting game. Other than each starring a young female exorcist, however, the two games have almost nothing in common! What Deep Shinonome: Yin Yang Maiden (which is the name it's given in the Switch's UI, while Shinonome Abyss: The Maiden Exorcist is what's on the title screen)actually is is a stage-based survival horror game, centered largely around your character's physical vulnerability, and the management of extremely tightly limited resources.

 

Each stage is a building, represented by a grid of (mostly) square rooms connected by doors. Some rooms will have torches or firepits, some will be traps: a spike pit surrounded by only a thin ledge, for example, some will have nothing, not even a light source. And of course, there's items to pick up in some of them. Sound is just as important as vision, though, as you can hear monsters in adjacent rooms, and can make noise yourself to attract their attention.

 

This is essential, since though you have a gun, ammunition is incredibly scarce, and really, it's only effective against the weakest monsters. But the monsters aren't particularly intelligent, and you can lure the corporeal ones into firepits and other traps to destroy themselves, and the spiritual ones through sealed doors or into shrines for similar effects. There's other, single-use weapons found lying around, too, like shurikens that can kill most monsters in a single hit, and grenades, that can clear out entire adjacent rooms.

 

 

Though you're an exorcist, your aim in each stage is only to enter through the front door, and eventually exit through the back. You don't have to destroy every monster lurking therein, though if you don't you'll be spending a lot of time avoiding them, and as well as weak and fragile, you're also pretty slow, so that's a difficult act to keep up for an extended period. So the meat of the game is surveying the situation very carefully, figuring out which monsters are where, and also where the resources needed to destroy them are. 

Of course, this means that it's heavily structured around playing stages repeatedly. Not only so you can get the lay of the land enough to actually complete them, but there's also a strong emphasis on scoring, with a complex rundown at the end of each stage, showing the points you scored for item use, destroying monsters, and finishing quickly. That doesn't mean they've skimped on the size of the game, though: there's a ton of stages, starting out moderately difficult, and judging by the star scale used on the selection screen, gradually moving up to inconceivable difficulty for superhuman genius players.

 

I like this game! It's compellingly addictive, to the point where I don't want to leave a stage I've started unfinished, trying over and over until I figure it out (and successfully eecute that solution), then often foolishly starting the next stage straight away and getting drawn in for another series of failed runs. It also definitely works as a piece of horror, being atmospheric and gruesome with relatively simple graphics and sound, and tying the horror into the mechanical design of the game itself, rather than just being a macabre skin draped over a generic action game. Definitely recommended. (Note: a lot of places online seem to have the game listed as a roguelike, but that's just an optional sidemode, the main game is a series of specifically designed and balanced stages).

Gunnm: Martian Memory (Playstation)

 Gunnm (under its English title Battle Angel Alita) is one of my all-time favourite manga, so it's a mystery why it's taken me so long to get around to playing this adaptation of it, when the fantranslation has been out a few years already at this point. Though I also haven't read the second sequel series, Mars Chronicle, so maybe I have some subconscious aversion to stuff with Mars in the title? Anyway, none of the sequels were out yet when this game was made, but it does apparently adapt the entire original series, with all its tragedy and misery and a severely toned down version of its violence.

 

In case you don't know, the manga details the life of a cyborg girl named Alita or Gally (depending on the version), who is revived by a doctor in a post-apocalyptic world after literally wasting away on a scrapheap unconscious for an unknown, but presumably very long amount of time. The world in which the series takes place is an incredibly horrible one, of constant violence, suffering, and all-new levels of inequality made possible by the mass adoption of artificial bodies capable of replacing almost the entire human body (except for the brain and spinal cord). Even one's own bodily autonomy is subject to sale or theft, and the threat of losing everything to debt or crime is ever-present. Furthermore, everything seems to be filthy and rotting on Earth, while some unseen class with absolute power live in presumed luxury in a city in the sky. It is, essentially, the world in which conservatives want the rest of us to live.

 

Anyway, in this world, you play as Alita/Gally, and you find out that you've got deeply buried memories of being a master of Panzer Kunst, a powerful martial art created on Mars. So you become a bounty hunter, a participant in violent future sport, and more, in search of your place in the world, and hoping you'll find the secrets of your past and where they might lead you in the future. I've played about five hours of the game, which got me through the first couple of arcs, with Makaku's killing spree and Hugo's tragic obsession, and then a little way into the Motorball arc of the manga. The game's got a semi-open world structure, though it is a very small world compared to ones that would come later, and pretty much all the NPCs you meet will only ever say things related to where you need to go next.

 

The first couple of hours will mostly be spent wandering the backstreets and wastelands killing minor bounties to get the upgrades and items that'll let you beat the first few bosses. It's fine, the combat is pretty fun, and these enemies go down quick enough that the grind never feels too heavy. Something cool that happens here and there is that at certain points in the story, you get new bodies, which tend to look cooler than those before them, as well as being big upgrades statistically. Eventually, all this street combat is replaced (presumably temporarily) by Motorball matches, short beat em up-like stages with an all-new control scheme in which you smash a whole bunch of jobbers until the boss player turns up for you to fight. Structurally and mechanically, it's a pretty simple game, but there's just something about it that's very gripping, and while most of my sessions have been about an hour long each, that time flies by.

 

I think a lot of that can be attributed to the game's presentation. It looks incredible, with the Playstation's low-poly models and those dirty low resolution textures used to amazing effect at realising the grimy, horrible world of the Scrapyard. There's also some nice use of lighting, too, as each location can be lit for daylight, dusk, or night time (though these change dependent on the story, not on your actions or the passage of time), adding a whole bunch more atmosphere. Something that carries over from the manga is also the unspoken horror of the world: there are no monsters, mutants, or aliens here. Not even any autonomous robots. Every weird creature you fight, all those semi-sentient deckmen you meet who exist only to provide basic, specific services, every giant freak, or pathetic wretch put together from spare parts is someone that was once human, and still is a human brain who has found themselves, through some kind of circumstance, in the bodies you see there.

 

If you're a fan of the manga, this game is definitely worth playing, it follows the story very closely, and though the NPCs are incredibly vapid, it still does an amazing job of creating a very atmospheric theme park version of the scrapyard to explore and fight weirdos in. It is a shame how much the violence is toned down, too. Obviously, it could never have been as violent as the manga is, but this game is almost completely bloodless! Still, the flaws are relatively small compared to how fun, atmospheric, and engrossing the game as a whole is, and I definitely recommend giving it a try. Such a shame it never got an official translation at the time, too! Especially since the manga and its animated adaptation both did.