Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

If you are reading this review, you have most likely seen or heard of the Anime Ghost in the Shell and are curious about if the game is good or not. I can already say that if you are a fan of the Anime, you’ll be a fan of the game. That is usually the case with all the Anime to game conversions. With a die hard fan base, Bandai has brought the cult hit to the PSP in the form of a thinking man’s first person shooter. Does the game impress or does it leave more to be desired?

Graphics

The choice in graphics is perplexing, while an Anime cell shading style would have worked really well, GITS: SAC goes for more of a standard set of FPS textures, guns, and enemies. The cut scenes are in 3D, no animation from the series is used. The main characters are nicely modeled and so are a few of the guns. What hurts are some of the other blurry looking textures and blocky looking guns; they just don’t look finished. When intense fire fights break out, bright orange tracers make it so you can track where the enemies are coming from. It seems, to save on PSP system resources, that there are never hordes of bad guys lining the walls to shoot. There are two maybe three guys shooting at you when you are engaged in combat, nothing too hard to handle.

The menus and HUD are clean and nice, for the most part. Navigation of menus is easy and just about fool proof. The HUD on the other hand looks nice but some times can get in the way because it is too big. Also, when trying to interact with objects, like an elevator door, it is next to impossible to read what pops up in the interaction bubble.

Sound

Guns that give off a rat-a-tat-tat? Check. Competent voice acting? Check. Engaging sound track? Not so much.

This game isn’t a treat for the ears to say the least. While the gun noises and voice acting are decent to good, the soundtrack is repetitive and annoying at best. It will take some fine tuning in the options menu to get the sound levels to where you want them.

The voice acting is good but there is a weird problem with it. All too often you are left wondering who just got done talking. With a complex story like this, you need to know who is interacting with whom. It also seems that dialogue was added at the end of the development cycle because sometimes a character will talk and their lips won’t move and their voice sounds like it is coming out of a tin can. Through out the whole game, the sound feels like an after thought. The Tachikoma voices are simply annoying.

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Controls

Let’s face it; gamers have been spoiled with dual analog sticks for FPS controls. The PSP presents a unique challenge because the lack of the two sticks. In this case, you move with the analog stick and move the gun with the triangle, circle, X, and square buttons. It makes the game feel not fluid and imprecise. You can forget about trying to lay waste to the cyber criminals with the choice of handguns because of the jerky controls when aiming. The developers did the best they could with the control scheme but switching the walking and aiming would have been nice.

Otherwise, the buttons are laid out in a logical manner. There is also sub commands accessed with the select button to give the Tachikoma commands. That is, if you don’t want to control the Tachikoma. I suppose a definition of a Tachikoma would be in order now. Basically, they are giant spider robots that have a super intelligent AI and provide slight comic relief and follow you on every mission. Anyway, they are always there and will take a little maneuvering to get around seeing that they are quite large.

Gameplay

GITS: SAC suffers from being mediocre on all accounts. There isn’t one outstanding feature that is worth shouting at the top of the roofs about. The story is the best feature of the game, if you can follow it. It is complex and intricate and it revolves around Section 9 trying to recover the once top-secret H-88 report from the hands of cyber terrorists that want to stop it from being declassified.

Not paying attention to the cut scenes will make you feel lost in the story with no hope of figuring it out. Over the course of the game, more and more characters pile up and you have to keep track of them because they have a tendency to show up later in the game.

The AI is not very intelligent as they run around shooting as you stand in one spot trying to aim and hit them. It ends up being a machine gun fest because that ultimately works the best to mow down the bad guys. The guns aren’t even that diverse so its not a big deal. Sure they have different looks, clip sizes, and slight bullet pattern but you will end up taking the gun with the biggest ammo clip and hold down the trigger.

In each mission, there is a choice on which of the four Section 9 member will do the mission. Each member is supposed to have a special characteristic that makes them unique; like the strong, agile, and sniper traits. These differences are marginal and can be ignored all together.

Missions are what FPS gamers have come to expect. Recover these documents, stop a bomb from exploding, escort an important person, and stop all enemies in an area. Not much deviation to the formula there. The boring and uninspired missions have been done before and the mission will become mind numbingly simple. The weapon selection is great, over 50 different kinds of guns to play with. It’s just too bad that they don’t feel different, just really only three different styles to play with: machine gun, handgun, or explosives. You outfit your character with three weapons and then you can customize the Tachikoma before you do each mission so there is a nice customizable feature for gamers who like to have the control in their hands.

Final Thoughts

First person shooter games are currently my favorite genre. I had high hopes for Ghost in the Shell from remembering my youthful days of watching fan-subs of such shows as Dragonball Z with my other friends when Anime was just breaking into American culture. GITS: SAC was a disappointment that I think could have been fixed with more time in development. It just felt like a generic FPS with Anime flair. Nothing about it stood out, it was all pretty bland. The complex story was interesting until I got distracted to let the dog out and I missed a critical part of the story. I replayed the mission but if I hadn’t I would have been hopelessly lost. So far, FPS games have had trouble on the PSP and I hope that trend will turn around.

If you have an itchy trigger finger, GITS: SAC might be the answer just don’t look to get blown away.

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