On anime tie-ins and wasted potential.
Cards on the table, I am an utter weeb. I love anime, I could rattle on endlessly on the topic once I get started, gushing about how much of a visionary Satoshi Kon was, and, well… You’d have a hard time shutting me up is the thrust of what I’m saying here. But easily one of my favourite anime movies of all time is Ghost in the Shell, which I have seen countless times. I first saw it as a kid, and bought a (probably exhuberantly priced) copy on VHS, more recently getting the Bluray edition, and having the utmost joy of getting to experience it on the big screen when it was released again in cinemas.
So when I caught wind of a game, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex — First Assault Online, based on the series Stand Alone Complex, my ears perked up so to speak. But once I heard it was going to be a multiplayer shooter, I lost almost all interest I had in it. I say almost, because when the game did release from Early Access on Steam and went Free to Play, I dipped my toes in because how could I not? It was Ghost in the Shell after all!
The game was, how should I put this? Aggressively mediocre. It was just a generic multiplayer shooter, unremarkable in every sense, with gameplay that felt dated next to Overwatch. Aside from the Ghost in the Shell visuals, First Assault was just offensively bland, nothing about it was interesting or remarkable at all. I played enough games to unlock the iconic Mateba revolver for Togusa (who is probably one of my favourite characters from the franchise, and sports the coolest mullet in anime) but once I got that little in-game cosplay out of the way, I stopped playing and uninstalled it.
First Assault had very little going for it, and aggressively pushed microtransactions. If you wanted to check the game out for yourselves, you can’t. It doesn’t exist any more. At the end of 2017, the publisher ceased support of the game and took down its servers, it’s since been de-listed from Steam. I didn’t play it enough to offer any serious or insightful post-mortem, and couldn’t tell you much about it’s short lifecycle other than “I played it for a bit one weekend” and while there is perhaps little to lament in the death of a game that was at best, a competent platform for delivering microtransactions, I will however lament the lost potential of the IP.
I want you to imagine what sort of a game Ghost in the Shell’s world best lends itself to, that perhaps the IP might not have suited a generic multiplayer shooter, but instead a Deus Ex style Immersive Sim/0451 game. A single player experience with RPG elements, a variety of ways to overcome a certain obstacle; stealth, hacking, firepower, and a wealth of in-universe gadgets that could be called upon. Perhaps even multiple player characters, taking control of different members of Section 9 as a mission required?
I played Watch_Dogs 2 recently, and I so thoroughly enjoyed the experience of using drones, hacking, and remote control to achieve goals. I was thoroughly impressed, because it did something that I find a lot of stealth/action games often falter at: making non-lethal play more fun and engaging than the “loud” options. There were times when instead of even setting foot inside a hostile compound to say, steal a car, I whizzed my little RC car in to unlock gates, and flying above with the drone, hacked the car to drive it right out, where I remained undetected. It was a wonderful showcase of how engaging the gameplay could be with various gadgets and tools at your disposal. Towards the end of the game, you got to control a spider mech that immediately made me think “If only there was a modern Ghost in the Shell game that let you take control of a Tachikoma, that would be amazing!”
Now, this may seem like a bizarre point to be making, I am either making a complaint that a particular game wasn’t a completely different genre of game entirely, something that it was never intended to be, or I am lamenting a game that never existed. Both propositions are more than a little ludicrous when I take a step back from it, but I am going to double down on it and say that the proposition of making a generic multiplayer shooter with the Ghost in the Shell IP in the first place is what was ludicrous. It made no thematic sense.
So why am I talking about this now? Partially because of the supposed death of the Immersive Sim as Arkane Studios recently announced that the Dishonored series is “Resting” for now, and that the amount of games in that rather nebulous genre is sparingly few, with the Deus Ex series itself also seemingly on hiatus. And partially because I rarely see games that deliver on the promise of a given anime IP, but I’m using First Assault as an example.
And I say promise because it is the existing lore, worldbuilding, and tools that the movies and series establishes, it flares imaginations about what is possible in a game; it is that promise that should inform game design. But when you have a game that takes an existing IP that is steeped in espionage and political intrigue, and remove all of that, leaving only the visuals intact, you’re wasting all of that wonderful potential. A lesson could be learned here about what makes a good adaptation, about how source material is more than just a skin to stretch over an existing game format, and what can be learned from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex — First Assault Online’s failure.
