Ef – a tale of memories Review

Genre: Drama, Psychological, Romance, Art!
Main Studio: SHAFT
Episodes: 12

Amnesia. Is there any more wretched word than amnesia? The moment I hear it when watching anything, my brain lets out an audible groan. Amnesia is associated with many things; bad writers crutch, pointlessly dragged out mysteries, lame filler episodes even seasons sometimes. You almost always can’t go right with amnesia. Almost… So with that said, I must continue by saying that Ef has probably the best use of amnesia in an anime ever.

Oh yeah, I am going to heartlessly spoil a bunch of the plot here, so hah!

One of the main themes of ‘Ef – a tale of lowercase subtitles’ is art. The three main male characters are all artists of various types. There’s a mangaka, an author and a film student. The show is also more than a little arty itself. It’s produced by Shaft who are a studio with a definite artistic flair to them. They have been working on the amazing Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, and in the past made arty shows like Pani Poni Dash and the disappointing Tsukuyomi -Moon Phase-. Ef is a technically seinen renai show, or as normal people would understand it, it’s based on a visual novel for adults, uh the type of adult without rape that is. Man, classifying these things is hard.

Yes, but is it art? Well yes pretty much.

The animators use a wide variety of animation techniques, with to generally great effect. There’s super-flat shots, CG shots, and others that while traditional, just look plain stunning. You could take almost any frame of this show and end up with something that would look great hanging above your mantlepiece. Here are a couple more shots to waste some space:

One of the main characters is Asou Renji who wants to be an author. One day while hanging around an abandoned railway station like a normal person, he meets a girl named Chihiro. She is very timid, and appears to have an eye injury. They become friends, over the course of a few days, but it quickly becomes apparent that Chihiro has something deeper wrong with her. It turns out that she forgets everything that happened longer than PRECISELY THIRTEEN HOURS ago. A lot of the show deals with the practical details of her attempts to live with this condition, and her attempts to write a depressing yet symbolic book.

Renji is totally into girls with disablities, and severe mental problems, the cad.

She records everything that happens to her in her diary, including enough information to re-educate herself if she ever sleeps for longer than thirteen hours. If that happens, she wakes up with only the memories of her twelve-year-old self, and is terribly confused about what happened to her eye, and why she’s aged four years. Of course Chihiro and Renji fall in love with each other, and they both have to work out how the hell the relationship is supposed to work when she’s got the mental development of a twelve-year old, and Renji is just a bit of a non-entity.

“All I want is a guard rail. Right there.”

The other main story is about mangaka Hiro Hirono and his attempts to do too much with his life. He get’s his bike nicked by spunky harlot and all-round ne’er-do -well Miyamura Miyako who attempts to steal Hiro away from his childhood friend Kei Shindo who also wants to get in his pants. This half of the show is probably the weaker, but it’s still plenty entertaining. Lots of jealousy and moody talks on beaches. Infact I never really got a handle on where this show is set, and wikipedia ain’t helping today. It’s set around this town, there’s a beach, a school, and a weird area where there are tons of destroyed buildings like the aftermath of a war. You can definitely feel it’s video game roots showing through anyway.

“Why did my plot just sort of trail off without any resolution?”

The film-maker character Kyosuke Tsutsumi gets forgotten half-way though and never really gets a conclusion. I guess they just ran out of time. The two main plots are interconnected by a bunch of characters, but never directly cross. There’s also this mysterious girl who always shows up to offer helpful advice before vanishing without the characters really seeming to care. She also may be a nun or paper aeroplane, depending on who you ask.

So I’ll stop spoiling the show now, and wrap up by saying that the plot is gripping, emotional and beautifully told. I think the thing that has the most impact is the amnesia plot, which is something I absolutely never expected to say in a thousand years. For record, the best amnesia plot outside of this show is Planescape Torment, and the worst is Alias Season 3, or maybe that ridiculous part of first season of 24 where a character gets amnesia for about an hour and fifteen minutes.

Arbitrary Rating: 9 – I can’t remember why though.

Attention: Real Drive Sennou Chousashitsu Exists

Director of Zipang…. yeah okay. 

Production I.G… Uh huh? Nice.

Shirow Masamune? Holy Shit!

Real Drive Sennou Chousashitsu

Coming in April.

An Important Message from Japan #2

I have received an important message from Japan:

 

Message ends.

Romeo x Juliet Review

Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Romance, Japanese Adaptation of a Famous Western Work
Main Studio: Gonzo
Episodes: 24

Since the moment I heard the name Romeo x Juliet, nothing could of possibly been made that lived up to the name. I was therefore destined for disappointment with this show, it was only the precise nature of the disappointment that had yet to be determined. When I first heard about it, I had recently finished the sublime Gankutsuou, and so the idea of another Gonzo adaptation of classical western literature was highly appealing. Of course none of the people who worked on Gankutsuou would turn out to be involved. The concept of making weird adaptations of classics definitely has more places to go. How about Pride x Prejudice, Flanders x Fields, or uh, Rumpole x Bailey?

Going into Romeo X Juliet, the best advice would be to throw out what little you remember about the original play from high-school English class. You should also forget that Baz Luhrmann movie as well, but more as a general rule rather than for any specific reason. The first clue something weird is up with this adaptation is that it’s set in Neo Verona, as in “Neo Verona Is About To Explode”.

What we have here is a very loose adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, which sort of of takes the names and rough setting, then goes crazy and shoots up a canning factory. Get this, William Shakespeare is actually a character in the show, except everyone calls him Willy, and he’s exceptionally camp. The idea here is that he writes the real play ‘Romeo and Juliet’ based on the events of the show, which sorta makes total sense.

The various guises of Juliet, and Romeo poncing about on his flying goddamn horse.

Juliet, last surviving member of house Capulet (who naturally used to rule Neo Verona), is hiding from society at large, from her own gender, and also from her own assumed identity. As the show begins, she’s pretending to be a boy named Odin, and also assumes a Zorro-like persona called the Crimson Whirlwind which she uses when going out into the city to fight crime like Batman. These three different personas are a pretty weird direction to go in with Juliet. I’m still not sure where the majority of her hair is supposed to go when she’s dressed as Odin.

Romeo on the other hand is just regular Romeo, flying around on his Pegasus being a hated noble, and son of Lord Montague who rules Neo-Verona with iron fists. Almost all the conflict in the show comes from the fact that Lord Montague is a jerk, and at any point in the series, simply killing him would fix almost everything. The rest of the cast are names from Romeo and Juliet, and some from other Shakespeare plays as well.

Romeo and Juliet rolling around like idiots, crushing someone’s garden.

Over the course of the show almost nothing from the play happens so really don’t expect it to. That said, it does drift confusingly far from the original material. All right it is set on a fantasy floating-island continent place, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it needed to stray as far as it did. There are a few episodes in the second half of the show where Romeo is sent by his father to run an ore mine staffed by convicts, and is told to get it to double it’s yield. This plot goes on for many episodes, and I furrowed my mental brow the entire time. Then a bunch of stuff with magic trees happened. Okay, while there are times where the plot does sort of benefit from having Romeo and Juliet slapped onto it, there are also a lot of other parts when it could easily just be any old fantasy show with nothing to do with any plays wharsoever.

Who could forget this classic moment from the play?

I feel I must mention the presentation at this point. The art, being a Gonzo show, is great. It’s by no means as good as Gankutsuou, but it’s using a totally different style from that show. There are almost none of the 3d sets that Gonzo likes to use here, and no weird clothes effects. No fighting robots either, just in case you were wondering. The music is composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto, who you might know as the guy who did the majority of the music from Final Fantasy 12, infact it sounds like leftover music from that game. Neo Verona even looks a lot like Rabanastre the main city in FF12, so if you have played it you’ll keep probably getting flashbacks to it for better or for worse.

Overall I did enjoy this show. It has some sword fighting, a surprisingly un-sappy love plot, and some badass characters like Tybalt who is pleasantly unstoppable with a sword. Unfortunately though the last few episodes were pretty dumb. I find that most anime shows struggle with endings, and like the majority of them the plot goes all weird ‘n’ crazy just to make it seem more epic than it really needed to be. The ending also manages to be staggeringly un-tragic, for an adaptation of what is predominantly a classic tragedy. They had moved a bit far a way from the classic simplicity of a plot-devicey vial of death-effect inducing liquid to really be tragic.

Coming up next season, an anime cross-over version of Poirot and Miss Marple. Oh wait they already did that? Fine, how about an adaptation of Les Misérables? Oh shit, that too? Well, how about Friends? Anyone done an anime version of Friends yet? No? Good. Make it.

Arbitrary Rating: 7 – Yeah fine.

An Important Message from Japan #1

I have received an important message from Japan:

Message Ends.

Code Geass Review

 
Genre: Fantasy, Mecha, Science fiction, Evil Jerk
Main Studio: Sunrise
Episodes: 25

At some point recently, anime and manga writers realised that a protagonist doesn’t necessarily have to be a dopey but well meaning girl-magnet, a bishounen ponce, or an angsty teen with a talent for piloting mechs. It turns out that it’s actually fun to have a protagonist who’s just an evil bastard, and would probably be more like a villain in any other show. I will credit Death Note with starting this trend with the excellently evil Yagami Light whose quest to rule the world using a murdering notebook was sadly cut short. Enter Lelouch Lamperouge the protagonist of Code Geass who has the same haircut as Light, and is perhaps an even more magnificent bastard than Light was.

He seems like a happy guy.

How ever I describe the plot of this show, it’s probably going to sound like Japanese nationalistic nonsense, so here I go. In the not too distant alternate future, The Holy Empire of Britannia has conquered one third of the world, including Japan. Being jerks, the Britannians have renamed Japan “Area 11″, and all Japanese citizens are now called “Elevens”. The Britannians came in and set up shop in Japan to mine the newly discovered power source, powerful explosive and general plotdevicium Sakuradite. They made all the Elevens live in the shattered ruins of their cities unless they swear allegiance to the Empire and become Honorary Britannians, or hated traitors depending on who you ask.

The show centres on a group of students at Ashford Academy which is a school which both Britannians and Elevens attend; this includes Lelouch and a whole bunch of his friends. Lelouch finds himself getting involved with a rebel attack, and ends up saving the life of a mysterious woman named C.C. who rewards Lelouch by giving him a power called Geass. This Geass allows him to give a command that cannot be disobeyed to anyone who he makes direct eye-contact with. A lot of the show stems from precisely what to do with this power, fortunately for the audience he is of course totally evil, and his first act is to make a squad of 20 soldiers blow their brains out with their own guns. Lelouch as it turns out has a beef with the rulers of the Empire, and sets about trying to use this power in order to take it down. While the idea of the Britannian Empire may seem to follow the Hollywood ‘evil British people’ stereotype, they come across as more American than British in the show. They also bellow ‘All Hail Britannia!’ in English a lot which is always funny.

The main antagonist if I could call him that is Suzaku, the childhood friend of LeLouch would probably have been the hero in any other show. He’s the one with a noble heart, tragic past, and a giant gleaming white robot. Oh did I forget to mention there were giant robots in the show? It’s hardly the main focus of the show or anything, but yes there are robots called Nightmare Frames, which are just how the characters fight when there is fighting to be done. The fact that Suzaku is opposing Lelouch is really odd, it’s like the story is being told from the point of view of the villain, which is a concept that really appeals to me for some reason.

Lelouch as Zero. There’s no way this could be conisdered flamboyant.

Eventually Lelouch sets up as the anonymous leader of a resistance group called the Black Knights, he calls himself Zero and wears a face-obscuring mask and ridiculous cape. Most of the characters in the show end up leading weird dual lives, where for half the time they are soldiers or revels, and the rest of the time they are pretending to be normal students at the academy and having to make up excuses for where they’ve been for the last week. This aspect is sorta ridiculous but only if you think about it too much.

Hmm yeah. I could..I could go for some pizza about now…

Along with Darker than Black, this show may give you an odd desire to eat pizza while watching it. The reason for this is some incredibly subtle product placement from Pizza Hut. Okay, maybe subtle wasn’t quite the right word, I actually meant to say blatant. It is integrated into the show a bit better than Darker than Black which seemed to be set in a future where Pizza Hut had taken over every high street, here they just have the characters getting pizzas delivered a lot.

Going back to LeLouch, he is certainly the main reason to watch the show. He’s rather a hands-off character, and prefers to manipulate people into doing his dirty work for him. In many the large scale conflicts, he hides in his robot issuing orders to his troops, and shows absolutely no remorse if they end up dying. At times where he does get involved, he is absolutely unafraid to play unfair. It sort of plays off the viewer’s expectations for how characters are supposed to act in shows like this, and so it is absolutely delightful when he tricks people into falling into his traps just because they assume that he’s actually being honest this time.

Lelouch also has the great ability to turn terrible disasters into opportunities. Light in Death Note, after an apparent series of horrible failures that somehow worked out okay, would always turn up and says ‘Exactly as I planned’ like he’s some sort of precog, Rather than doing that, Lelouch’s skill is being able to adapt his plan along the way and turn things to his advantage, even when he has the sort of emotional investment in a situation that would leave any other character a blubbering wreck. He is also a great charismatic leader and is always able to round up followers under the seemingly noble cause of freeing Japan, he’s just using them of course, but it gets the job done.

It’s probably worth noting that the animation, voice acting and other product aspects of the show are all top-notch. The show is by all accounts only half-finished, as the last episode after a cliff-hander ending informs us that “Production for the sequel is going smoothly! Anticipate it!”. I will.

Arbitrary Rating: 9 – Fuck yes.

Shigurui Review

Genre: Historical Drama, Gore
Main Studio: Madhouse
Episodes: 12

No-one has seen Shigurui. You haven’t seen Shiguri. He hasn’t seen Shigurui. They haven’t seen it…. I have seen it. What does that say about me? A good way of measuring how many people have seen a show is by how many people have bothered rating it on animenewsnetwork , in this case a mere 51 people. So why don’t people watch it? Probably because it’s about as penetrable as a steel reinforced mountain, but also because because unlike most of anime it seems to actually be aimed at adults. No, not teens, real adults with jobs and stuff. Actually, I’m not sure if I can pin exactly who the target demographic of the show is.

When you get down to it, Shigurui is largely a discourse on the devastating effect a Katana can have on the human body. The show is a seinen historical drama by animation studio Madhouse, and genius director Hirotsugu Hamasaki who’s last work was the brilliant Texhnolyze (a show so great that it actually sickens me to think that almost no-one has seen it). Shigurui isn’t quite that brilliant unfortunately, but it’s still pretty darned good. Shigurui is an anime based on a manga, based on a novel, so there’s a lot of background reading to do if you really want.

How exciting does this look, eh?

The plot is set in a very grim Edo-era Japan, and is based around the Kogan Ryuu Dojo where a man named Irako Seigen challenges the Dojo members seeking to learn their hidden technique. It is also about the eccentricities of the Dojo’s six-fingered master Kogan, who is very old but still incredibly powerful but yet is teetering on the edge of senility. Kogan is very unpredictable and while he has brief moments of clarity, and he also brief moments of wanting to do horrible things to women. The dojo members serve Kogan’s whims as best they can, as they are eager to get him to impart any knowledge he has to them. Anyway, Irako ends up pissing off Fujiki who is a member of the Dojo, along with all the other Dojo members, and gets himself cast out and blinded with a nasty Katana slash to the eyes. The rest of the story features his quest for more powerful techniques, and him using them on the Dojo members, and sometimes passing cats.

I Can Has Massive Trauma?

This show has a curiously impenetrable style to it, one that really leaves it to the viewer to work out what the hell is going on. It doesn’t really tell a story, it merely implies it. If you lack familiarity with the concept of a traditional Dojo, then a lot of what’s going on will just leave you highly confused. It also has a rather unsettling introduction. From a visual point of view it goes for a subdued almost monochrome effect, and many of the scenes aren’t animated a great deal. This is presumably so that when the fights do occur, they can make the animation incredible. Stylistically speaking the fights aren’t the sort where they leap all over the roof tops, but they rather focus on the precise moment of contact between two opponents slowed down to the degree required for you to appreciate the subtlety of their swordsmanship skills.

For those of you too baffled by the story to make much sense of it, you can still rely on Shigurui to serve you up some of the goriest scenes ever rendered in the medium of animation. This show is very eager to display the interaction between katana blade and flesh. Within the first 5 minutes, someone reaches a katana wound across their stomach, and pulls out his own intestines, presenting them to his master in attempt to convince him he is serious. Another delightful scene has Kogan jamming a katana blade into his assistant Ushimata’s mouth, destroying his teeth and carving two slits all down his cheek. This wound is shown regularly throughout the show, as Sake leaks out from it whenever Ushimata takes a swig, and his jaw occasionally drops unnaturally widely open due to the damaged muscles. While the gore is rather extreme, it somehow manages to get away with never seeming gratuitous, as it always serves the plot and is never just gore for gore’s sake.

I believe it was “Urghlblbllgh”

On of the main themes in Shigurui seem to be the idea of making yourself stronger through crippling injuries. A scene at the beginning of the first episode takes place chronologically after the show ends, which in itself is an issue that reminiscent of Berserk’s legendary first episode. This scene shows a fight between Irako and Fujiki who have been crippled my many years of training. Fujiki has only one arm which has gained immensely oversized muscles, and a massive gash in his foot which he somehow incorporated into his fighting stance. Irako has adapted his fighting to being blind, and is also deformed after many injuries, though you get the feeling that they are more dangerous now than they would be if they weren’t injured.

This show doesn’t have the slightest glimmer of a sense of humour to it, unless of course you find people being cut to chunks in immense detail with swords amusing. The tone is kept subdued, realistic, and there are absolutely no wacky anime cliches to be found. With that said, it’s probably quiet apparent that this show won’t be for everyone. Infact it’s probably for only very few people, so best not to bother watching it really.

Arbitrary Rating – 8 Nice!

Here is some gore for you sickos:

Minami-Ke Okawari Is Not Awesome

As the title suggest, I am really not digging the second version of Minami-Ke. I had a very high opinion of the first season, so it is particuarly painful seeing the same characters and setting treated so many degrees worse than the previous series. Going in I was a bit skeptical, not only because a second adaption being aired in the season directly after the first adaption was aired is totally unheard of, but also because the new studio Asread seemed to have unnecessarily altered the character designs which is always a surefire way to win over fans. The biggest overall problems with the show are that it looks and feels cheap, and that it’s not funny which is a bit of an issue for a comedy show. For some reason I get the feeling that the studio just doesn’t seem to really want to be making this show.

Here is a list of 10 reasons why Minami-Ke Okawari is not awesome.

#1 The Opening

From the very thing you see in the show is this horribly generic opening. Let’s compare the new one to the original one for a sec. Notice how the Okawari one has a song that doesn’t really fit in with the tone of the show at all? It has terrible walk cycles for the three sisters at the beginning, it has the section with the creepy eyes, but by far the worst crime though is that they couldn’t even be bothered to animate Hosaka.

#2 Cheap animation

It’s amazing how little animation there is in this show sometimes.  Even in the opening five minutes of the first episode, there’s almost none. What typically happens with anime is that they blow their budget making the first episode look amazing, often much better than the rest of the show ends up being. This definitely happened in the first version, and if you don’t believe me watch the sequence where Kana is chasing Chiaki around the apartment again. This show however seems to be having budget problems from the get-go. For example, whenever Chiaki chucks the bear at Kana, it’s accomplished using only one or two frames of animation.

#3 Too cheap for mouth movements

Following on from the previous point, they really go out of their way to avoid showing people speaking. They will often show a shot of the person a character is talking to rather than the character who is talking. If they don’t do that, then somehow obscure the characters mouths. It reminds me a of parody of a cheap episode that the Kujibiki Unbalance OAV did, which had a 2 minute scene that was entirely montionless apart from people’s mouths moving. This is cheaper than a parody of cheapness.

#4 Fujioka?

Uhh is that what he looked like?

#5 Poor use of Hosaka

Hosaka is appearing in more of the episodes, but he only seems to get about one scene per episode. Part of the humour of the original series Hosaka episodes was watching him come up with these elaborate plans to woo Haruka, get bogged down with the details, and never actually get anywhere with it. In Okawari he just appears and says ‘So Minami Haruka likes Rabbits.’, has a brief fantasy and unbuttons his shirt. It’s like they made some bullet points of his original plots, and just wrote from those without really understanding what they were doing.

#6 Haruka is a right bitch now

In the original Haruka was a kindly parental figure for the other sisters, who is mistaken for being a hard-as-nails gang leader despite her best efforts to convince people otherwise. In Okawari she is a to-be-feared authority figure for the sisters, and actually goes as far as not cooking dinner for them as punishment for a situation that she couldn’t be bothered to listen to the explanation of. Thanks for making her unlikable, Asread, or should I say… obvious joke based on studio name.

#7 No Sensei and Ninomiya-kun

Yes, I know that they were invented by the writers of the first adaption and were not present in the the original manga, but I don’t care. Their show was brilliant, and one of the funiest things in the first adaption. I guess what we have to put up with as a replacement  here are these terrible and barely animated sequences with that bear thing.

#8 That Fucking Neighbour.

This stuttering cretin moved in next door, and won’t stop showing up in each and every episode. He is possibly the least likable character I’ve seen in anime since Renge from Air Master. Look at him, he looks like Harry Potter, only somehow much more pathetic. His gimmick is that he’s a whimpering little shit who can’t turn down any request even if it means he ends up wading through raw sewage to help someone move a rusty bicycle.

#9 Creepy-ass background characters

Comically cheap looking background character have been an anime staple since the original Di Gi Charat where minor characters were drawn as anthropomorphic thumbs. The same idea has also been used in other comedy shows like Puni Puni Poemi where the background characters were black outlines filled in white. In Okawari, the design team have for some reason decided to colour the skin of only some background in character completely black, but not the mouth or the hair. These character even have spoken dialogue. The effect is creepy, real creepy.

Di Gi Charat (Left) and Puni Puni Poemi (right)

#10 Too lazy even to properly do creepy-ass background characters

This is what happens when you combine cheap animation with creepy design. Though it does reveal that they draw the characters properly, then cover them up, which is even more confusing.

 Here’s one last screenshot I took and couldn’t fit in anywhere.

Tomb Raider Retrospective Part 2 – Tomb Raider II (1997)

Platforms: PC, PlayStation

Facts

• It was set in The Great Wall of China, Venice, An Oil Rig, A Ship Wreck, Tibetan Mountains and Monastery, China, and a Surreal Alien Dimension.
• It was the one with the Dragon in the intro, and the last boss was a Dragon.
• You got a grenade launcher, M16 and spear-gun.
• Her breasts were actually breast shaped.
• She did have an animated ponytail, but it behaved like some sort of epileptic snake ghost.
• It had a mansion level with a butler, and there was some outside areas.
• You could climb up walls, and ‘ladders’ which were just walls that looked like ladders.

A mere 12 months after the first game came out, a sequel was already weighing down store shelves. It soon became apparently that Core had decided to go in a different direction with this game, the opposite direction of tombs. Some surmised that this new tomb-less environment may have been a response to the controversy stirred up by having Lara spend a large part of the first game killing poor cute animals. Killing humans is of course far less upsetting for the children than killing dangerous and almost certainly rabid beasts.

Let’s get the plot out of the way first. The game starts off strongly with a level set on the Great Wall of China which contained far more rolling boulders and swinging axe traps than I expected. Lara is there searching for the Dagger of Xian which is a legendary dagger that if stabbed into ones own heart will apparently turn one into a dragon. Actually it does exactly that, turns you into a real bloody dragon. Of course removing the precariously lodged dagger doesn’t turn you back into a human, it turns you into a dead dragon instead. A Venetian mob boss called Bartoli is also searching for the dagger, presumably because he’s an otherkin who wants to live out his fantasy of being a dragon with an obvious weak spot. This time round, the plot really is just an excuse for Lara to traipse around the world, and it actually manages to be substantially weaker than the first game’s plot which is quite an accomplishment. Here, just to fill up some room, is the rough progression through the game…

No expense was spared recreating the majesty of the Great Wall of China.

From the Great Wall, Lara ends up in a blocky impression of Venice where she gets to pilot an awkward speedboat around some canals for a bit. She blows up Bartoli’s hideout with some bombs, then jumps around a condemned opera house. From there, she catches a sea-plane to an oil rig, and then dives down to the wreck of a cruise ship at the bottom of the sea. After this, she goes to the foothills of Tibet for some more awkward vehicle based hyjinks, this time in a gravity-ignoring snowmobile. After this long frustrating sequence she ends up in a monastery where she meets the first non-hostile humans in the series. After this it’s back via truck to the Great Wall and into some catacombs that some how lead to a surreal alien dimension of floating rocks, and from there to a boss fight with a dragon in a temple that has convenient water filled holes for you to hide in when you are inevitably flambéed. Finally you end up back in her manor where she fights off home-invaders while wearing night-wear.

I feel I glossed over something important in that last paragraph. Did you notice I said she went to an alien dimension of floating rocks? Let’s be clear here, I am all for the wackiness of the first game, and I will admit that this sequel had been largely too mundane for my taste up to this point, but this was by far the oddest plot jump the series ever did. Look, just watch it here. What the christ was this all about? Who even knows? You had better believe that Lara doesn’t seem to bat an eyelid about it though. Most blasé heroine ever.

No need for concern, it’s just a surreal fantasy world of flying rocks and floating Chinese warriors. No need to even pass comment really.

Much like the first game, playing it is a really long and surprisingly difficult experience. You will find yourself reloading your game a lot, and simultaneously growing to love the bone-crunching sound that happens whenever Lara dashes herself all over rocks for the umpteenth time. The poor PlayStation users had to put up with a terrible Save Crystal system which just went towards making it that little bit less accessible.

The gameplay was spiced up all the way to the max with the addition of wall climbing which was I have no positive or negative opionion on, it was just there. You could also do this 180 degrees roll thing which I always found myself using more than I probably needed to. The biggest new feature was the inclusion of vehicles. For the Venice levels you got a speedboat, but weren’t really given enough room to do much speeding in it. At the end of the level you were supposed to launch yourself up some stairs and over a mine-field which didn’t always work quite how you would expect. You also got a chunky snowmobile in the Tibet area. Back in 1997 physics didn’t exist yet, which is unfortunate as you were required to make a few jumps across pits which would result in the laws of gravity being totally ignored.

The combat is exactly the same as the first game, although some of the enemies have guns now, but you have better guns. The grenade launcher was particularly devastating, and had a bizarre visual effect. Upon being killed by a grenade, enemies split apart into their component triangles in an effect now unlike a vase shattering.

As mentioned earlier, Core had only 12 months to work on this game, and therefore didn’t have time to deliver much more than what is essentially an expansion pack, and most reviewers acknowledged this, although it still managed to get reasonably decent scores. One thing it certainly did do though was make a franchise out of Tomb Raider.

The first hint or perhaps omen of what was to come for the direction of the series was the curious phrase ‘Starring Lara Croft’ on the games’s box. This seemed to me to be the marketers telling you why you should care about the game in no uncertain terms. It’s also a really odd concept. Do game characters really star in games? I’d say probably not unless there is some meta-layer actually present in the game to some degree. I have a feeling that this obsession with promoting Lara Croft as a character external to the games was instrumental in the decline in popularity of the series.

Just to show where this all eventually went, it was this corporatisation of the franchise that would lead to Lara appearing in adverts for Lucozade, finally culminating Lucozade being briefly named Larazade around 2001. Yes Larazade, I swear I am not making this up. What the fuck?

Hey Kids! Do you want to simply play a game with your fists like a nerd, or do you want have a wild and unique branding experience?

Next time on Tomb Raider Retrospective, Lara discovers a hidden lost valley of dinosaurs…again….

Tomb Raider Retrospective
Introduction
Part 1 – Tomb Raider (1996)
Part 2 – Tomb Raider II (1997)
Part 3 – Tomb Raider III: Adventures of Lara Croft (1998)
Part 4 – Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation (1999) – coming soon
Part 5 – Tomb Raider Chronicles (2000) – coming soon
Part 6 – Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness (2003) – coming soon
Part 7 – Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend (2006) – coming soon
Part 8 – Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Anniversary (2007) – coming soon

Tomb Raider Retrospective Part 1 – Tomb Raider (1996)

Platforms: PC, PlayStation, Saturn and N-Gage

Facts

• It was set in Peru, Greece, Egypt and Unnamed Island a short distance away from Egypt.
• It was the one with the T-Rex that you can probably remember.
• It had 4 guns: pistols, better pistols, shotgun, and uzis.
• Her breasts were a sort of triangular wedge.
• She did not have an animated ponytail, or even an unanimated one.
• It had a mansion level, but there was no butler, and you couldn’t go outside.

Unusually for the series, the original Tomb Raider was actually focussed on the act of raiding tombs. The game could generously be described as being inspired by the Indian Jones films, in as much as it involved ancient civilisations that were not only capable of but frequently did construct elaborate mechanical traps and door-opening mechanisms involving switches several hundreds of metres away.

The story involved a wealthy and very 90s businesswoman named Jacqueline Natla hiring a bunch of broad stereotypes to collect pieces of the Scion for her. The Scion is an ancient artifact with spooky powers such as being a sort of primitive video-blogging device, and somehow enabling the bearer to rule Atlantis. It had been divided into three pieces and scattered across the world, which I assume is the normal procedure for artifacts of such contrived power. While initially hired by Natla, Lara realises she wants all the bits of the Scion for herself for some reason, and she decides that Natla is a bitch who needs shooting. With that in mind she runs, shoots, falls to her death, and leaps around the world collecting the Scion chunks before Natla’s goons can, and foils both a Texan and a Frenchman on the way.

While the setting starts off reasonably grounded in reality, as you progress through the game it gets gradually more and more ridiculous. For the first part of the game, Lara mainly shoots wolves, bears, panthers, crocodiles, gorillas and other normal endangered animals. But then the dinosaurs show up, then the mummies, and finally the centaurs and the demons. Never once does Lara seem the least bit concerned with all these fantastical creatures showing up to kill her. By the end of the game you are running through surreal flesh-wall tunnels while Atlantean mutants that explode when killed are bursting out of giant stasis egg/pod things. In probably the weirdest sequence in the game, Lara runs into her own fleshless dopplegänger who’s weakness is the rather abstract concept of asymmetry.

It would be very easy to dismiss the plot as just an excuse for Lara to traipse around the world, but oddly that doesn’t seem to be the case. If it were then they probably wouldn’t of spent the time and money needed to produce this baffling sequence. Other than the occasional seemingly unnecessary cutscene like that, the game largely seems to leave you to work out what is going on for yourself. You sort of get the feeling that there was probably a lot more to the plot at one point in development, but it mostly never made it into the game.

Ah, classic Tomb Raider. Wait…. WHAT?

The mechanics of moving Lara around the environment could be described as slow and methodical, but to the untrained eye may seem tedious and frustrating. There’s a sort of tomb raider mathematics associated with these early games that you have to learn if you play them for any period. The levels are essentially constructed out of identically sized cubes, some of which are deformed to create irregular surfaces, but are still in essence cubes. Once learned, you can be one hundred percent sure if Lara will make a jump or not, and what sort of run up she will need to do it (eg. a run-up of two walking-backwards steps are required to make a jump of four cubes, assuming you are grab on). These mechanics stayed in for the first five games and in my opinion were part of what made them good.

The combat was never the strong point of the game as there was virtually no skill involved in it. The one and only strategy involved holding down the fire and jump buttons and leaping around all over the place until whatever it was that was attacking you died. The designers clearly understood this wasn’t very engaging as there were only ever about 20 enemies per level. Of course there were bosses which were a T-Rex which is probably the most enduring memory anyone has of this game, two fireball chucking centaurs, a torso, and a Demon-Businesswoman-Atlantean-Leader who throws yet more fireballs at you.

Lara takes the only logical action in response to the discovery of actual dinosaurs living in a forgotten valley, she fills them with bullets.

One of the most unique things about this game at the time was the mansion level. It served a dual purpose; it provided a quick and effective background for the game, specifically that Lara was a woman rich enough to actually own a mansion, and it served as a training level for the game mechanics and general sandbox environment to run around in without wolves jumping out from every which way. The first iteration of the mansion here was strictly internal, and there was no butler following you around. There wasn’t really a whole lot to do, and the engine was so bad it ended up looking a bit rubbish really and unlike anything you would expect a mansion to look like. Lara, ever the apologist, mentions that she is still in the process of unpacking which explains there being loads of crates all over the place and not much else.

There is a lot wrong with this shot so rather than pointing it all out I’ll simply say that the engine just wasn’t really built for realistic environments.

All in all this was an excellent game, a classic even, and obviously good enough to begin a franchise, but I can’t help but feel the majority of people didn’t actually play all that much of it. It’s slow pace and unforgiving difficulty probably put a lot of people off getting all that far into it, and so they didn’t witness the totally insane later levels. It was also one of the only entries in the series that manages to live up to the name Tomb Raider.

Meanwhile, the suits over at Eidos had caught the scent of gold, if gold has a scent that is, and commanded more Tomb Raider be made for them. Clearly something about either Lara Croft or Tomb Raider was working, and it was probably the one appearing on the front of magazines. I can’t help but feel that things would of gone a lot better if they had not ignored half of what made the first game good, you know, Tombs. It’s right there in the damn name.

Tomb Raider Retrospective
Introduction
Part 1 – Tomb Raider (1996)
Part 2 – Tomb Raider II (1997)
Part 3 – Tomb Raider III: Adventures of Lara Croft (1998)
Part 4 – Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation (1999) – coming soon
Part 5 – Tomb Raider Chronicles (2000) – coming soon
Part 6 – Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness (2003) – coming soon
Part 7 – Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend (2006) – coming soon
Part 8 – Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Anniversary (2007) – coming soon