It's been a long, long, time since there has been a PC shooter that tried to take the frenetic pace of anime combat and bring it into a game. In the beginning, there was Shogo: Mobile Armor Division and since then there has been nothing worth speaking of for a long, long time.
Then came 1st Century After: Tsunami 2265. It has still been a long, long time since there has been a PC shooter like Shogo... Ugh. Nothing bothers me more than when a developer will make a game that looks like it has potential and falls on its face. This is annoying for a multitude of reasons.
First off, it gets your hopes up and then dashes them to pieces. Nothing's worse than plunking down your hard earned cash only to find that you've been duped by the screenshot department again. (That's why we're here folks...we take the hit for you.)
Second, the next time some company gets the idea to do a game like that, the marketing people will go, "Well, hey, you got any sales figures on similar games?" And then the developers will go, "When did this piece of crap come out? 300 copies sold?!" and then that's the end of that project. Then the company decides to remake Counter-Strike and call it "Al Qaeda Invasion", and hence you end up going to E3 and seeing 10 versions of basically the same game.
Third, it pisses me off because I want to make games. I can make better games than what people pass off as a finished product. Why doesn't anyone let me take a whack at it? Anyway, that's basically what Tsunami is like. Take Macross, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Shogo, and throw them all in a blender. Wait, who threw Oni in there? Awww no, now you've ruined the whole damn thing!
So, how 'bout them PC 3rd person shooters? Aren't they fantastic? Anyone remember that last good one the came out? You know that one with the...oh who am I kidding. 3rd person shooters suck. I wouldn't be surprised actually if these people just wrote some half-assed mod for Oni and tried to ship it as their own game. The main female character is a dead ringer for the main character from Oni. Even the font for the text is the same...just a different color. So not only are you getting the pain of playing through a 3rd person shooter, you're having the additional pain of playing through a rehash of one that has already been given the public litmus test and has come up "bad". Sounds like how I'd like to spend my hard earned $40 plus shipping and tax.
If you're still interested, here's the plot. Sometime in the future (I don't remember the exact details, because the intro movie consisted of scrolling a camera across the in-game water effects. Absolutely nausea inducing. I couldn't look directly at the screen.) some guy named Shin Balhe becomes shogun of the world. The Earth has run out of energy, and under Shin Balhe's reign, some scientists find some casket which gives off a vast amount of energy that they have dubbed "E.L.E.N.A".
Then Shin Balhe dies. It was very, very sad. I almost hurled.
So the world plunges into chaos, yet again. Some guy kills the Daimyo of some Sector or another and that pisses off the main male character that you can play as, Neon Shima, because his job was to make sure that ninjas didn't go and kill the Daimyo. At the same time, they steal "E.L.EN.A". The main female character, Hiroko, is tasked with with getting Neon Shima out of his prison in the Valley of the Wind or something like that. Apparently Neon knows the way into Sector 3's energy barrier, and will likely want some form of revenge on his Daimyo's killer. And that's pretty much it. You can play as either Neon or Hiroko (I'm not actually sure if you can choose, I opted out of this torture far, far before that point in the game would have occurred.) and they each have their own selection of mechs they use, and will also play parts of the game outside of their vehicles, on foot, a la Shogo...only in really lame 3rd person.
The game is psuedo-cel shaded, which if you dig, might be cool for you, but to me it just looks like everything is in regular, non-cel shaded style with really thick lines that jump out every once in a while. The mech designs look exactly like what you'd get trying to fuse the Macross and Evangelion Angel designs...a freaking mess. The red mech you start with looks like Asuka's Eva combined with a Veritech in Battroid mode...and a mosquito.
In addition to the lack of inspiring art, the gameplay leaves much to be desired. I died while jumping. Not jumping off boxes, not jumping off a cliff, I jumped and pushed forward, landed and died. Considering that your jump consists of you elevating to about the height of your knees, I would have thought this to be impossible. I also discovered that your weapons to start have no ammo/energy cost. This meant that I can run around the entire level while holding down both fire buttons and have no repercussions. Hey, look at me! I'm the walking fireworks show...of DEATH!
A.I. consists of your enemies running straight at you, firing, sliding the the left and right while firing. Ta da. A.I. also consists of enemies standing behind corners that you can see, and letting themselves get shot to death.
As far as audio goes, the in-game music is pretty bad. I decided to shut it off and run Winamp in the background to play my own tunes. I found that a high octane shuffling of Imai Eriko's "Our Relation", Okakita Ayu's "Saite", Liv's "Without You", and Supercar's "Storywriter" kept me entertained enough to give this game 3 levels before I put it out to pasture. (Regrettably, "Tsunami" by the Soutern All Stars didn't quite fit the mood for this game.) Oh, and I was eating dinner, too.
The effects aren't much better. Your lasers sound like they're out of the Transformers, and your missiles don't make any sort of decent effects. The one decent thing about the sound is that the opening theme song actually sounds kind of tolerable. Not really anything spectacular, but hey, I had to say something nice, right?
So, feel my pain and prevent your own. Tsunami 2265 is not a new version of Shogo. It's a new version of Oni. If you really liked Oni, you'll probably dig this. If, for you, like most of the populace, Oni was a huge letdown, then you'll probably want to laugh derisively whenever anyone mentions this game. I mean think about it...it says something about the game when the thing I enjoyed the most about it was playing my own music in the background.
