Long Live the Revolution

I have been contemplating writing this review for a long time.  I even took a shot at it once or twice before now.  Hopefully, this will be the last attempt and the first real success.  I know that it's pretty firmly on the long side, but it sums up most of what I wanted to say on the subject, and what I thought was worth saying.  I find it’s hard to write about especially complex things, even when you love them.  Sometimes the love is what makes it difficult.

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A friend of mine in basic training recommended Revolutionary Girl Utena to me.  This would have been back in late 2000, or else very, very early in 2001.  If you know anything about Utena, or about basic training, or both, you can well imagine that this would be the last place you might normally expect someone to recommend something like Utena to you.  But he offered to loan me his tapes of the series once we both had permanent duty stations, if we could keep in touch.  I didn’t manage to keep in touch, because as it turns out I’m lousy at that kind of thing, and while I regret it, it’s probably just as well for him in one sense.  It would have been hell getting those tapes back from me once I’d gotten good and hooked.

I had seen the Utena movie at a convention, back when it was big in the fansub community (this was back when fansubs were on VHS), and while I had loved the absolute poetry of its artwork, the way it dealt with themes as deep and dark as the center of the heart, I had very little idea what much of it had actually meant.  I knew there was a TV series that this movie was somehow connected to, and had heard of it before, but further information eluded me.

Still, I had my own interest, a keen fascination, and a solid, reliable recommendation to motivate me.  So when I saw the first 13 episodes — the first arc of the story — on DVD at Otakon in 2001, I didn’t hesitate to buy them.  I bought a lot of things at that Otakon, but that first story arc of Utena was by far the most memorable.

Among other things, Utena marked my first real foray into the realm of shoujo anime.  I had explored that territory before, in an extremely limited way.  I was a fan of CLAMP, having read what existed of Magic Knight Rayearth and X at that time, but those examples hardly count.  CLAMP has often straddled the line between shoujo and shounen (this was particularly evident with the dark and moody X), and they have always stood apart from what I often think of as “typical” (probably “stereotypical” would be more accurate) shoujo fare.  And it doesn’t get much more shoujo than Revolutionary Girl Utena.  My preference in anime has traditionally been for the weird and the dark and the thoughtful.  It’s why I gravitated toward Akira, and Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evangelion at the time, and why I am enthralled by anime like Wolf’s Rain and Kara no Kyoukai and Puella Magi Madoka Magica today.  So on the surface of things, Revolutionary Girl Utena looked like it would be a major departure, being all pink and fanciful and fairy-tale wonderful.

Imagine my surprise.

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For a while there, I was a sort of Revolutionary Girl Utena evangelist.  Several years ago, I was attending an anime club at a college where, oddly enough, I had never, ever been a student.  I petitioned the club president to allow viewing sessions after normal club hours, where a niche group of us could watch things that might not have a very broad appeal without any risk of alienating the club members who were there mainly because they liked Naruto and Bleach.  This was a sort of compromise we had reached.  She wanted to hijack the club’s viewing schedule to watch Utena, because she had never seen it but had a burning desire to do so, and I wasn’t willing to loan her the DVDs (you will have to trust that my selfishness was the wiser course in this situation).  I still wanted there to be a club to go to on Friday nights, and I discovered that we still technically were allowed to use the clubroom for two hours after club normally ended.  The arrangement practically made itself.

After Utena viewing sessions, we would usually head over to a nearby Steak ‘n Shake to talk about the series, or about whatever came to mind.  It was through this group that I met one of my best friends.  There’s probably a moral in there somewhere, but I’m not going after it.

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So…  About Revolutionary Girl Utena.

There are some media — anime, books, films, TV shows, video games, works of art — which reward subsequent viewing, and Revolutionary Girl Utena is one of these.  There are some that practically require multiple viewing, and Utena is one of these, as well.

It’s difficult to describe.  It is impossible to summarize in any short form (and it would be cumbersome to the point of uselessness do so in any long form), and it is probably equally impossible to provide even a short synopsis.  Still, because I am stubborn, or stupid, or something, I will try.

Utena Tenjou is a girl just entering high school, and she attends the private and very prestigious Otori Academy.  Otori Academy is practically a world unto itself; very, very little occurs off-campus. 

Utena is, perhaps, not a normal girl.  She wears a boy’s school uniform, and on her left ring finger, she wears a rose signet ring.  When asked, she says simply that her Prince gave it to her.  But unlike so many of the young girls around her, Utena is not the sort to wait for her Prince Charming.  She wants to meet him again, of course.  Whoever he is, it’s evident even from early on that he was responsible for saving her from a very personal sort of certain doom.  But to Utena, he is also an inspiration.  She has decided that she will be a Prince like him, that she will live nobly, courageously, heroically.

One day, the captain of the kendo team, Kyoichi Saionji, carelessly breaks her best friend’s heart.  He compounds this sin by making a public joke of it.  Utena challenges him to a duel.  Being the sort of domineering, sneeringly prideful person he is, Saionji would normally ignore this challenge.  But he sees her ring.  Strangely enough, he wears one just like it — it happens to match the school’s emblem, and every member of the Student Council wears a ring just like it.  Saionji changes his mind, and tells Utena that he will meet her in the forest behind the school after classes are finished.  He is dismissive of her concerns that the forest is off limits, as though those who wear the Rose Seal are not bound by the same rules as others.

What she finds when she goes there is a staircase leading up to a dueling arena in the sky, above which, impossibly, is suspended an upside-down castle with its foundation seemingly in the clouds.  It is in this arena that the Duelists — those who wear the Rose Seal — meet and duel, in the hope that if they can become a champion, they will be granted the power to revolutionize the world.  This has been promised to them by an individual known only as The End of the World.  To the best of anyone’s knowledge, this person is never met, never seen, never heard; he is known only through letters, which instruct the Duelists on when they will go to the arena.

Utena presents a problem, though, in her very presence.  She has received no letters, and has no idea about The End of the World, or about the power to revolutionize the world for which the Duelists all strive.  Yet she clearly operates by End of the World’s mandate, since she has the Rose Seal, and no one can enter the arena without one.

And so Utena finds herself drawn into something that is both strange and dark and wonderful, by turns and all at once.

At its most basic, Revolutionary Girl Utena is a metaphor, an allegory.  For what, I will leave it to you to determine.  Half of the reward for watching is the discovery of its meaning. 

The series sets up a sort of ritual, early on, which helps bolster its sense of meaning and imparts an air of mysticism.  A more superficial analysis would dismiss this as formula, but no.  Ritual really is it.  There is a sense of heavy, grave purpose behind the repeated actions, a sense of significance.  Revolutionary Girl Utena is practically turgid with meaning.  These things are done because they impart a sense of importance, of weight, to the proceedings.  They are like the parts of a Catholic Mass. 

The strength of a ritual lies in its sameness, its repetition.  But it also serves to set a standard.  So when things change, the impact is more keenly felt.  So when the established ritual changes, you feel not only interest, but a vague sense of alarm.  Something upsets the natural order, turns the world a bit sideways, and the change signifies insecurity.  Because that is the other thing ritual accomplishes.  The motions, repeated often enough, seem almost meaningless.  Their constant and reliable form becomes a comfort, freeing you to ponder the deeper mysteries toward which they gesture.  The change to this established order, the upheaval, signifies danger — to life, to mind, to the very sense and essence of one’s self.

The word “apocalypse” pops up quite frequently throughout Utena.  It’s right there in the song that plays each time Utena ascends to the arena: “Absolute Destiny: Apocalypse”.  And there is definitely the feeling of a certain and inevitable doom as the series winds toward its climax. 

“Apocalypse” is a very apt word for the end of Utena, both of the series and the movie.  We all know the common meaning, of course.  Catastrophe, disaster, widespread (particularly on a global scale) destruction.  Doomsday, essentially.  But the word has an older meaning, and that is “revelation”.  That was, in fact, its original meaning, before the only thing it got associated with was the disaster hinted at in the Book of Revelations.  That’s linguistic drift for you.  But back to the point: “apocalypse” is the word to describe Utena, in both the modern and in the much older definitions.  For at the heart of Revolutionary Girl Utena is a revelation, and it may very well destroy worlds, in a real and personal sense.

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In some ways, Utena has all the hallmarks of its era.  The animation is minimal, which has typically been characteristic of shoujo anime for as long as I can remember, and some of it does get reused or retraced.  This isn’t the crime it might normally be.  The focus of shoujo is usually set on the relationships between characters, and you don’t need a lot of fancy animation techniques for that.  And while a more cynical person would be tempted to take all the things I said about ritual up above and use it as evidence of something much more mundane at work — budget constraints, perhaps — I tend to think that if it wasn’t a deliberate stylistic choice, then it was either a happy coincidence, or else one of those situations where the limitations of a production, instead of hampering it, help to inspire it. 

While on one level, it does occur to me that the characters in Utena don’t usually behave in the way normal people do – people don’t normally challenge each other to duels — their behavior is to some extent stylized.  The actions can’t be subtle and nuanced, because they would either be possibly misunderstood, or else never be noticed.  Like a stage actor, the actions must be great instead, so we can see and completely understand the meaning.

But if the words and actions are grandiose, the characters still retain the subtlety of normal people.  If their words and actions are at times grandiose to the point of improbability, their feelings, with all the layers of meaning and subtlety, are absolutely real.  And that is part of the mastery of Utena, that the essential feelings, thoughts and ideas come through clearly despite the limitations, and because the people making this thing used the limitations smartly when and where they could.

The story itself, as mentioned above, is complex, symbolic, and many-layered.  You can understand it well enough on a single viewing.  But there are things that you see differently after you’ve seen the series through once.  There are things that were mysterious before that now have clear meaning.  There are subtle bits of foreshadowing here and there that the show just moves right over; you almost have to know what to look for or what’s coming ahead in order to see them.  There’s a particularly neat bit done with a row of photos toward the end of the second story arc that I didn’t notice at all until I was on my third run through the show.  So while you can pick up the essential meaning of the show in one pass, I do think subsequent viewings are best for full appreciation.

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I should mention it at some point, so I suppose now is as good a time as any.  I may write about it in more depth some other time, but right now we’re going with the short version, so here goes:

There is a Revolutionary Girl Utena movie.  It tries to cover the same basic themes as the TV series, but in a much different way, and in a heavily altered setting.  The Otori campus looks like something out of an Escher painting.  The themes and relationships between the characters in the movie are more obvious, most likely due to the movie being somewhere under an hour and a half (as opposed to nearly 20 or so for the series), but for those less willing to sit and ponder and ruminate on things, that might actually be a benefit.  The ending to the movie is terrible — I get the metaphor, but I think it’s horribly, clumsily handled, completely out of line with the general tone of the series (and of the movie immediately prior to the ending), and most of the time, I just turn the movie off at a certain point. 

Still, the movie is absolutely, amazingly one hundred-percent drop-dead gorgeous.  It should be running on an endless loop in a gallery somewhere.  (That might be hyperbole.  Possibly).

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Now, I want you to understand, in this next section, that I am typically a pro-dub sort of anime fan (please, save your pitchforks and torches for another time).  I’m going to take a moment to talk about the English dub here, because it certainly deserves a mention.

The dub is fucking awful. 

To describe it in more precise terms than that—to find terms precise enough—would exhaust the thesaurus, and I’m not about to do that.  I am neither Stephenie Meyer nor Christopher Paolini; I can’t write with one hand on the keyboard and the other busily searching for synonyms.

It’s difficult to put my finger on the exact nature of the problem with the Utena dub.  It isn’t that it’s poorly acted—it’s not even acted.  Some of the actors recite their lines in the same way that you might read a storybook to a small child, reading things in an overemphasized way and accenting your syllables too hard because you’ve never been to acting school or done any professional acting, so you don’t know any better.  Except nobody here has that excuse.  Other characters’ voices just seem to be a bad fit for their roles, or they’re altering their voices in an attempt to sound different (and failing miserably).

In a note to a friend, I described the English dub of Utena as follows:

“There is no dub.  I know the DVDs all have a dub option, but this is a mistake.  A dub may have been recorded at some point, and it may even have been good, but it was for some reason removed, at the point of manufacture, and therefore before the DVD menu options could be altered to reflect the change.  What exists in its place sounds deceptively like English dubbing, but carries, buried within it, a subtle subliminal command that will, with increased exposure, drive you to claw your own ears out.”

I mean, there are worse dubs out there.  The Fist of the North Star movie has a godawful English dub.  But that movie couldn’t be dubbed any other way.  To dub that movie with serious acting from serious actors who performed like they meant it would have been an absolute disaster.  The ridiculous dubbing of that movie is part of what makes it bearable.

Utena, by contrast, absolutely requires a skillful dub.  I guess that’s my problem, really.  There are all sorts of implications and fine distinctions and a range of subtle emotions that the dialogue needs to carry.  Then here comes the English voice case, stumbling and bumbling and fumbling their way through it, with their heavy overemphasis and breathless whisper-shouts and mismatched voices, turning what ought to be a serious, deep and layered character drama into something more like a fifth-grade school play.

And some of these actors are good!  Crispin Freeman is in this thing, and he’s on my short list of voice actors I’d like to meet in real life.  But he sounds like he was acting through a concussion here.

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Finally, I’m going to take a few moments to talk about the various releases that Revolutionary Girl Utena has seen over the years.  There have really just been three.

The first release was on VHS, sometime in the mid-90s, and consisted of the first 13 half-hour episodes, released across four VHS tapes (par for the course at the time), of the whole 39-episode series.  It went no further than that, and for several years, those 13 episodes were all we had to go on in the U.S., unless you wanted to go the fansub route.  And let me tell you, that was an extremely dodgy practice in those days.  It wasn’t as if digital fansubs were even possible at that time, after all.

The story I heard regarding this was that Be-Papas, the company that made Revolutionary Girl Utena in Japan, believed that the U.S. market for their show would be pretty small, and so they charged a fairly small fee to Software Sculptors to license it.  Because Murphy’s Law is the one ruling principle of the universe, Utena actually managed to achieve a fair degree of success.  This is not a bad thing in itself, but of course it was impossible for Be-Papas not to find this out, and that was the problem.  So when Software Sculptors went back to Be-Papas to negotiate the rights for the rest of the series, Be-Papas decided they wanted a bigger slice of that pie.  Software Sculptors was either unwilling or unable to pay Be-Papas’s price.  Of course, one side or the other must have changed their minds at some point, because in the early 2000s, we got the movie, and then started getting the rest of the series.

After the VHS tapes, there was the first DVD release, which basically covered the same ground as the original VHS release.  The DVD release of these first 13 episodes is frankly atrocious.  On the one hand, those episodes, the first story arc of the series, are contained on two DVDs.  Economy is always a plus. 

That about does it for the positivies.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Software Sculptors simply took the VHS tapes and recorded them onto DVD.  The episodes are divided only into halves.  There are no separate chapter divisions for the credits; chapters only go either to the halfway point of the current episode, or to the beginning of the next.  So unless you really, really like “Rinbu Revolution”, you’ll need to manually fast-forward through it.  I know, I know; talk about your First World Problems.  But literally no other anime DVDs I have ever owned worked in this way.  Even back then.

The subtitles are also a wreck.  Dialogue text is a paler yellow than is usual for subtitles, and the borders around the letters are thin enough that the dialogue sometimes gets lost in the background.  It doesn’t happen a lot, but it does happen often enough to be notable.  The text for the song lyrics is the more usual style for subtitles, and is in a bolder green text. 

The real problem with these DVD releases, though — the one issue that could excuse the other problems if it wasn’t such a problem itself — is the poor transfer quality.  There’s a kind of jitteriness to the picture which I tend to associate with VHS.  You don’t notice it as much when everything’s in motion, but Utena is the type of show that has lots of long, contemplative stills and slow panning shots.  There’s also a kind of fuzzy, murky quality to everything, and the colors overall seem a bit washed out.  It seems minimal at first, but watching later discs throws it into contrast.

Between the poor transfer quality, the lazy chapter breaks, the sparse menus and the sub-par subtitling effort, I suspect that my comparison of the DVDs’ quality to the VHS is much less of a joke than I’d like.  The DVD release of the first 13 episodes makes only the most basic concessions to the benefits of the DVD format.  Granted, the DVD format itself was a somewhat newfangled thing when the Utena DVDs were first coming out, but the level of “quality” on display here is frankly ridiculous.

The only excuse I can think of for this is that perhaps, with the rumored shaky relationship between Software Sculptors and Be-Papas regarding the equally rumored newer and much-higher price Be-Papas demanded for further episodes, Software Sculptors may not have had access to more high-quality video to copy onto the DVDs.  Perhaps the reason this first DVD release is so bare-bones is because they were trying desperately to scrounge up the cash necessary to get the rest of Utena into the States.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that I have, in all seriousness, watched pirated Taiwanese fansubs of anime that have more attractive menus and a bigger suite of features.

Thankfully, from this point forward, the DVD releases get better.  From Episode 14 onward, the video quality is much crisper, the colors are sharper, the chapter selections are in line with what seems to have become the standard for anime on DVD, and the subtitles are respectable.  The English dub is still as awful as it ever was, but what can you do?  At least they’re consistent.

The third and final release is a much more recent one, coming to us through The Right Stuf International and Nozomi, and oh my God, is this ever the sort of thing Utena always deserved.

It’s available in a series of three box sets, split by story arc (more or less).  The first one contains the entire Student Council arc, the second contains the Black Rose arc, and the third contains the Apocalypse arc as well as the movie.  Each one comes with a small booklet which contains background information on the making of the show, and also brief interviews with director Kunihiko Ikuhara.

The video has been completely remastered.  Colors are brighter and bolder, and lines are crisper.  As much as the original Software Sculptors DVDs seemed like a giant leap in quality after Episode 13, these constitute a yet more tremendous leap.  The animation is still pretty sparse, but Utena still has it where it counts, and if you’re looking for a beautifully animated Utena, I mean, the movie is right there.

The sound has also been remastered.  Some of the effects have changed, for the better of course.  The bells that signal the duel sounded like a decent approximation of bells, in the previous additions (if a little tinny), but now they are no longer approximations; they are honest-to-God real bells ringing, or the next closest thing, and it is wonderful.  Some of the music is also a little different.  The songs are all the same, but there seems to be a slight difference in the mixing.  Parts that were drowned out before are brought forward to enhance the original sound.  It’s not noticeable in every piece of music—probably not in most of the music—but there are definite changes here and there.

I am of two minds on these changes.

Part of me is absolutely thrilled at this set.  It’s basically the definitive Utena compilation, and I had no compunctions about giving my previous set away to a friend who is fairly new to anime, and since I am something of an Utena evangelist, I felt as though this was a good way to spread the word.  “Here: Have 39 episodes and one movie of raw excellence.”

Another part of me, smaller but still significant, feels a little odd watching and hearing the new box set, because there are large parts of Utena that I am familiar with from multiple viewings.  My brain fixes on certain images, certain sounds, and these are different.  My main issue in this sense is with the visuals—the sound still has some getting used to, but I can appreciate its superiority with little trouble.  But I had come to love the oddly pale visuals of the series as a whole.  I doubt that it was ever an artistic choice, but I felt that they lent the series a sense of insubstantiality that oddly worked.  It made things seem just slightly removed from reality, as if the whole thing took place in a realm where things and events mattered less than thoughts and feelings, and that light and airy feeling, that insubstantiality, placed the emphasis of the story on the latter rather than the former.

This is not a gripe, exactly.  Not really.  It’s more just a thought.

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In case it wasn’t abundantly clear by this point, Revolutionary Girl Utena is probably my favorite anime, period, and I am happy to recommend to anyone open-minded enough to watch it.

Behind the Gun: Doom

So we have a history lesson that needs to be gotten out of the way, if we’re going to do this whole “writing about FPSs” thing right.  And since I’ve been going back to games of this period lately anyway, it makes sense personally as well.

So…  Doom.

Doom isn’t necessarily where the first-person shooter genre began — that honor probably belongs to Wolfenstein 3D, or possibly some game even older — but Doom is where the FPS style of game really took off.  Before Doom, the genre hardly existed.  There were really only a handful of notable games in that vein.  After Doom, the first-person shooter quickly became one of the major staple genres of computer gaming.

The success Id Software achieved with Doom is a thing of legend.  According to the stories, productivity at IT firms and computer engineering outfits ground nearly to a halt as the employees apparently preferred to install the game on their workstations and play against each other on their respective companies’ networks.  In addition to its PC release, Doom has found its way to a number of consoles, both those popular at the time of its release, and subsequent generations.  There are versions of it for the Super Nintendo, Sega’s 32X add-on for the Genesis, the ill-fated Atari Jaguar, the Sega Saturn, the Playstation, the N64, the Xbox, the Xbox 360, the Playstation 3, the Gameboy Advance, and this is not a complete list.  It was also ported to the Macintosh (albeit some years after its original PC release and, oddly, after even its own sequel).  There were also several games made by other companies who licensed the Doom engine (essentially, the technology which allowed for the creation of 3D graphics, placement of items, enemies, doors, etc., and governed their operation in the game’s environment): Heretic, Hexen, Strife: Quest for the Sigil, and expansions to these.  Doom itself received a couple of expansions (and got re-released in different versions with those additional episodes included), and then had a full-blown sequel using the same engine just a year or so later.  In addition to all this, the fan community continues to create source-ports, which (for the uninitiated) are programs designed to make the game run on newer operating systems, taking advantage to a limited degree of some of the technical advances that have occurred since 1993, when the game was new.  The only game I can think of with more source-ports is Quake, also an Id Software product, and the immediate successor to the Doom crown.

Let’s let all of that soak in, just for a minute.  For the past twenty years, Doom has been commercially viable and readily available on almost any platform you could ask for.  With video games, that kind of longevity is mind-blowing.  The willingness of both fans and the developers alike to create either updated versions of the game, or software to make running it on modern systems possible, speaks of a demand practically unheard of in this particular medium.

So the obvious question practically asks itself: why all the fuss?

Well, the problem with thinking critically about Doom is that it’s so completely ingrained in the DNA of the FPS genre, it’s almost impossible to really touch.  It seems quaint, these days, though in its time it was at the absolute leading edge of both the technology seen in computer games and of game design.  It’s only because its design elements have become so ubiquitous, and been iterated and improved upon so much, that it seems absolutely mundane today.  The best analogy I can come up with at the moment is like reading about the moral panic that erupted when the Beatles became popular.  Beatles music seems so… safe, these days.  You hear them on the lite-rock stations, for God’s sake.  It’s difficult to fathom how anybody in their right mind got their shorts in a twist about lyrics like “She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah,” unless you look at the context and realize that, in that time, nobody else was making music like that — or if they were, they didn’t manage to touch that particular nerve.  But now, things that the Beatles have done are practically everywhere in popular music. 

So that’s Doom today.  The Beatles of the first-person shooter genre.  And just like them, although it may seem simple by today’s standards, there’s an entirely satisfactory game that’s still quite enjoyable even today.

While it was modern for its time, Doom today still feels fairly old-school.  Its structure is still a fairly rigid, level-based affair, with clear beginnings and objectives.  Most games today tend to feature much more fluid play, breaking things up for story, but otherwise feeling like a more unified experience.  If you put Doom at one end of this play-style scale, Half-Life is a prime example of the opposite extreme, never once breaking away from the player’s perspective, and moving in a single, unbroken line from start to finish.  Most games tend toward this end of the spectrum these days.  By comparison, Doom’s sense of pacing is more… well, game-like.  You begin each level at one point, and your object is to get to the clearly marked level exit and throw a lever.  This ends the level, and you’re given a brief rundown of the percentage of enemies you’ve slain, secrets you’ve uncovered, and the amount of time it took you to complete the level compared to a given par time.

This isn’t a bad thing!  In some ways, it’s actually good.  Rather than constantly mounting tension that goes on for hours, Doom gives it to you in smaller doses, allowing you some time to relax at the beginning of a level before the challenge ramps up again.  It also serves to make your goals fairly clear.  You always know what you need to be looking for or doing at any given moment, and there’s never so much ground to cover that you have to worry about getting completely lost, or intimidated by the sheer scope of the environment.  But the level structure does make Doom feel very different from more modern FPS titles.

Another concept Doom introduced (or at least made popular) was that different weapons have a different effect.  This in itself doesn’t seem revolutionary, but there’s a template of weapon progression that Doom laid out.

1. Melee weapon (here, that’s punching or using a chainsaw, if you can find it): requires no ammunition, and generally does little damage, but still allows you to attack if you’ve exhausted your ammo and are in a tight spot.

2. Pistol: Fairly accurate, better than nothing in terms of offensive power, and ammo is fairly easy to find.  However, while it’s sufficient early on, it’s going to take forever to drop the more powerful enemies, and it has almost no stopping power.

3. Shotgun: Questionably useful at long ranges, but respectable at medium ranges (still more powerful than the pistol) and devastating up close, the shotgun is the weapon you’ll be using the most, as it strikes a good balance between offensive power and ubiquity of ammo.

4. Chaingun: Rapid-fire machine gun which uses the same ammo as your pistol.  The rate of fire makes it powerful, but that same speed means you have to use it judiciously.

5. Rocket launcher: Devastating at any range, to the point that most lesser enemies fall after a single hit.  However, the blast can damage the player as well as the enemies, and ammo is scarce, so choose carefully when and how to use it.

6. Plasma gun: The “fun” weapon, firing rapid-fire bursts of energy that are accurate and fairly damaging.

7. BFG-9000: The Big One.  Basically clears a room in one blast, but requires an obscene amount of ammo for even a single shot.

The template itself wouldn’t be all that interesting, of course, except that until pretty recently, almost every FPS followed that model pretty much to the letter.  The weapons may have gone under different names and had a different appearance, but in terms of function, order of progression and best application, this is pretty much the list for FPSs, until Halo came along and introduced the concept of a more limited and situationally available arsenal.

But what perhaps set Doom apart most in its own time was something that its predecessors were incapable of.

Atmosphere.

Now, again, it all looks a bit long in the tooth today, what with our mip-mapped, bump-mapped multi-million-polygon character models, realistic physics models, fancy lighting effects, and locales modeled from real life.  But Doom was a pioneer in its time.  It used lighting to create contrast between high-visibility areas and cramped, dark areas, for one thing.  It was able to induce a sense of actual fear.  You ran around in narrow corridors where the light flickered or was totally absent, occasionally hearing the sounds of creatures that hunted you through the level.  Wolfenstein 3D had blown people away just a year or so before, but Doom made it look about as tense and atmospheric as an early level of Pac-Man.

Part of why this was possible was due to the leap in technology between the two games.  While neither of them is truly 3D, tricks of rendering made Doom’s levels much more believable environments.  Wolfenstein 3D was very rudimentary.  You were in a series of mazes meant to evoke, vaguely, the interior of a German castle, or bunker, or something.  It varied depending on the episode.  The environments were all fairly uniform, with a flat, even floor and ceiling that had no texture, and bright, consistent lighting throughout.  There were occasionally objects placed in the environments (tables, chairs, potted plants, hanging cages), but these seemed to be placed as much to break up the monotony as for any other purpose.  They suggested a sense of purpose to various locations, but were rarely ever very convincing about it.

A modern FPS thrives on a sense of place.  Wherever you are, whether you’re struggling across battlefields in World War II, or duking it out on space stations centuries into the future, or slaying monsters in medieval fantasy worlds, a large part of what makes the game work is how convinced the player is of the reality of the environment.  Wolfenstein 3D offered little reality.  Its appearance was novel in its time, but Doom blew it away.  In addition to better lighting and sound, Doom also allowed for more varied environments in terms of overall design.  It sounds perhaps a little simple to say now, but things like staircases, elevators and moving platforms dropped jaws when Doom introduced them.  Vertical movement of any kind had never really been possible before.  It was still technically impossible then.  I could never explain it in technical terms, but there was some sort of coding sorcery at work that allowed for vertical movement in what was still technically – so far as the computer was concerned – a 2D space.  It’s one of the reasons the game offered no capability to look up or down.  The perspective only looks right when you’re looking straight ahead.  Playing Doom in source-ports, where vertical looking is possible, exposes it.  The perspective distorts in odd ways that make looking up and down kind of uncomfortable after a while.  Later source ports have fixed this, or at least mitigated the effect somewhat.  Still, the use of visual trickery to achieve the more advanced 3D effect and the resultant improved realism made a world of difference in the necessary sense of place.  Doom’s environments still seem a bit abstract by today’s standards, but if you were to make a sliding scale, with one end being abstract environments and the other being absolutely realistic, Doom would land just on the realistic side.

So what about actually playing the game?

Well, one thing Id Software seems to believe in quite firmly is that the player should not be kept waiting, that the average player starts the game not to be dragged kicking and screaming through tiresome opening cutscenes, hand-holding tutorials, or beginning levels that offer little action, no challenge and no satisfaction.  The player, in Id’s mind, wants to start up the game and just play, without distraction or delay.  That approach wasn’t quite so revolutionary in its day, but it’s a refreshing novelty today.  Not that there would be much time to waste in the first place.  The controls are simple for this sort of game, and as for story…  Really, Doom doesn’t have a story to speak of.  John Carmack, head honcho at Id, is famous for his expressed belief that video games need story about as badly as porn does, and at least with Doom, he certainly put his money where his mouth is.  Where most games have a story, Doom has a premise, which is confined to the manual, and to the brief text crawl that accompanies successful completion of an episode.  It’s simple, uncomplicated and unsophisticated, and could probably be summed up like a prompt for some drama-class exercise.

“You’re a lone space marine on one of the moons of Mars, where the government has been conducting secret experiments into teleportation technology.  However, there is an unforeseen hitch in this technology, which is that the portals work by transporting things through another dimension, which turns out literally to be Hell.  Now the demons are using that technology to invade.  You’re the last one left alive (that anyone knows of), and you have a pistol with a couple dozen rounds in it.  Go!”

And by God, that is exactly where and how Doom starts you off.  From there it’s pretty much just a brutal, blood-soaked and gory gauntlet to the end of the game.  You pick up additional weapons on your way through the Mars base and then the bowels of hell itself, and the game does a good job of keeping you tense and anxious for action.

Even the traditional complaint leveled against pretty much every Id Software game — namely, that the enemies are mindless, and their main tactic (their only tactic) is to advance toward the player and attack whenever possible — falls flat here.  First of all, for 1993, that’s about all that was possible.  Doom at least can be forgiven for this sin (its descendants… not so much).  Second, while the enemies may indeed be dumb as a sack of hammers even so, their placement is smart.  Large, massively powerful enemies may be intimidating, and are certainly lethal, but almost always pose less of an actual danger than mobs of low- to mid-strength enemies.  As the game progresses, learning how to bait enemies into attacking each other is a skill that becomes increasingly mandatory.

There’s not much to dislike, unless you absolutely can’t stand the sort of tongue-in-cheek heavy-metal aesthetic that the game uses in its imagery.  And really, even that has its purpose, which seems to be to remind us all that it’s just a game — a violent one, yes, but almost cartoonishly so — and therefore probably not worth getting into a moral panic over.

Not that that stopped anybody.

Behind the Gun: F.E.A.R.

Well, F.E.A.R. is about six and a half years old now.  Maybe I should write about it, before it becomes completely irrelevant.

F.E.A.R. isn’t the first horror-themed first-person-shooter out there.  Doom 3 beat it by about a year, and I’m sure there have been others that I’m unaware of.  But Doom 3 tried to be frightening by way of survival horror, which failed for reasons I’ll explain later.  F.E.A.R., in my inexpert opinion, is largely successful on this count.

What does F.E.A.R. stand for, you ask?  It refers to a fictional top-secret special operations unit that deals with supernatural threats.  It stands for First Encounter Assault Recon.  It also, depending on who you ask, stands for Fuck Everything And Run.  Your tolerance for blood and jump scares will be a good indicator of how true this is for you.

For me personally, F.E.A.R. is rarely ever truly frightening.  In fairness, though, that’s more a consequence of its being an FPS than any failing on the creators’ part.  Generally speaking, most FPS games put you on an even footing with the enemies, in terms of power, maybe even make you more powerful.  It makes sense, since you need some kind of edge, and the enemy pretty much always has raw numbers on their side.  Going the route of survival horror in an FPS, then, is generally a bad idea.  This is where Doom 3 failed.  Survival horror is concerned in large part with managing the character’s resources and relative fragility (hence the word “survival”).  The main notions of the FPS genre run entirely counter to that.  So the game relies on jump scares, unsettling fake-outs, disturbing tableaux and of course a few actual “gotcha!” moments.  Maybe that does it for some people, though.  I’ve seen at least one Let’s Play on Youtube where the player seemed pretty consistently freaked out. 

And to be fair, F.E.A.R. does mess with you a bit.  There are often objects which seem to exist for the sole purpose of being knocked over or bumped into in order to make a startling noise that wrecks the otherwise eerie quiet.  And there are a few moments where some scripted brief weird and eerie event occurs, but is actually harmless, and largely happens just to keep you on your toes.  Particularly on a first pass through the game, you can’t really write these events off, because there’s no real way of knowing (short of familiarity with the game) when these events are happening just to screw with you, and when they preface an actual threat.

So what’s it about, then?

F.E.A.R.’s story is a mix of horror and science fiction.  Long story short, it involves your attempts, as the Point Man of one of at least two First Encounter Assault Recon units, to find a genetically engineered psychic commander named Paxton Fettel, and kill him.

Up until quite recently, Fettel was the property of Armacham Technology Corporation, which is the kind of corporation that employs a small army, complete with fully automatic weapons, as a security force, and has policies in place to murder anyone who might leak incriminating information during the sort of disaster that unfolds as the game begins.

Because it would be far too easy otherwise, in addition to being a psychic commander, Fettel has an army of clone soldiers, referred to as Replicas, who are especially susceptible to his mental commands.  While he was once locked up tight, he has recently been released by persons unknown, and he clearly has a mission of some sort.

He also has an appetite for human flesh, but this is just a means to an end, really.  He indulges mainly because eating part of someone allows him to absorb their memories.

You know precious little of this starting out, and one of the ways in which the game supports its eerie atmosphere is by never spelling any of this out very directly.  What you really know in the beginning is that you, fellow soldier Spencer Jankowski and forensic specialist Jin Sun-Kwon are being called upon to find and eliminate Fettel, which in theory will render the Replica soldiers insensible, thus ending the threat.

Of course, it doesn’t work out quite like that.  It never does.

While he’s supposed to have a tracker chip embedded in his head, Fettel seems to appear and disappear at will.  That he always seems to be a step ahead of the F.E.A.R. team, having slain and dined upon pretty much anyone who might tell you anything useful about what’s really going on, makes things somewhat frustrating.  You uncover clues as you go on, relating to a girl or woman named Alma, who is in some way integral to the experiments Armacham was running prior to the creation of Fettel himself. 

Most of the plot details are revealed through the messages left on various important people’s answering machines, which you encounter as you work your way through the Armacham offices and other nearby locations.  I guess it’s a good thing the game takes place in 2005.  If it was set in the present, the Point Man would have no idea what was going on, unless he could retrieve everybody’s cell phones.  Eventually, the truth emerges, and you realize that Armacham has about a cemetery’s worth of skeletons buried in its closet.  You begin to feel a little sympathy for Fettel.  Clearly, his methods are horrific, absolutely intolerable, and yet his goals are not wholly without justification.  At least a few of the people who die at his hand (or fangs, whatever) had it coming.

So what about the game itself?  That the story is well done is all very well and good, but how does it play?

Pretty well, actually.

F.E.A.R. follows in the newer trend of FPS games in that it limits the player’s arsenal.  There are close to ten different weapons (the number differs depending on whether you count the ability to wield pistols singly or as a pair as two separate weapons), plus a handful of different types of grenades, but you’re limited to carrying only three firearms at a time.  In a game like Halo, this helps to liven up the experience by requiring you to adapt your tactics to whatever weapons and ammunition happen to be on hand.  F.E.A.R. backs away from this restriction somewhat, though, by making a couple of weapons consistently available.

In addition to the FPS-standard melee attack (in this case, hitting enemies with the butt of your chosen weapon), F.E.A.R. also gives you a handful of other melee attacks.  You can holster your current weapon to strike with your fists, and in fact, the smaller the weapon you’re carrying at the moment, the faster you move.  You can also employ a flying bicycle kick and a sliding tackle with a few simple commands.  This amount of attention paid to melee attacks is rare in FPS games, and it’s all the more interesting that melee attacks are so powerful.  Most standard foes will fall in a single hit, especially if you can sneak up on them from behind.

And that’s not even the best of it.  The Point Man has superior reflexes and perception, which manifests in a limited ability to slow the game down.  This allows you to maneuver among the enemies more quickly than they can easily track, and line up precise shots under pressure.

All of these abilities would make the game sound stupidly broken and easy, were it not for the fact that the enemy A.I. is some of the smartest around.

Enemies are intelligent enough to shoot from behind cover, flush you out with grenades, employ suppressing fire, and split their forces in order to flank you.  That last bit is something they will do at every opportunity, and it’s important to remember when playing, because that opportunity presents itself distressingly often.  Pretty much every area has a couple different paths you can take to get through, and whichever one you’re paying attention to in the middle of a firefight, the enemy will probably be sending people through the other route to take you down from your blind side.  They’ll also spot you coming if you have your flashlight on (and the game has enough dark areas to make sure you need it, often at the worst possible moments), and are bright enough to target any exploding barrels or other explosive hazards that happen to be nearby.  As logical as it sounds for the enemies to be this intelligent, it was pretty unusual for its time, and continues to be kind of impressive even today.

In fact, in their way, the regular enemy encounters are some of the more harrowing and taxing parts of the game.  Sure, the intentionally horrific scenes—the hallucinatory nightmare walks through blood-filled hospital corridors, the unsettling encounters with dim phantoms in a fire-lit void—do their job, but the main combat does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to making you feel strung out. 

To which I can say only: Bravo.

Of course, F.E.A.R. isn't quite perfect.

The environments do wear out their welcome after a while.  There is entirely too much time spent wandering through the Armacham offices, though I do think that’s the worst part.  The industrial section that precedes said offices could probably stand to be trimmed a bit, also.  It’s not that they’re bad, just long to the point that you start wanting to see something new well before anything new actually appears.  The game could stand to be shorter.  If it had to be just as long, then it should have more diverse environments.

The sound effects are a bit of a mixed bag.  Most of the more conventional firearms have oddly low-key sound effects; the submachine gun and the machine gun sound about as threatening as a popcorn popper.  This is in direct contrast to the visceral, meaty sound of bullets ripping into your enemies, which is something I don’t think most other games I’ve played even have a sound effect for.  It’s kind of unsettling.  The more “future-y” weapons, I can’t really complain about.  To my knowledge, nobody actually knows what an energy weapon that vaporizes flesh and leaves a charred and bloody skeleton would actually sound like, so F.E.A.R.’s take on that is as good as anybody else’s.  The voice-acting, though, is done well.  There's something in the mixed anger and frustration in the enemies' voices when you're whittling down their numbers that almost makes you feel for them, and that's rare in any game, let alone in a genre where enemies exist almost solely to be mowed down in a hail of gunfire.

Enemy variety could also stand to be a little more diverse.  You have your normal Replica soldier mooks who (to be fair) come with a  variety of different weapons, armored mooks that are considerably harder to kill, mooks in mech suits, Armacham security mooks, flying gun turrets, ceiling-mounted gun turrets and the odd ghostly phantom enemy.  Still, aside from the phantoms (they go down fast, but move more quickly and erratically than anything else in the game to make up for it), fighting the enemies gets harrowing enough that you may find yourself honestly thankful that they come in strictly limited varieties.

There are also two expansion packs: F.E.A.R.: Extraction Point and F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate, which take place after the events of the main game.  Both of them add new enemies and weapons, and if my own experience has been any judge, are somewhat more difficult than the original F.E.A.R.  But I’m honestly kind of bad at FPSs in general, so that may just be me.  I can't speak on these much, as I haven't finished either one of them yet.  But it's kind of a moot point by now; buying the game on Steam, which is pretty much the only way to get it, nets you both expansions automatically.

All in all, F.E.A.R. is definitely worth playing.  The graphics have aged surprisingly well—character models are a bit simple, but expressive and well-animated enough to compensate—and the flaw of overlong areas is far outweighed by the skillfully handled atmosphere.  The story, while simple, is handled well and internally consistent, and there are some nice bits of foreshadowing in the beginning which will probably make you go “Ohhhhhh,” on later playthroughs.  And F.E.A.R. is, frankly, still mechanically better than some later games I’ve played.  That it set a new high-water mark for enemy A.I. in FPS games doesn’t hurt its reputation, either.  After Half-Life 2 and the original Quake, F.E.A.R. is the FPS I’ve probably spent the most time on, and not because it’s difficult.

Not just, anyway.

Behind the Gun: Half-Life 2

I’ve had it in my head for a while now to write a series of “reviews” of first-person shooters.  I somehow doubt I’ll be doing so exclusively for the next little while, but we’ll see.  In any event, here is the first.

*    *    *

I have a fascination with these bleak, dystopian settings, these harsh wastelands barren of hope and promising decay, and death for the unwary.  I think I’ve felt this way ever since I was a child, reading through the mini-comics that came with the Starriors figures I got for Christmas for a couple consecutive years.  The idea that the Earth might be damaged to such an extent as to be inhospitable to human life—that it might conceivably be destroyed, even—is so repellent to instinct that it becomes in some way perversely compelling.

Half-Life 2 pretty much opens up with that kind of scenario and gets progressively more grim from there.  I think it’s safe to say I was going to be a fan right out of the gate.

You start off on a train, a nod to the tram car where your player character, Gordon Freeman, ended the original Half-Life after doing the smart thing and accepting the G-man’s offer of “employment”.  He took you into some kind of stasis, and now here you are, some twenty-odd years later (give or take).  You haven’t aged a day, but things sure have become different while you were gone.

“Wake up and… smell the ashes,” the G-man tells you, in his oddly haunting and strangely emphasized tones.  Who he is—what he is, precisely—remains unknown.  What we know for sure is that he is some sort of interdimensional bureaucrat who has retained you for your unique skills.  Your first glimpses of this future world are not uplifting.  Wake up and smell the ashes, indeed.

You have only the vaguest notion of where you are and what you’re supposed to be doing. The question of “where” is easier.  You are in City 17, located somewhere in eastern Europe, which serves as a sort of capital for the much-diminished human civilization.  The Earth has been overrun twice over.  First it was the creatures that slipped into this dimension due largely to the events of the original Half-Life.  Then came the Combine, a collective of alien races bent on utter domination.  Between creatures making the countryside and wilderness highly unsafe, and the Combine’s efforts to corral and control humanity, the numbered Cities seem to hold the majority of humankind.  A suppression field prevents reproduction.  Volunteers are modified to become troops for the Combine; troublemakers are also modified, but in a much different, less pleasant fashion (not that the volunteers’ modifications look to be all fun and games, mind you).  The message is clear: those who can be used, will be used.  Those who cannot will be driven to extinction.  The bottom line is that humankind as we understand it will be destroyed, and the Earth will be gutted for its resources.  Half-Life 2 shows us subtle signs of this gutting already happening.  Docks and boathouses on dry land, well away from the shore, give a good indicator of how much water has been drained from the oceans already. 

None of this is shoved in your face.  The Seven-Hour War, in which humanity rose up against the Combine and was decisively trounced—which served, really, as little more than a prologue for the complete surrender and “treaty” brokered by one Dr. Wallace Breen—is hardly mentioned.  It’s in a few newspaper clippings you’ll find here and there, pinned up by the sorts of characters who would want a reminder of all that has been lost, perhaps to goad them ever onward toward some action.  Maybe some conversations mention it.  It’s difficult to recall, exactly.

One of the many strengths of Half-Life 2 is in its narrative subtlety.  There are very few scenes where characters exposit at you for long stretches.  People talk about background events and history in much the same way you or I might talk about history.  They talk about the Seven-Hour War like we, today, might talk about 9/11.  We don’t expound on the tragedy.  We mention it; we share a grim, knowing glance; and everybody understands the full meaning of what’s been said.  In much the same way, characters in Half-Life 2 don’t feel the need to speak in brief history lessons specifically for your benefit.  They talk how people talk.  You want to be in the know, great; go figure it out on your own. 

So there’s Half-Life 2’s setting in a nutshell, if we want to be flip: part War of the Worlds, part 1984, part Children of Men.

That answers the question of “where” nicely enough.  What about that question of “what”?

What, indeed?

The G-Man himself provides a subtle answer to this in his brief opening monologue.  “The right man, in the wrong place, can make all the dif-ference in the world,” he tells you with his off-kilter enunciation.

The original Half-Life saw you pretty much being exactly that.  Surviving a catastrophic accident that opened a portal to another dimension was practically a fluke.  The game from that point forward amounted to little more than the player character’s attempts to escape from Black Mesa (the research facility where the disaster occurs) for much of its length.  That there are alien creatures running around, and later, U.S. military personnel whose job was to shush the whole affair up, is practically incidental.  Freeman just happened to be fit enough and determined enough to beat the odds and escape.

The right man in the wrong place.

So, rather than give you any real direction (or even a stated goal), the G-Man just drops you into a train car bound for City 17, apparently having faith that you’ll do exactly what he (or his employers) want, just by doing what comes naturally.

You’re quickly pulled aside at the train station’s processing center, presumably for understandably lacking important documentation.  Thankfully, the guard who pulls you aside is Barney Calhoun, one of the heretofore nameless security guards from Black Mesa.  He discreetly sends you on your way to Dr. Isaac Kleiner, one of your colleagues from the back-story of Half-Life who is, despite his apparent nervous disposition, part of the resistance in City 17.  Lacking a map or even basic directions, however, you are quickly cornered by the City Overwatch.  You’re saved in the nick of time, however, by Alyx Vance, the daughter of Eli Vance, another scientist from Black Mesa.  Alyx guides you to Dr. Kleiner’s lab, where you’re given your familiar Hazardous Environment (HEV) Suit.  Also, your old crowbar.

This is pretty much the iconic image of the series in a nutshell: the bearded and bespectacled theoretical physicist-turned-action hero Gordon Freeman, with nothing but his HEV Suit and trusty crate-breaker to fend off hordes of aliens and other assailants.

From here, you’re pretty much on your own.  You’re tasked with finding Black Mesa East, which is the resistance headquarters, and reconnecting with Eli Vance, where Freeman will theoretically do some science for once.  Of course, this is not to be.  Upon being discovered at Black Mesa, Freeman is forced to flee through Ravenholm, which has been infested with headcrabs, which effectively make zombies of their victims, and make Ravenholm one of the more unnerving sections of the game.  From there you go through the mines, and shortly thereafter find yourself tooling along a lonely stretch of sea-cliff highway toward Nova Prospekt, which is a political prison.

Half-Life 2 never seems to wear out its welcome.  The various environments you traverse last just long enough to feel substantial (especially on your first, most clueless playthrough), yet are short enough that you never really get tired of a particular area.  Even in the game’s various areas, there is often diversity in the different sorts of places you’ll go.  The aforementioned highway section is broken up frequently by various obstructions.  You find yourself dealing with the occasional ambush, or removing a barricade, or deal with rolling mines or any of a number of other things.  There is always some variety to keep things interesting and novel.

The game occurs largely in big setpieces.  There’s a rhythm to the game; you’re usually alternating between more navigation-heavy sequences which involve solving puzzles on your way from Point A to Point B, and more combat-oriented sequences where puzzle-solving is nonexistent and you’re gunning down bad guys or blasting a way to freedom.  But even in combat, you have to use your head.  Sure, some minor encounters can be solved by charging in with guns blazing and mowing down every mook that comes into sight.  Most battles don’t work that way, though.  Like most FPS games, Half-Life 2 requires you to manage your resources.  There are only so many health and armor recharging stations and items in the game.  Likewise, there is only so much ammunition.  And while there are also only so many enemies, unlike you, they can shoot and throw grenades forever.  Some of them are immune to most your many weapons.  (Half-Life 2 is somewhat old-school in that Freeman carries an arsenal of nearly a dozen weapons, and ammo for each, on his person throughout much of the game).  Fight smarter, not harder, in other words.

A common complaint with Half-Life 2 is that its enemy AI is lacking.  This complaint is probably lent more weight than it should be on account of how intelligent (relative to the standards of the day) the enemies in the original Half-Life were.  When it comes to Half-Life 2, the complaint is both true and false.  Custom-made levels have shown the enemy AI to be quite intelligent.  However, the way environments are set up, it’s difficult for the enemies to really showcase their abilities.

So all of this provides a halfway-decent description of the game, but why do I like it so much?  If it’s my favorite FPS of all time, surely it does something special, right?  Well, yes and no.  I tend to think of Half-Life 2 as the sort of game where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  The game is getting somewhat long in the tooth by now—it was released in late 2004, after all—but that doesn’t matter much to me.  After all, I’ve played the living hell out of older games.  Quake, for instance.

A lot of it comes down to the atmosphere I mentioned back in the beginning.  And it’s not just that Valve chose a post-apocalyptic atmosphere (or one similar to it) when they made this game.  It does take a little more than that to get my interest.  It’s that they were at some considerable pains to reinforce the sense of despair and slender hope that are manifest every inch of the game’s world.  You periodically run across resistance outposts, all of which have the appearance of having been lightly manned and (in most cases) hastily abandoned.  You’ll walk into a room in some dilapidated shack by the road, or some platform tucked away just out of sight, and there will be a small cache of supplies there, and a mattress and a radio to show that someone, however briefly, occupied that spot.  If you’re observant, there are occasionally clues as to why that person isn’t there any more.  The atmosphere is in the way the people dress, the way they talk, the way they mutter to each other about how terrible things are, or warn you not to drink the water while in the city (there’s something in it that makes you forget, apparently)…  There are probably a hundred things that are beyond description because I’d take them for granted, and only notice them by way of their absence in other games.  “Man, I wish this game did X like Half-Life 2 did,” I’ll think, and then pause.  “Or that it did X at all.”

I tend to come back to atmosphere a lot when I think of what makes a game’s story good.  That’s mostly because I think atmosphere is one of the most important things a game has to get right in order for its story to have the greatest impact.  Atmosphere is in the subtle, delicate details of the game world.  A game may look real and sound real all it wants to, but atmosphere is what makes it feel real, in a compelling way, and that feeling is infinitely more important than any one thing we see or hear.  The environment doesn’t have to be realistic, but atmosphere is what gives a game’s environment a sense of consistency and purpose, which translates into a form of realism.

Of course, the rest of the game is also great.  The graphics, despite showing signs of age, still function perfectly well.  The sound effects and music are done admirably.  But I tend to look at the overall experience, and what stands out to me is the attention to detail everywhere you look, the atmosphere balanced so well that it helps to sell the setting while not being cloyingly thick, the aggressive adherence to realism in the environment's details.

Long story short: go play Half-Life 2.  Then go play the two episodes.  Then go play Black Mesa (the fan remake of the original Half-Life).

The Other M Is for “Missing the Point”

I started out wanting to write about Super Metroid, and sometime I will, I swear, but somehow this happened instead.

In my first draft of this write-up, I had a several-paragraphs-long tirade about the unfairness of gender roles in our society today.  I talked about how it seemed unfair to me that male heroes in video games can look any way they want, because they have and exercise power in some form in the game world, and that seems like the ultimate basis for “traditional” values associated with male attractiveness.  I talked about how unfair it was that when it came to female heroines of video games, they all had to conform to a certain much narrower standard of attractiveness, governed by a “traditional” mindset regarding what makes a woman attractive, with physical beauty being a mandatory characteristic (for male heroes, it is recommended, but optional).

I want to be proven wrong, but I don’t think I will.  Find me one heroine (assuming she’s a full adult, and that we’re playing a game with relatively realistic character models, and that she is the protagonist) who lacks a respectable bustline and an hourglass figure.

While you’re at it, find me a dodo bird or two.

Actually, no, the dodo is a bad comparison.  It at least existed at some point.

I took the tirade out because it was long-winded and probably ill-informed.  I refer just to the crux of the dilemma, however, because it’s a large part, probably the largest part, of what pisses me off about Metroid: Other M.

Our heroine Samus Aran has proven herself time and again to be an absolutely professional warrior.  Her occupation in the games, overall, is that of the one-woman army.  She is the sort of person the Galactic Federation calls in to take care of a situation after more typical military solutions fail.  She has saved the galaxy more than once, with little oversight, support or backup at any given time.  This is not a secret.  This is the reputation she has earned for herself.

What I personally find remarkable about the Metroid series in general, and its heroine in particular, is that no particular issue, in the universe of the games, is made of her gender.  She is a female warrior who performs most of her missions clad in a suit of powered armor that makes her gender ambiguous.  Come to that, she doesn’t even need to be human.  Any kind of humanoid creature at all could lurk under that armor (and in fact, series lore states that it was made by a non-human race).  Nobody remarks how amazing it is that a woman is the one saving the galaxy with all this heavy firepower.  They just call on her to do a job, she does that job, and everybody just kind of rolls with it. 

To me, this is the ideal goal of feminism.  Her femininity is not an issue of any kind.  It’s neither overplayed nor underplayed – it isn’t played at all.  It doesn’t need to be.  She’s a woman; so what?

Then, in Other M, she falls in with a group of soldiers with whom she worked previously, before she began her solo career as a bounty hunter, and… they all treat her like a brash, over-eager younger sister who can probably hang with the boys, but still warrants a certain amount of looking after.  And she just kind of goes with it.  Grudgingly, sure, but with no real protests to speak of.

Now, narrative isn’t usually a big point in the Metroid games.  It normally just provides a reason for the places you’re going and the things you’re doing there, and that’s it.  It’s the kind of thing that exists mostly in the manual, or in opening and ending cut scenes.  The in-game narrative in Metroid games is often subtler.  The things you do, the way the environment changes as you progress, the new abilities you gain as you explore: that’s the story.  That’s always been part of the genius of the Metroid games.  The story is solid, but heavily understated.  Where so many other games are content to disconnect the narrative from the gameplay, and reward you with non-interactive chunks of the former after completing a certain amount of the latter, the Metroid series on the whole avoids that.  There are exceptions (Metroid Fusion and the Prime trilogy, though they try to keep their non-interactive bits brief and infrequent), but aren’t there always?  Metroid games let your exploration, your brooding sense of isolation and your unanswered questions about all the weird vistas and objects you encounter, be the story. 

Metroid: Other M does not.  It wants to tell you all about Samus’s motherhood instincts, and rather than do it subtly, as Metroid II and Super Metroid did, Other M wants to beat you over the head with it.  It wants to make sure beyond all doubt that you understand that Samus Is A Woman, and that she has a deep-seated need, despite all this galaxy-saving she does, to mother something.  This is why the game has so many terrible ideas, such a distress call being referred to as a “baby’s cry” (seriously), or the space station where the game takes place being referred to as the Bottle Ship (and it’s shaped pretty much like a baby’s bottle, with some additions which obscure this, very slightly).  It has other weird and kind of ridiculous ideas, such as trying to parlay the whole “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” gestures into something with deep meaning and symbolism, but that’s a lot less offensive.  What is offensive is how Metroid: OtherM tries to enhance the overt femininity of the heroine by giving her powered armor a wasp waist and a more pronounced chest, emphasizing the femininity of the whole thing, and by putting fucking high heels on the skin-tight Zero Suit she normally wears beneath it. 

Let me repeat that, because it’s so fundamentally ridiculous that it really should be highlighted.  A woman who is known for single-handedly succeeding where armies fail for some idiotic reason goes into combat with high heels.

It also tries to downplay her known and oft-demonstrated strengths in order to play up her insecurities, with the stated goal of making her a more well-rounded, fully realized and interesting character.  Except she was already interesting and well realized.  The games prior to this mostly took the ancient maxim of storytelling – “show, don’t tell” – to an aggressive extreme and in so doing gave us ideas about the character that we could interpret along certain general lines.  And it did this without getting in the way of the game itself, for the most part.  So few games do this well, or at all.  The ones I can think of offhand are Another World, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. 

Metroid: Other M says that’s not good enough.

It starts off well enough, giving us an early view of Samus’s life as a green recruit in the Galactic Federation army under her commander and mentor Adam Malkovich.  We get to see her as a raw, idealistic young warrior who finds herself at odds with the cold, hard facts of military responsibility.  We can guess this fiery temperament cools into a more level-headed perspective with time and experience, but here we would be wrong, despite everything the rest of the Metroid series seems to imply.  Part of the problem is that Other M has a short list of issues in the larger Metroid story that it wants to tackle, and is hell-bent on doing exactly that, however stupid the method might be.

Let’s talk about the military presence in Other M for a minute.

The story of Metroid: Other M proper starts with Samus responding to a distress call (I’m sorry, a “baby’s cry”; God, that’s a terrible idea) originating from a space station called a Bottle Ship.  Arriving on the scene, she runs across a group of soldiers who have also been dispatched to the Bottle Ship.  They are very familiar to her, as they should be.  They are the Galactic Federation 07^th Platoon, her old unit, still led by Adam Malkovich.  Adam is now a general.  He orders her to shut off her power suit’s many functions and weapons in order to avoid undue damage to the Bottle Ship until his unit’s operation is complete, and she willingly complies

The game has hardly started, and already, we have problems.

Platoons are not led by generals.  Generals are usually in charge of much larger units of soldiers – brigades, whole armies, etc.  They never, ever go to the front lines, and they certainly never take point I sensitive, secret operations with low survival odds.  This isn’t because they’re fundamentally cowardly, lead-from-the-rear sorts.  It is because military regulations prevent it.  The loss of strategic expertise and the compromise of sensitive information should a general be killed or captured is not acceptable.  A general would design and authorize a mission like this, sure.  And then he would send it to a captain or a major under his command to actually execute it.  He certainly wouldn’t go along on the operation and he especially wouldn’t be suiting up in armor to go with his men on the ground.

So why did General Adam Malkovich do exactly that?

Well, the first, most tempting answer is that series director Yoshio Sakamoto is an idiot who lost sight of his creative vision.  And this is probably to some extent true.  After all, despite the known predilections of Team Ninja (famous for the Dead or Alive series of fighting games, as well as Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball, and the Ninja Gaiden reboot), with whom Nintendo partnered to make this game, Sakamoto has gone on record as saying most of the story ideas came from him anyway.  But there’s another reason as well.  Sakamoto is hobbled by the overall story of the series.

Samus has a personal history with General Malkovich.  As explained in Metroid Fusion (chronologically the last game in the series, but the one where Adam is first named and his relationship with Samus explained), Adam was Samus’s commanding officer, back when she was still a soldier in the Galactic Federation army.  It’s clear from what she says and implies in Fusion that she cared for him, admired him and respected him.  It’s also clear that the feeling was mutual.  He often referred to her as “Lady”, a title that was both sardonic and fond; it served as a reminder of his authority, but was always delivered in a way that also acknowledged her autonomy and conveyed his respect.  This was my reading of it, anyway.  Unfortunately, Adam is dead in Metroid Fusion, and has been for some time.  Other M, however, seeks to explore the relationship between Adam and Samus.  Which is fine, in and of itself.  So Adam having that distant-yet-also-paternal authority, where Samus is impulsive, rebellious and brash makes sense.  Other M hams it up a bit for drama’s sake, but the relationship operates along the basic lines described by Samus in Fusion.  Placed where it is in the timeline of the series, though, it makes very little sense. 

If Samus was a rookie bounty hunter, fresh out of the army and stumbling into her old comrades during an early solo mission, then the relationship dynamic would make sense.  Samus would still be making her way in her new life, feasibly shaky enough on her own still that she could easily fall back into old habits of obedience when in proximity to (and under the nominal oversight of) her old commander.  It would also explain her abject terror at encountering the series recurring villain Ridley, who is responsible for the loss of her family and her entire way of life, because this would be her first encounter with a truly vicious, powerful and serious enemy who has also provided her with one of her life’s great turning points.

But Metroid: Other M occurs next to last in the Metroid timeline.  Samus is a big girl now.  She’s defeated the Space Pirates on four separate occasions by this point, and has destroyed her nemesis Ridley as many times.  She has committed practical genocide on a parasitical species whose use as a biological weapon also threatened the galaxy.  She was also indirectly responsible for the detonation of an entire planet.  She is a consummate warrior, a skilled veteran, and her quick thinking and determination have saved the galaxy time and again.  If Queen Badass of the Galaxy was a real title, it would be hers.

And yet, unaccountably, she obeys Adam’s commands with little question (and much figurative hand-wringing over what he might think), including arbitrary commands to deactivate most of the useful functions of her power suit.  Her encounter with Ridley, whom she has destroyed four times now (and whose reappearance after “death” should no longer come as a surprise to anyone, least of all Samus), has her inexplicably paralyzed with fear.

So the writing is terrible.  Both on the level of execution (some of the dialogue is pretty cringe-worthy) and on the conceptual, story level, it’s bad.  So, so bad.

So how’s the actual game?

It’s okay.  Probably the largest problem with Metroid: Other M from a purely gameplay standpoint is that it feels like a Metroid game made by people who enjoy the series thoroughly, but have trouble articulating what makes it great.  And since they can’t explain it, they’re unable to really create it.  There’s exploration, to an extent, but you are limited.  Previous titles in the series mostly feature a fairly open environment, allowing you to go wherever your abilities can take you.  Metroid and Super Metroid have become famous over the years for the sheer number of ways clever players have been able to exploit the heroine’s abilities to reach locations in the gameworld which they were not meant to be able to reach until much later in the game.  Metroid: Other M, on the other hand, has definite ideas concerning where it wants you to go, and when, and its structure allows for very little player freedom.  Platforms you might be able to reach with new abilities remain inaccessible due to invisible barriers; the only available entrance or exit to these areas is the one the game designers intended, even if your abilities should by rights allow you other means of access.  This flies in the face of the very essence of the Metroid experience.

Even the process of gaining new weapons and abilities is robbed of much of its savor.  In previous Metroid games, Samus gathers various upgrades in order to better explore the game’s world.  She empowers herself through resourcefulness, diligent exploration, and the competent application of existing skills and abilities.  You have to go out and find the items that empower you, and the ability to use them and apply them in other areas of the game is its own reward.  In Other M, Samus gains new weapons and abilities because… a man told her to activate them.  The sense of discovery is completely absent, and in fact no real discovery actually happens.  The abilities just become available to you at set points throughout the story, no finding required.  And the narrative framework makes this even more galling by specifically denying you these abilities that you always had, and in at least one memorable case only activating an ability after it would have been most useful. 

The story’s given excuse for this may be weak, but it can be made to work.  Samus’s weapons are deactivated so as to avoid collateral damage, okay, fine, I get it.  It’s stupid, but I can work with it.  But her armor abilities being turned off?  Is Adam really afraid that she could potentially damage something by, I don’t know, being immune to high temperatures at it?  And then, when all of Samus’s abilities are activated by the endgame anyway and fail to do any real damage to the Bottle Ship, the whole “authorization” business falls apart like the lazy fucking gimmickry that it is.

The game itself is all right and actually can be pretty consistently fun (I did manage to finish it, after all), if a disappointing low point in its series and a frustrating exercise in missing the point of what makes Metroid games interesting and fun in the first place.  But it’s saddled with some awful game design decisions and this frankly embarrassing plot that tries hard to be deep, and sacrifices no small measure of consistency with the greater series story in the attempt.  That it fails so miserably only makes the sacrifice all the more aggravating.

Anno Domini 2015

As much as I avoid referring to the things I write here as reviews (a practice meant to avoid the pressure of ever feeling like this is something I should do in any way remotely professionally, or regularly), I should note that what follows is even less like a professional review than normal.

So.

It’s late September or early October of 1999.  I’m going to a community college, taking Gen Ed courses with the idea of earning some sort of computer sciences degree — networking, I believe — and gradually feeling that the darkness and the numbness that have been waiting in the wings for much of my life to that point (I hate to actually call it depression, lacking an official diagnosis, but I’m not sure what else it could have been) are about to take shape and close in for good and all.  It’s difficult to keep myself invested in anything that anyone else would call important.  Work, school, home life – I’m essentially just trying to stay out of trouble, wherever I am, and maintain some rough sense of tranquility.

It isn’t going so well.

A friend of mine wants to know if I’d like to join him and some other friends in an all-night anime viewing.  He’s being ambitious; we’re going to try getting through all 26 episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion in a single night.  I say sure, why not?  I’ve heard of this series before, it’s supposed to be pretty good, though my actual knowledge of it is limited to the ADV previews that feature on most of their tapes (this was back when VHS was not just a thing but the thing).  Since that was basically just clips of combat between giant robots and incomprehensible monsters, punctuated by explosions and set to "Ode to Joy", that didn't tell me much.  But it sounded interesting, so I said sure why not.

The day comes and we make it about six episodes in before the plan breaks down.  People who were supposed to be there now suddenly can’t make it on time, and we have to stop the festivities to go get them.  And then we get sidetracked along the way.  I’m frustrated because I want to get back to the show, but at the same time, driving around town and goofing off, I’m having what will (in retrospect) turn out to be one of the best times I can remember in my abortive pre-Army college stint.

Skip forward about a month, and I’m house-sitting for my aunt in a house that, some six years or so later, will be my house.  I own six volumes (of thirteen) of Neon Genesis Evangelion, although I can barely afford that kind of expense, and am watching them regularly.  I’ve called in from work for no better reason than because fuck that place.  Watching 80-meter tall berserk robots with children “piloting” them thrash the crap out of equally giant monsters is infinitely more engaging than operating a cash register, and I’ve pretty nearly run out of shits to give.

“What’s wrong with running away from reality if it sucks?” Shinji cries in Japanese.  I think the line’s been translated differently in later releases, but it’s still pretty much the same sentiment.  That sense of confusion and rage and despair and… I don’t know.  Absence?  I almost typed “loss”, but you can’t lose what you never had.  That feeling speaks to me.  

And while even then I knew this wasn’t the best response to the central dilemmas of life and relating to other people, it was in some way heartening to know that someone understood.  Here was a creator – Hideaki Anno, who certainly knows a thing or two about being a painfully shy and underconfident person who is often confused and sometimes terrified by the world around him – talking to all of us through his creation, sharing in the pain of being, saying “I don’t know what the answers are, either, but I know how you hurt, and I hurt too, and together maybe we’ll tough it out.”  Amen, brother.

This is not a cry for pity, or for help.  I’m better now.  Mostly.  (I think).  This is by way of explaining why and how Neon Genesis Evangelion struck in the way and with the strength that it did.

*    *    *

Occasionally in a given medium, you’ll get a work that, more or less by accident, completely revolutionizes everything that comes afterward.  It exerts an almost tidal effect on the flow of the medium, warping everything out of the direction it might otherwise have gone.  With rock music, it’s bands like The Beatles or Nirvana.  In fantasy fiction, it’s The Lord of the Rings.  In anime, it’s Neon Genesis Evangelion.

It was hard for me to pinpoint the exact nature of Evangelion’s impact for a long time.  Even now, I’m not sure if the way I think it impacted the medium is the way everyone else seems to think it did.  But here’s what I think, for what it’s worth:

Most anime had been pretty straightforward prior to this.  The technique of using the trappings of one category of fiction as a framework to examine more broadly applicable social and philosophical issues had not, to my recollection, been done in a big way previously.  Then Gainax came along, an upstart production studio which was run less by business types and more by animators and directors, with this weird giant robot show that spent most of its time exploring its characters and obsessed over its ideas.  After they did it, everybody else started doing it too.  They're still doing it.

Here was a show that started off as a deceptively “hard” sci-fi giant robot show with an unusual amount of attention paid to character development and growth, and an apparent obsession with (and sometimes clumsy application of) Judeo-Christian religious iconography, symbolism and philosophy as part of its overarching metaphor.  It descended into a bitter and often unsettling character drama, where the whole giant robot thing seemed to happen only when it was necessary to twist the knife even further than it already was.  The two – two! – endings constructed for it, which were essentially different ways of saying the same thing, were the result of the creator’s epiphany about the brighter side of life and the world, and largely seemed to stem from his recovery from the bout of depression that informed most of the dilemmas he explored throughout the show.  The first ending, which was the ending of the TV series, came at a time when the production studio was within bare inches of bankruptcy, and could not afford to do much more, from a technical standpoint, than what they did.  What they did was tell the ending of the story (and, incidentally, of the world) from inside the protagonist’s head.  The second ending was shown in a series of movies (collectively titled The End of Evangelion) designed to tell the ending of the story as it affected the world at large.  It is deeply interesting to me how both endings are vastly different in scope and in method of expression, yet equally baffling. 

The show was nearly pulled off the air twice during its original run, was the source of more than one death threat against the director, and was the motivating factor of at least one act of vandalism against the production studio’s property.  It also spawned manga, a few video games, models, toys, apparel, bath salts (I couldn’t make this up)…  The merchandise has been going strong since the show first aired.  It has not stopped at any time since then, and does not look likely to stop at any reasonably predictable point in the future.  Someone has made (and continues to make) a tidy profit, I’m sure.

So what is this whole thing all about?

*    *    *

Our story starts in 2000, when a scientific expedition to Antarctica goes disastrously wrong.  The experiments done result in an explosion of energy so massive it completely melts the polar ice cap.  Sea levels rise, the earth’s axis shifts, and in addition to the global climate change (Japan, for instance, has summer as its only season now), about half the human population perishes in the aftermath of it all.  The world slowly rebuilds itself.  The precise nature of this event is covered up, with the blame being officially cast on a meteorite impact.  The event is dubbed “Second Impact”, with the First Impact being a similar meteorite collision early in Earth’s formation, which caused the moon to split off the main mass of the planet.

Much of the world’s recovery effort is spearheaded by a mysterious internationally operating group called Nerv, which operates under special permission of the UN.  But as poorly understood as they are, Nerv are in turn backed by an even more shadowy organization, called Seele, which seems to have plans of their own beyond the scope of Nerv regarding a Third Impact.

The story proper starts in 2015, with Shinji Ikari, a 15-year-old boy who has been summoned to New Tokyo-3 (yes, there really are two other New Tokyos) by his father, Gendo Ikari.  Ikari the elder turns out to be the commander of Nerv.  Gendo left his son in the care of his teacher several years ago, not long after Yui Ikari, Shinji’s mother and Gendo’s wife, disappeared under strange circumstances during an experiment conducted by Gehirn, an organization which was later disbanded and reformed as Nerv.  With his mother dead and his cold, harsh father distant to a degree best measured in astronomical terms, Shinji quite understandably has trouble getting close to people.

Shinji arrives in New Tokyo-3 just as it is being attacked by an Angel*.  In Eva’s parlance, Angels are massively powerful beings whose forms and modes of existence appear to violate all biological possibility.  Despite their differences in shape, size, capabilities and methods, they are unified by a single goal: the eradication of all human life from the Earth.

At their most effective, conventional weapons, artillery strikes and missile barrages all seem to be a minor nuisance, no sort of real impediment at all.  An N2 mine, the next closest thing to a nuclear weapon, forces it to a temporary halt.  This halt gives Shinji just enough time to be taken to Nerv’s headquarters and discover why his father summoned him: to pilot Evangelion Unit-01 against the Angel.  Despite their robotic appearance, they have some of the same capabilities as their Angel enemies.  Chief among these abilities is the Evangelion’s ability to combat the Angels’ AT Field, a barrier virtually impenetrable to any attack, by generating one of their own.

In the process of fighting and defeating this Angel, Shinji loses control of the Eva Unit-01.  But rather than submit itself to certain destruction at the Angel’s hands, Unit-01 instead goes berserk, savagely annihilating the Angel.  In the process, a portion of its armored helmet comes off and reveals that the Evangelion is not, in fact, a robot.  It is a giant cyborg.  Protected, and harnessed, and restrained by this armored casing is the sort of monster Godzilla must have nightmares about.  For reasons unknown (at least at this point), only Shinji can make Evangelion Unit-01 work.

And there are more Angels to come.

This is interesting stuff all by itself, but Gainax goes one further and uses it as a platform to explore what I tend to think of as “The Dilemma of Being”.  The major characters around Shinji are all, like he himself, broken in some way.  None seem to be completely irredeemable (not even Gendo, not really), but all of them have failed or do fail at some point when it comes to being functional, stable human beings capable of honestly giving and receiving care and affection for others.

Talking about the subject matter and the impact of Evangelion is easy.  These things can be measured in more or less objective, entirely factual terms.  The impact is demonstrable.  The facts of the story and ideas are there for anyone to see.  What is harder to gauge is the quality of it.

I raved about it when I first saw it.  I couldn’t get enough.  Twenty-six episodes didn’t seem like enough.  As I progressed through it, my opinion grew, but the ending left me feeling soured.  Evangelion’s ending is a thing of rightly notorious reputation.  Its jarring turn into the bizarre and surreal is certainly proof beyond all doubt that Gainax’s intent for Evangelion was always that it be a character story first and foremost, but it discards any real sense of the story’s resolution for the wider world.

But this much is well known.  People who have only heard the show’s title could probably tell you (however much they’d be pressed for reasons) that the ending is unilaterally despised among series fans.

There are other problems with Evangelion, of course.  The characters are complex, but often find themselves shackled to specific philosophical viewpoints, so that they occasionally descend from being actual characters to being mouthpieces for dialogue that is (at times) turgid and frankly clunky.  I’m generally opposed to the blatant use of characters in this way, and it’s especially jarring for how unnecessary it is.  The exploration of the various personal and interpersonal dilemmas throughout is at times ham-handed to the point of distraction.  It gets the job done, but it’s clear that subtlety isn’t the director’s strongsuit, or at least not on a regular basis.

The movies which were later made to answer fans’ demands to know more of what happened in the world outside the protagonist’s head during the series finale, and also probably to close the tale in a way more satisfying to Gainax themselves, are a dilemma in themselves.  They mirror the TV series’s quality arc, in that they start off engaging, rise to a point of being gripping, tense drama and action, and then founder in a morass of philosophical pondering.  To top it off, the movies were released in a way that seems meant to deliberately confuse potential viewers.  The first movie, titled Death and Rebirth is comprised of two parts.  The first, Death, retells the story of the first 24 episodes of the TV series (essentially the entire thing, barring the last two episodes) in compressed form.  Some footage is reused, but has been retouched.  Some other footage has been altered, changing some scenes in subtle ways to better set up plot elements in the movies.  Some of this footage was later used in a re-mastered and re-cut edition of the TV series (marketed as a box set called the Platinum Edition in the U.S.).  The second half of the movie, Rebirth, takes up the story where the TV series’ 24^th episode leaves off, this time showing us the story from the world beyond Shinji’s psyche.  It ends on a massive cliffhanger and resolves basically nothing.  The job of ending the story falls to the second movie, The End of Evangelion.  This starts off with Rebirth once again, but follows it up with Air, finishing the story once and for all.

So…  Is it worth watching?  I’d say yes, definitely.  While Neon Genesis Evangelion has its ups and downs, it is overall very well done, especially given the budgetary constraints under which Gainax was operating for much of its run.  As an anime fan, it’s practically required viewing for the history lesson alone.  As mentioned above, Evangelion has shaped the face of the medium, and cemented director Hideaki Anno’s career and reputation as an animator and director.  And as easy as it is to point to the never-ending parade of ancillary merchandise, I keep thinking that there wouldn’t be a market for all of this weird stuff (and trust me, some of it is pretty weird) if an overall love for the series didn’t create an equal demand.  Warts and all, the series is highly imaginative, and definitely worth the time.

*    *    *

In recent years, Anno has decided to return to what has become, whether he wanted it to or not, his magnum opus.  His intent is to retell the story of Evangelion through a series of four full-length theatrical movies.  Two of them are available so far: Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone and Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance.  The third, Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo, is due out sometime in November in Japan, and God knows when it will make its way Stateside.  I’ll leave off talking about them for the moment (maybe some other time), except to say that they appear to be the sort of thing Anno might have made the first time around, were he not hobbled by a crippling depression.  They are crazy, often unsettling and sometimes disturbing movies, and I have enjoyed every moment of them so far.  They, also, are worth the time.

*Some of the English terms in Evangelion are oddly chosen.  Angels, in Japanese, are called shito, a word that more directly translates as “Apostle”.  The title itself, Shinseiki Evangelion, translates more accurately as “New Century/Age/Era Evangelion”.  The given translations were, apparently, done as they currently are on the insistence of Gainax.