All You Need is Kill

After announcing a film was being made with Tom Cruise as the main character, I became interested in finding out a little more about this ‘Light Novel’ which apparently was able to interest the doe-eyed folk in Hollywood, but not the pouncing directors of the animé world, for you see, All You Need is Kill is a Japanese novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, making the moving fairly unprecedented.

Concerning a future where starfish-type aliens are invading the planet, Keiji Kiriya is forced to relive the same day, the day of attack, again and again, each time with the slaughter of soldiers around him. In the same base camp, American soldier Rita is famed for her legendary prowess on the battlefield, dubbed the ‘Full metal Bitch’, she is a frequent in the relived days as a power-suit wearing hunter taking out swathes of enemy, or a discerning soldier back on base.

The novel mostly follows the main character as he tries to make sense of the re-occurences and endeavours to get better at fighting using the deaths as a way to learn. I suppose the best example without giving away lots of plot would be to liken it to Groundhog Day meets Starship Troopers, with a bit of Source Code thrown in.

There was also a manga made, they made the starfish aliens look like this.[/caption]

There is little to speak of in terms of language, Japanese is a pretty butchered language once translated and holds little literary value afterwards, unlike Russian. There aren’t many themes in the book, unless you include the most obvious, loss, discovery, love even. The biggest and most laudable part is Rita, who doesn’t suck and isn’t a complete counter-stereotype.

Rita is terrific at fighting, she hasn’t got a ‘Fuck-You’ attitude, nor is she meant to be some kind of astounding beauty, that’s pretty cool right? Well on top of that she’s all broken and stuff just like a battle hardened soldier ought to be, she even follows the Mako Mori test, meaning she has her own story arc. The film comes out today in the United Kingdom which I will be watching soon, I highly doubt that in a film with Cruise, any exec is going to be willing to shaft him for an awesome female character like Rita.

As the novel progresses, the parameter of expectations for the novel widens, eventually turning into a full-fledged Sci-Fi novel instead of a themed action novel, the characters are stylistically 2 dimensional, almost pulpily so and the main character is interesting, even if he lacks depth. At times it can be difficult to distinguish character’s aims, but the writing style; procedural, opinionated, id-driven, is addictive and enjoyable.

Straight after reading, I had my doubts, I was a little put-off by a few facets of the book. In one sense I like how animal the book is, in another, it confirmed awkward  suspicions about the books motives in having such a prominent female character. I read this a couple of months ago, opportunism inspiring me to write this review, but since then, it has become more fondly remembered.

The plot, characters and writing style of the book surpass all expectations, transcending traditional Japanese animé roots and cementing itself as its own thing, overall, it is a good book, even if it plays out like lengthy Philip K. Dick short story. 

I hope it’s good?[/caption]

All You Need is Kill

Child of Light

It seems like this past year, developers are beginning to branch out and make different kinds of games, starting with the release of Demon’s Souls a few years ago, the western-inspired Dark Souls 2 and the Final Fantasy-esque South Park came out last month are signalling a change in the industry.

It is these changes that allowed the existence of Child of Light, a turn-based RPG from the creators of Farcry 3, inspired by Japanese RPGs and Studio Ghibli animation. A digital-only title, the game was released this month on all current consoles at a lower retail price of £15.00 and is only about 13 hours long offering an authentic gaming experience unlike most digital-only games which are over-priced in comparison.

In 19th C Austria, a duke’s young daughter dies from an illness, but is immediately reborn in the magical world of Lemuria, where she meets a small glowing light, a sprite named Igniculus who aids her, and discovers that in order to return home, she must defeat an evil witch who has been plaguing the land.

During the game, all dialogue is spoken in verse: mostly in the form of closed rhyming couplets, with slight deviations to the formula.

The battles are active time-based (ATB) and attacks are selected after the waiting time and executed during the charge time. If a character is attacked after they have selected their move, but before they have executed it, they are interrupted – the move is cancelled and they are pushed further back on the waiting bar, this can be done to both the enemies and your characters, so it makes for very dynamic gameplay.

Igniculus can also be used during battle, when hovering over a player character he heals their health or over an enemy he slows their ATB bar.

The level-up system shares characteristics with Ubisoft Montreal’s Farcry 3, a branching set of attributes and stat upgrades which are un-lockable using points gained through levelling. There are a number of paths so that there is some choice in what skills to pursue.

There are 3 equippable slots; Head, Armour & Accessory, crystals are used as the equipment and are gained as loot from battles. There is a crafting system with 3 slots which you can insert crystals and make higher ranking crystals from, either by mixing colours or by putting 3 of the same colour together. Depending on the colour and the slot that you equip it in, they have a range of effects including chance hits of paralysis on the enemy or a percentage reduction in elemental damage.

The presentation is of high quality and belies its presumed budgetary costs, the sprites are hand-drawn looking with smooth animations, and are styled in 2D, similar to paper cut-outs, except for some elements like Aurora’s hair, which swishes around 3-dimensionally.

The backgrounds are layered and moves when the camera pans and both inside and out of battle are side-scrolling screens, so that the battle system initially looks like an old Final Fantasy game.

The music is beautiful, with thematic melodies that echo in essence throughout and some orchestral sounds that give it a rich and solid sound. Choral sequences enter during boss battles making them feel grand and heroic, with quieter, violin pieces accompanying the world adventuring.

Although simplistic and easy to learn, the game offers a hidden depth when it comes to the battle system, the interferences one inflicts can allow lots of different tactics and methods for taking down an opponent. The range of spells and characters changes the pace of battles and suit all kinds of players. Enemies mix it up with counterattacks, activating on certain conditions, magic attacks, physical attacks, or even retaliating only when interrupted, these combinations of move-sets mean the player is often required to change techniques in order to defeat opponents.

I have heard the battle system is similar to Grandia, but a bit simpler, an indication of its JRPG roots.

Boss battles are fun and challenging, however sometimes spring up at unforeseen intervals meaning that lack of preparation can often be a cause for demise. Sporadic quests offer new characters, however I found the first addition to be the most effective. At times I found that I had gotten myself lost in the game, not knowing where to go or simply not being able to map segments in my head, however, continual exploration got me to grip with it, especially when doing a couple of the sidequests, which have you backtracking and fast-travelling in order to find oddities.The difficulty of the game ranges, at the beginning through to the middle, it is really easy and then gets to a more normal difficulty onwards, I turned up the difficulty throughout this time until around the middle, where I changed it to normal on the fly, which is a great choice to allow the player.

I never found that I had to try to level or round up loot, with tactics being the major factors in winning battles against bosses and enemies.

Although not  evoking that quintessential Japanese RPG experience that the game was hyped to, Child of Light breeds its own kind of adventure which is visually stunning and emotionally satisfying outside of the entertaining battle system.

The characters are charming, the poetic style of text and is fitting and untiring (despite the few comments I have seen mentioning otherwise) and the atmosphere is visionary and nostalgic in a way that isn’t replicating 8 or 16 bit art.

If there were any issues with this game, then it’d would be the sad knowledge that we’ll unlikely see anything else quite like this, from anyone else like this, any time soon. 

 

 

Child of Light

Waiting for Godalming

I’ve never spent so much time wondering if a writer is mad or not. Nor for that matter, the protagonist.

The fact that Psychological thrillers are one of my favourite genres of book, film, TV and videogames is what makes the former statement so frighteningly ironic. That a comedy fantasy novel could aspire to create such an enduring and perplexing doubt for the duration of it is somewhat of a mystery, when so many Fight Clubs fail to hit the desired mark.

Waiting for Godalming is a comedy fantasy novel about a seemingly bumbling, yet apparently the world’s best detective, Lazlo Woodbine, who, after God’s disappearance is tasked with finding him, by God’s wife, also active, is Icarus Smith, a lowly thief who justifies his activities in the belief that he is only ‘replacing’ items as according to a divine purpose which only he knows. After a rather unfortunate theft, Smith is hounded by an organisation known as the ‘Ministry of Serendipity’.

Written by Robert Rankin, Waiting for Godalming was published in 2000, and presumably due to his being British and having a sense of humour, appears to have been mostly marketed as appealing to Terry Pratchett fans, despite Rankin having been in the authoring business since before even the Discworld series was begun.

Unlike Pratchett however, Rankin’s humour is much more absurdist, surreal and metafictional, Lazlo Woodbine is depicted as a very unreliable narrator and often partakes in ridiculous rituals in order to adhere to being a ‘traditional 1950′s detective’, such as: only being present in 4 locations, (his detective office taking cases, in a bar talking toot, in an alleyway having a shootout or being on a rooftop showdown) using a Smith & Wesson and drinking only a certain brand of scotch.

The plot exists mostly as a means to deliver the humour as there are a lot of moments where the prose diverts attention quite wildly away from the situation or moving the story forward, in order to digress and speak of some witty whimsy. A novel such as this uses irony as a kind of badge of honour, where satire looks in and silliness looks back in a never-ending mirror of reflection, so you’re never quite sure if an event was meant to be taken seriously or not, yet the plot moves on.

I enjoyed the humour in the book, looking at other reviews, I have noticed that different readers, have not, after all the humour is rather unusual, so it might be said that the comedy is of a particular taste, not perhaps a refined or Wilde-ian, nor are laughs created of the belly-aching sort but instead induce a warm chuckley kind that one might outwardly describe as ‘hearty’.

There’s always a difficulty I find in reviewing books like this, to approach it in a serious tone sounds mocking and prudish, and to attempt to be humourous or light-hearted often results in catastrophic failure and one worries that any readers might confuse my poor sense of humour with the novel that I am banging on about. Please don’t.

Outside of comical elements, Waiting does a good show of de-constructing the detective fiction genre as well as other archetypes and cinematic tropes used in adventure/mystery films. There are some brilliant and attentive literary techniques used also, such as the end of a chapter or section following a character using a similar action or word as the beginning of the next chapter.

I have read a few fantasy comedy novels now, and I can easily say this is one of my favourites so far, gloriously told and a pleasure to read, I look forward to reading more by Rankin, or so my guardian Sprout, Barry, tells me.

PS – The banner image is from Alice on Mars, which has an Indiegogo going on for a film at the moment.

Waiting for Godalming