This is one of those articles that I kind of dread writing.
Akira is either loved or hated by those that have seen it,
there is no middle ground really. It is a very polarizing
Anime. Unfortunately for North American gamers, we
never got the NES game that was based on the movie.
Thanks to fans though, that has been rectified and the
game is pretty good, not as good as the Anime though.
close-up shots of
the characters in
the game so that
you could better
make out what is
going on. The way
the game is now,
you may as well be
literally talking to a
wall since you will
be hard pressed to
see the NPC that is
talking.
The game opens with Kaneda having been taken into
police custody with most of his motorcycle gang minus
one member who was abducted by the military.
Gameplay is similar
to Policenauts (page
26) with a cursor and
menu combination
for interacting with
the game world.
Picking look from
the menu will allow
you to move a cursor
around the screen
and select exactly
what you want to look at whether it be a person or an item.
AKIRA
NES/FAMICOM
The beloved Anime in game form.
Words: Carl Williams
There is no real need to have watched, or enjoyed, the
Anime that this game is based on. Everything is pretty
well explained in the game. This makes it easier for
anyone interested in thinking they are controlling the story
of Akira.
The text is pretty hard to read in many places as the game
tries quite hard to follow the movie and some of the text
simply doesn’t make sense when trying to figure out your
next move. It doesn’t help that so many non-player characters are given extremely generic names such as
“groupie” or “Army” and the like. This makes it hard to
identify with the person talking, let alone keeping the story
straight as you progress in the game.
The game is not great but for fans of the movie it will be
worth checking out since most of the scenes are redrawn
from the movie. Since this is the NES we are talking
about, there
probably was no way to scan cells from the
movie and include those. What is here is decent, thought
the art could have been better as Jesus (previous page)
shows the NES is capable of better.
Akira was a classic Anime but there is a reason the game is
not revered in a similar light. The developers could have
done so much better to create a gaming classic. This one
is only for die-hard Akira fans, everyone else check out
some of the other Digital Comics in this issue for better
games.
Character artwork is quite poor and many times who you
are interacting with is off in the distance of the scene. It
would have been better had the designers used more
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