Persona 4 review

Anime is just like any other genre - most of it is unmitigated shit, with an occasional nugget of goodness lurking deep within the mire. It gets a bad rap because, like the jack-booted imperialistic pricks we are, us privileged folk in the Western World constantly endeavour to grade the rest of the planet against our own halcyon cultural metrics. And, seemingly more so than any other oeuvre, contemporary populist Japanese storytelling is so impenetrable to somebody raised on a steady diet of Hollywood and Murdoch rags that it might as well have been beamed down from Neptune via a tinfoil helmet. It's all about adjusting your expectations accordingly: if you can sit through two consecutive episodes of any anime or anime-related activity without witnessing an act of child molestation or an attempt at humour that causes you to shit your own mind out through the eye of a needle, then it's a culturally significant artifact ranking alongside Beethoven and the Sistine Chapel.

Consequently there is much in Persona 4 that will likely strike the Japano-curious as dashed odd right from the get-go. The initial pacing is absolutely glacial, reducing your involvement to mashing the X button to wade through an interminable procession of expositionary dialogue before your first real battle. Then there's the Social Link system, a sort of in-game Facebook account that forces you to eschew vital dungeon-grinding hours at the whims of your simpering miscreant classmates. Actually, the game doesn't force you per se, but unless you want your player character to end up as a dribbling retard wanking alone in his room by level 20 you'll have to dance to their increasingly annoying tunes. Though it's not made explicitly clear, you actually have a fixed time limit within which to reach the end of Persona 4's storyline, and so this system instills a pervading sense of paranoia, giving you pause to consider whether you're doing what the strategy guide expects you to do at any given moment.

Previous installments of the franchise were less forgiving than the Schutzstaffel, continually presenting you with apparently interchangeable choices, any one of which could irrevocably shag up your save file, and as such I was so petrified at the thought of sitting through the endless fucking introduction again that I bent over sideways to accommodate every wheedling request. Yes, even in Persona 4's electronic fantasy world you cannot escape the sucking gravitational pull of peer pressure, and this makes for one of the most dispiriting gaming experiences ever. Every time you prepare an expedition into dungeonsville, lips smacking at the prospect of invaluable virtual trinkets, some twat phones you up and insists to be taken shopping. You'll want to tell him to fuck off and leave you alone, but of course you'll cave in, led about by the wriststrap of your cellphone like a manacled bitch, all for a handful of Arbitrary Magical Kawaii Kudos Points that only serve to inflate the sense of entitlement of your cosseted chums until they morph into co-dependent time-sponges whose suspiciously fragile existences are sustained only by your CONSTANT FAWNING ATTENTION.

While this may sound somewhat restrictive (and it is - frustratingly so at times) it's a quantum leap forward from Persona 3, which inhaled sharply through its teeth every time you contemplated exhibiting the barest glimmer of free will, and the actual RPG part of the game is satisfyingly streamlined if not a little shallow. You explore the randomly-generated dungeons of an alternate universe with a student exchange program with Silent Hill, murder a succession of demonic creatures, loot treasure chests for loose change, levelling up your party of extradimensional hooligans until you possess sufficient testicular fortitude to defeat a larger, palette-swapped creature, only to be informed that the princess is in another castle. The gimmick here takes the form of the titular Personae, which are like Pokemon that live inside your mind, complementing your anaemic combat abilities with a pre-determined skillset of magical powers and a rock-paper-scissor system of strengths and weaknesses. The player character is, predictably, The Chosen Thing and therefore able to employ a small of army of Personae providing that the relevant tarot card has been looted from a monster's still-twitching corpse, and although it's transparently obvious that this "gotta invoke 'em all" mechanic has been installed mainly to protract the grind for another 23 hours, it does add some much-needed flexibility and variety to the otherwise stodgy combat. The designs of the Personae are pretty snazzy too, mercilessly culled from a hundred mythological and religious texts and given their own wacky aesthetic twist.

Persona 4 is one of those games with an inverse difficulty curve, beginning on a punishing peak and gradually tobogganning down into a gentle valley of piss-simplicity once you've raised your protagonists to the status of Olympian gods. Unfortunately this requires a correspondingly superhuman time investment, which is the game's biggest turn-off. The combat is swift and cerebral enough to stave off the tedium for a while, but the environments are incredibly repetitive and the MMORPG-style eterno-grind left me hankering for something more expedient, like Final Fantasy XII's sublime Gambit system.

Ultimately it's the storylines that have been the Persona series' selling point and Persona 4 is no exception. It's a likeable mish-mash of Twin Peaks, Harry Potter, and CSI: Rural Japan, as an implacable serial killer abducts women through their television sets, leaving them to starve in existential prisons within a world of magic ghosts before stringing their corpses up on telegraph wires. My chief complaint is that, as fucking ever, it's beyond the wit of trained professionals from the X-Files to solve this supernatural whodunnit, and thus left to a team of adenoidal teenagers. Call me cynical if you like, but if a portal to the Phantom Zone opened up in my 26" Sony Bravia I'd want the situation rectified by a crack squad of the hardest, most murderous bastards from the Special Air Service, not a bunch of disenfranchised children. At the risk of sounding like someone who spends his evenings creatively redesigning my forearms with a Gillete Fusion while searching for hidden Satanic messages in Linkin Park songs, I actually think the writers missed a trick in not making the plot a searing satirical treatise on teen angst and disaffection: a story where television sets, the ultimate founts of placatory mind-balm, are subverted to become a surreal purgatory in which your deepest insecurities are given flesh in the form of bizarre ghouls could have carried some real weight. The story is still just interesting enough to warrant your perservance, and it deserves some special attention purely because, normally, there'd be no earthly way that anything as downright peculiar would ever see the light of day over here. In this case, the popularity of previous installments have caused the game to wash up on our shores only after cresting a tidal wave of foaming fanboy spunk, and, for once at least, it's gratifying to see that there's something of genuine outsider merit amid the used tissues and shame.

A word of warning - there is the obligatory harpy-voiced child NPC whose sole contribution to the plot appears to to be periodically crushing your pixellated arse beneath steamrolling great torrents of gurgling sentimental bullshit, but at the time of writing it doesn't seem possible to cause your player character to engage in illicit sex with her, so that's a big plus right there.

Grand Theft Auto 4 review

For all their censor-baiting controversy, we must remember that the first six installments of the Grand Theft Auto franchise have always fundamentally been about as "mature" as curling out a monster bumlog inside a crowded and badly air conditioned lift. Every attempt to evoke a gritty gangster melodrama was balanced out by a moment of abject cartoon stupidity: the original game awarded you bonus points for mowing down Hare Krishnas in a tank, Vice City introduced the time-honoured "fuck a whore to regain health" mechanic, and San Andreas deftly portrayed the urban plight of impoverished black Americans by inviting you to steal jet packs from Area 51 for Peter Fonda.

Grand Theft Auto 4, meanwhile, has simply glided into the eager gobs of the gaming proletariat like a lubed-up Greggs baguette full of hyperbole and wild dreams, wilfully jettisoning everything that might once have been amusing and fun. Gone is the giddy, coke n' Starburst-induced lunacy of old, replaced with a lifeless mess that somehow contrives to be simultaneously grim and gaudy AND incredibly boring, like Tim Westwood remaking Goodfellas for Men & Motors.

Foremost amongst the discarded is the characterisations. Okay, Tommy Vercetti and CJ Johnson might have been psychopathic thugs, but Niko, your morally reprehensible glove-puppet from somewhere frightful in the Eastern bloc, is an utterly unlikeable, emotionless prickwart, a Soviet-made Terminator with a profanity upgrade. This might be a refreshing change of pace from the usual chisel-jawed, all-American analogy for Christ, but if I wanted to play as an nihilistic, ugly, misanthrope from Europe I already have a remarkably authentic first-person RPG called Real Life. Niko has arrived on the shores of Yankdom looking for some unnamed third party upon which to exact revengement, but the storyline is advanced so sporadically that you'll either forget what's happening or make the conscious decision not to give a fuck.

The supporting cast are agreeably thick and generally useless and are therefore orders of magnitude more likeable than your snarky, one-dimensional asylum seeker. However, they're not beyond reproach, because outside of the traditional mission-based gameplay they insist on dragging you away from the storyline by phoning you up and demanding to be escorted to the theatre at the drop of the hat. Yes, Rockstar have at long last perfected the innovative "annoying friend who you don't really like but with whom nonetheless affect a superficial social facade in order to stave off their latent psychotic tendencies" mechanic and, having done so, ensure that you get your money's worth by ejaculating it out of your screen at every available opportunity. Combine this with the ranting roadside loonies spouting excerpts from Foucault's Pendulum and the spam emails for cock pills that show up every time you make use of the utterly pointless internet feature and you begin to wonder what other humdrum real-life inconveniences await us in the inevitable Grand Theft Auto 5. Teatime cold calls from Nigerian con artists? How about a minigame where you have to gingerly coax divots of dog shit out from the soles of your trainers with a toothbrush while trying not to gag?

Furthermore, while the pretensions towards turgid realism in a virtual world where evading conviction for serial murder is as simple as going to sleep are laudable, what do Rockstar think they're playing at by including the Internet inside a computer game? This is a worrying trend in danger of turning into some all-consuming multimedia ouroboros. Once we've accept this shit as de rigueur, it's a slippery slope towards games that include a fully-functional virtual console and virtual copy of the game you're already playing, and before you know it, our plasma TVs have been converted into infinity wells - sinister ontological puzzles of layered fictional universes from which there is no escape.

Also left emasculated by the Realism Bulldozer is the driving mechanic - which is frankly baffling, considering that despite the shooty bits and filigree of sidequests, Grand Theft Auto (see, the clue is in the title) has always been a driving game at heart. I was bitterly disappointed to learn that you can't drive at warp factor stupid all the time, and apart from handful of rare diamond-encrusted ultracars everything handles about as well as greased bricks in the cold vacuum of space. The game seems to be straining to guff the gritty urban experience into your lap, but it falls short, sticking in its anal pubes like a particularly persistent tagnut. The problem is that cities - while vibrant and bustling as the graphics and sound ably display - are, from a vehicular viewpoint, unpleasant and places to be. Once you finally find a decent set of wheels you'll have barely turned a corner before you've compacted it into a tinfoil veneer around a bollard, catapulting your Slavic avatar through the windshield with an urgent reservation at the asphalt buffet. Actually this is one of the best parts of the game, because in a rare condescension to dumb fun, the developers have implemented a bullet-time slowdown feature that allows you to savour the carnage in enough gruesome detail to make David Cronenberg jizz himself in half.

If that's the "auto" part of the game fucked, then at least they've got the "grand" in order. While the remade Liberty City may lack the incongruous diversity of San Andreas, it conveys the metropolis like nothing else committed to silicon. There's a sort of bleary mayonnaise filter on the camera which is obviously there to stop your GPU from going off like Three Mile Island, but at times it creates a transcendental Impressionist wonder - driving across a suspension bridge at dusk with the skyline glittering in the background is an authentic and truly haunting sight, and one of the few memories that linger on even after I've flogged the disc for pennies at Blockbuster.

Ultimately it's these flat impersonations of your own pitiful existence that contrive to make GTA4 a dull and listless affair, but admittedly I'm never going to be able to enjoy it on its own terms, purely because its older brothers and sisters were just too much bloody fun. These were the first true sandbox games, the ones that handed you a rocket launcher and a sprawling cityscape jampacked full of screaming artificial intelligences and positively encouraged you to turn the place into downtown Beirut like the Unabomber with a gutful of sweets and fizzy pop. GTA4 is a wrenching transition from a world which allowed you to binge on cheeseburgers until you resemble the pre-disaster Hindenburg, put on a gimp suit, parachute out of a Harrier jump jet onto the roof of a casino and then proceed to murder its clientele with a foot-long dildo.

For all the predictably awful "comedy" segments on the radio, Grand Theft Auto has just gotten too damn serious for its own good. It's still nominally a sandbox game, only now the best it can offer is anarchy distilled through the brain of an asthmatic accountant from Swindon. While it tries desperately to mitigate this critical pleasure haemorrhage by channelling the inner-city hell as depicted in uncompromising cop shows like The Wire and The Sopranos, it forgets that though these settings are relevant and enthralling to explore via tightly-plotted storylines and controlled camerawork, it's markedly less gratifying to be punted off a boat at midnight with a handful of coins and a bumpicking nonce for a sidekick and told to conquer the lot in the name of some arbitrary vendetta.

Diebuster Review

Remakes are a funny thing. Balls it up and you're left with pointless re-varnishing at best, and expensive fan-fiction at worst. Get it right and you've got Battlestar Galactica '04.

Though not strictly a remake, most of the fans of Diebuster's prequel will fervently wish it was, and thus invoke canonical bastardization as a get-out clause. Unfortunately, Diebuster lurks between Aim for the Top! Gunbuster's penultimate and final scenes like cuts of Jar-Jar Binks spliced into the candy-coated climax of Return of the Jedi. Both belong to the same fictional universe, but, while Diebuster transcribes vast chunks of plot and theme from its predecessor, it's wildly at variance in execution, corrupting, like the vast majority of fan-fiction, the innocent, wide-eyed purity of a much-loved genre classic into something weird and vaguely grubby.

The original Gunbuster was, in the main, a tragi-rom-com (heavy emphasis on tragi and rom, not so much with the com) replete with Gainax's trademark whinetrospection. This was decorated with a whimsical filigree of almost-real astrophysics (the OVA's major dramatic hook being the effects of time dilation involved in interstellar travel, similar to Joe Haldeman's The Forever War), and interspersed with dumb, flashy nonsense; super robot nerdgasms in which the absurdly powerful Gunbuster battles literally millions of aliens, employing flamboyant weapons and techniques that rely heavily on the volume with which the attack's name is vocalised.

Nonetheless, it remains a favourite slice of mecha anime, and it certainly has something that Diebuster sorely lacks. If the original Gunbuster required that one suspended one's disbelief in order to accommodate such bat-shit concepts as the titular super robot using a built-in Bat-cape to deflect alien death lasers or a finale which involves turning the planet Jupiter into a gigantic bomb, its sequel requires you to dangle it from a perilously thin thread. In one scene, the main protagonist commands swarms of Buster Machines with her cowlick; in another, one of her comrades employs a psychic attack that transforms a fleet of spaceships into killer sperm. You wish I was joking.

The story is effectively identical to its prequel. Delete where appropriate: wannabe space pilot/ditzy robot girl Noriko/Nono forms a semi-Sapphic obsession with truculent ace Kazumi/Lal'C, embarking on klutzy misadventures until becoming abruptly skilful/powerful for reasons not adequately explored, eventually piloting/transforming into the titular mecha and saving the universe. Entire scenes are all but Xeroxed from Gunbuster. The action scenes (which, let's be honest, are pretty impressive in the wow-lookit-the-purdy-lasers mien) are similarly padded out with the cast of indomitable superheroes bemoaning their sorry state of near-omnipotent perfection, or embarrassing both themselves and the viewer with moments of spectacularly inappropriate fanservice. Chalk an attempted rape scene up as one of the most baffling inclusions in recent anime history - amid so much fluff, it's like watching a chainsaw decapitation in the middle of an episode of Last of the Summer Wine.

Diebuster is precisely what would result from an experiment involving the Gunbuster DVD, a classroom full of 13-year-olds, Attention Deficit Disorder, and six gallons of Coca-Cola. Giant robots? Hell, yeah! But what if there were, like, dozens of them, each with their own totally kickin' special moves! Evangelion was cool, so let's make the already-improbable robots biomechanical!! Oh, and the pilots? The ones in Gunbuster were okay, but wouldn't they be so much better if they had magic powers?!?! Cite a rebuttal against the po-facedness of recent mecha anime as an excuse for this if you will, but recall that GaoGaiGar did the same thing 15 years earlier, and didn't take itself half as seriously as Diebuster does.

Most Gunbuster fans won't get much further than Diebuster's first episode, but if you're inclined to persevere there are minor treasures within. The mecha design - especially that of Lal'C's Dix-Neuf - is impressive and thoroughly original, the animation is top-notch, the colors vibrant enough to sear the eye, and the faithfully reworked music is lovely, but these few plus points don't come close to redeeming the OVA. Depressingly, the analogy of hyper-active kids with crayons is infinitely preferable to the truth: Diebuster is nothing but a soulless cash-in, a 20th anniversary money-rake, confusing Gunbuster's daft sense of wonder with FLCL-esque insanity and gurgling mahō shōjo tropes.

Gainax deserve an Inazuma Kick to the testicular region for allowing this sort of rubbish to leak out. However, they don't appear to care, as Neon Genesis: Evangelion - Hideaki Anno's license to print money - is also getting a new lick of paint (the trailers for Rebuild... look excruciating). Proof that you can have too much of a good thing - especially if those responsible for prolonging its lifespan can't quite remember what made it good in the first place.

Today is Chorus Day...

SFX #162, priced a trifling £3.99, is now available in all good newsagents, and several passable ones. Also, Sainsbury's.

Oh! I forgot to mention this last time, but - in what would appear to be a veritable avalanche of generosity on the part of SFX - you also get a free DVD, 'pon whose iridescent undercarriage is inscribed episode #1 of the parallel universe-hopping sci-fi extravaganza, 'Charlie Jade'.

Further examination of the Pulp Idol book reveals it to be a most wondrous tome of scintillating majesty and nascent genius. Great big props go to Laura Messenger's 'Dysmorphia', Beverley Allen's 'Maud: A Garden Tale', and Sheila Adamson's 'Goodbye Normal Jean' for being - respectively - bleak, creepy and effortlessly clever. Imbibe, post haste!

- Alex

SFX #162 is go!

The first bunch of Pulp Idol 2 books have gone out to subscribers (you may also find attached issue #162 of a magazine called 'SFX', which is worth a look, too). I had a quick flick through before work, and let me remind you that this is Good Stuff™, people, and worthy of your patronage. If money was sentient it would literally hurl itself out of your wallets and onto the counters of newsagents and supermarkets in an attempt to be involved in such a glorious transaction. Currency used in this manner would travel throughout the British economy, forever instilled with a sense of profound fulfillment, safe in the knowledge that it has, in some small way, made the world a better place.

- Alex

Faster, pussycat! Shill! Shill!

If you'll forgive a little shameless self-promotion: hi! My name's Alex Clarkson, and I'm the winner of Pulp Idol 2007, a short story competition held by SFX Magazine and Gollancz Publishing.

My entry was titled 'Da Capo', and it's eleven different kinds of awesome. If you don't believe me, ask renowned sci-fi author Geoff Ryman, who said of 'Da Capo': "a surrealistic but touching fantasy idea, and a current contemporary subject given a terrifying new twist." Sweet Jesus! There's simply no feasible way of containing your excitement short of an icepick lobotomy!

'Da Capo', plus 11 runner-up stories, is being bound into mini-book format by the good people at SFX or possibly Gollancz, and it'll be given away free (yes, you heard right! FREE, by God!) with the issue of SFX Magazine. Of course, by this point you, faithful reader, are doubtless frothing at the mouth with anticipation, and therefore I need not remind you to buy two copies of the magazine. This will ensure that you have a replacement in the event that you thumb the first one to shreds, which you most assuredly will.

The standard of writing in last year's Pulp Idol was amazing (not quite as good as this year, of course, because I didn't enter last year): eleven succinct and divinely dinky sci-fi, fantasy and horror romps, each one a glorious shot of literary ambrosia injected directly into your retinae. I am confident that the quality of stories published this year will be such that looking directly at the text will rend the very flesh from your bones à la the end of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'. If nothing else, it will almost certainly be the best eleven sci-fi short stories given away free on a magazine that you will read this year.

Cheers,

- Alex