New Vision in Sight
We take a little hands-on peek at Bandai's second bit of Eureka Seven fan service.
Published: March 18, 2007
Licensing anime -- at least the mainstream stuff that runs on Cartoon Network, is something of... well, let's just call it a cash cow for some of the more popular series out there (we hear that Naruto thing has worked out kinda well for Bandai, same with a little series called Dragon.. Ball.... Z?), which makes sense; plenty of people that geek out on anime geek out just as hard on video games. Ah, but there's a bit of a catch: see, stuff during the normal Cartoon Network hours seems to translate well into games, but stuff that airs on Adult Swim... eh, that notsomuch...
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Samurai Champloo, both great anime series in their own right, just never jumped into digital form all that well. That's clearly no deterrent for Namco Bandai Games (particularly the latter half of that partnership), who have chosen to continue the three-part prequel to fairly new-ish Adult Swim addition Eureka Seven. We decided to take the second of the games, Eureka Seven: The New Vision for a little spin without actually getting any time with the first, The New Wave. Stand by for semi-clueless impressions...
The PlayStation 2 version of ES plays out not unlike a digitized version of the anime, meaning there are a whoooooole lotta cutscenes thrown at you to try to get you into storyline, which serves as a bit of backstory to the stuff you'll see on Saturday nights if you flick over to Adult Swim. We know this because we had to look things up on the internet tubes, and thusly gleaned that some folks weren’t really terribly keen on that whole process. We mention this only because The New Vision is clearly set up as a direct continuation of the core gameplay and themes established in The New Wave.
This means, then, that tucked in between those cutscenes (fully voiced this time instead of being voiced here and there with plain text filling in the gaps), are four primary bits of gameplay, some of which bleed into one another. There's basic hand-to-hand combat, "lifting" (hoverboard racing) segments, and then combat on foot and in the skies while piloting a Light Finding Operation, a big ass transformable mech. They're meant to spice up the storyline, which in the few hours we played was mostly about the main character getting his groove back.
You've got your slightly lovestruck coming-of-age human lad named Sumner Sturgeon, a young man who left his military training to join a resistance and then struck out again on his own to find himself, which is where the second chunk of the trilogy picks up. This is explained in ultra-rapid fashion -- so quickly we were beyond lost and had to do a little online sleuthing to get what was being introduced at the beginning of the game -- but it at least gets you into playing right away.
Well, if not playing then at least doing all this fancy "lifting" stuff that the game references like crazy. See, Sumner is something of a whiz kid when he hops on his board, suspended off the ground by all the trapar waves playing about in the atmosphere. He can bust off basic flips and twists (which in turn powers his boost), and generally just has to zip around a race track to finish before everyone else. After entering (and clinching) a race that was nearly fixed, he manages to win himself a prized LFO and regains a little of his mojo while finding out the guts of this metallic beast are powered by a similar military prototype just a little while back.
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Samurai Champloo, both great anime series in their own right, just never jumped into digital form all that well. That's clearly no deterrent for Namco Bandai Games (particularly the latter half of that partnership), who have chosen to continue the three-part prequel to fairly new-ish Adult Swim addition Eureka Seven. We decided to take the second of the games, Eureka Seven: The New Vision for a little spin without actually getting any time with the first, The New Wave. Stand by for semi-clueless impressions...
The PlayStation 2 version of ES plays out not unlike a digitized version of the anime, meaning there are a whoooooole lotta cutscenes thrown at you to try to get you into storyline, which serves as a bit of backstory to the stuff you'll see on Saturday nights if you flick over to Adult Swim. We know this because we had to look things up on the internet tubes, and thusly gleaned that some folks weren’t really terribly keen on that whole process. We mention this only because The New Vision is clearly set up as a direct continuation of the core gameplay and themes established in The New Wave.
This means, then, that tucked in between those cutscenes (fully voiced this time instead of being voiced here and there with plain text filling in the gaps), are four primary bits of gameplay, some of which bleed into one another. There's basic hand-to-hand combat, "lifting" (hoverboard racing) segments, and then combat on foot and in the skies while piloting a Light Finding Operation, a big ass transformable mech. They're meant to spice up the storyline, which in the few hours we played was mostly about the main character getting his groove back.
You've got your slightly lovestruck coming-of-age human lad named Sumner Sturgeon, a young man who left his military training to join a resistance and then struck out again on his own to find himself, which is where the second chunk of the trilogy picks up. This is explained in ultra-rapid fashion -- so quickly we were beyond lost and had to do a little online sleuthing to get what was being introduced at the beginning of the game -- but it at least gets you into playing right away.
Well, if not playing then at least doing all this fancy "lifting" stuff that the game references like crazy. See, Sumner is something of a whiz kid when he hops on his board, suspended off the ground by all the trapar waves playing about in the atmosphere. He can bust off basic flips and twists (which in turn powers his boost), and generally just has to zip around a race track to finish before everyone else. After entering (and clinching) a race that was nearly fixed, he manages to win himself a prized LFO and regains a little of his mojo while finding out the guts of this metallic beast are powered by a similar military prototype just a little while back.
