Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex

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Coming in on the end of first year of the PlayStation Portable, we're seeing the challenges and troubles Sony has brought by birthing its breed of the next generation of portable gaming with PSP. The generation gap has been bridged between consoles and handhelds, with budgets and production design levels raised to daunting levels. A newborn system always has trouble finding its identity in its growing years, and the PSP has had more than its share of growing pains. Standing in the shadow of its big brother PS2, and with the PS3 looming to claim its birthright inheritance of developer time and publisher budgets, the PSP has not always gotten the love it needs.


So far, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is the most telling case for me of the PSP, on unfortunate occasions, getting second-class treatment despite its stature and success. Bandai is publishing the game here, but the game was originally developed and put out in Japan by Sony Computer Entertainment itself, with Production I.G collaborating on the design. This is a top-tier license, but the game feels like it was given B-grade treatment. There wasn't much Bandai of America could have done to fix the game from the Japanese original -- for its part, the company has done a good job in putting resources into the American version's translation, and is doing well by GITS and fans by bringing this over. The game was just never given a hope for the future.


Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. on PSP is a junior shooter trying to be its own man. It is immature and aimless, with no special talents to be proud of. Its grasp of basic game concepts is strained, and its most adventurous steps are tentative and awkward. It rarely enjoys the simple pleasure of firing a gun, the game's wide arsenal of weapons mostly falling into one of four or five similar gun categories, the target enemies almost always blank faces who don't seem to feel the bullets until they're dead.

It takes about a dozen levels to see what Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. could have been on PSP. The game finally finds its step just before its end, with a handful of missions that, while not spectacular or groundbreaking on their own, at least deliver the kind of bang that you'd expect out of the action-packed anime inspiration. These stages would have made great opening levels, maybe mid-level encounters even. But with such uneven pace leading up to these stages, and with so little effect from the futuristic machinery and technology that this series steeps itself in, they come way too late and make up for very little for what came before. Even with little competition on the system for FPS play, a game that is mildly appealing and only mostly disappointing in its late best moments isn't going to cut it. 

Take the simple stealth mission, for instance. GITS has a few, and they're terrible. For one, silenced weapons don't seem to play a part. There is a "Stun" blast that helps if you're quick about it, and there are a few weapon slots that we didn't fill while playing through the game for this review, but with the main stealth mission (there aren't many after that -- it's hard to call this first one a "stealth" mission in the first place) coming so early, it'd be either luck or redundant effort that you'd be equipped with anything that'd help you be "stealthy" even if they did come up. Not that the stealth missions are designed for stealth, nor the game in general. Two guards you're supposed to stealthily take out are stationed feet away from each other, with no path to take advantage of as they pace back and forth in the wide open, two more just behind them and not visible around the bend if you try to sneek by them. You can't peek around corners or use shadow to keep yourself hidden, and getting a headshot with most weapons puts you in their view just as easily as you can see them. Your choices are either to cap each from a distance with the booming sniper rifle (the second guard doesn't notice the shot, much less that his partner lies dead next to him), or to engage your one-time invisibility cloak and run past them. The third option is to cap both before the arbitrary time limit runs out on them warning their partners -- the guards don't run to a security phone like in other stealth missions, there's just a warning, and you have maybe 10 seconds to shotgun everybody before the mission fails. Splinter Cell, this is not.

Most everything about Ghost in the Shell on PSP is cracked like this. An escort mission plays out like an on-rails game that goes off the tracks if you're not stupidly careful -- you're free to roam the stage, but unless you're standing within a few feet of your escort, he won't move and the enemies (which magically spawn where there was nobody seconds earlier) won't appear to attack you or be there for you to kill first. Another mission had a boss protected by a guard, but the designers for some reason skimped on creating a special character for this figure -- he looks and moves like any other baddie (takes hits the same way too, with no special shield), and I died a handful of times emptying full clips of ammo into him before I figured out that he was a cheaply-produced super-guard. Prior to that (and for a long time after), the game wasn't a challenge. I had died two times before -- once testing whether one of the game's invisible walls could be gotten around so I could jump into the ocean (it worked), the second when I tried firing a missile at an unaware enemy and accidentally splash-damaged myself by hitting a crate that I though I would clear.


There aren't exactly any puzzles in the game, and while it tries to play itself out as a smart and customizable shooter in the Ghost in the Shell world, the game itself is mostly fetch quests and shootouts. You have to play for what seems like an eternity before you see the interesting robots and cyber-enhanced humans you expect from Ghost in the Shell -- there is one bang-up stage where you're chasing a droid around in a factory full of bots, but prior and for much after that, you're simply plugging away at the same armed thugs in square stages. The game tries to require players to play through each mission as each of the four characters, but aside from a few minimal changes between them that we might not have noticed had we not been looking for them (for instance, the big lug Batou has to slow down after running sometimes, and the mostly-human Saito is slightly less prone to being noticed by snipers because he hasn't been cybernetically enhanced), they all have access to the same weapons. None of the missions are changed besides the dialog (which seems like a waste of voice talents as well as the programmer's time.) It's four times through each stage just for the sake of padding out the game.

Then there's the Tachikomas. These spider-tanks are designed to play a big part in the game, allowing you to customize the character and utilize the unique properties of four different Tachis. On some scale, these things do add to the game. Having a second character to worry about or to help out on a mission adds complications, and while they're never as handy as they should be given that they're smart tanks with inset AI and the ability to follow orders, it's so much more a cool game to have a lumbering tank with the voice of a precocious child wandering around on the stage with you. That said, it rarely makes sense to have at your back a tank, armed with up to five gun pods (including everything from missile launchers to sniper rifles to laser rays to sticky bombs) when you're shooting mostly at men with baseball caps on. It's a little overkill. Also, the character assignment aspects of the Tachikoma don't do a whole hell of a lot -- there's a scale for loyalty and other aspects of the Tachikoma, plus four different overall types, but you never get to make them grow or change in any significant way besides arming them, and arming with every killer weapon possible doesn't affect the feel of weight or ability. You can also get into the Tachikoma and pilot it around in first-person, but it doesn't do any of the cool stuff that the old PS1 Ghost in the Shell did like climbing on walls (it does jump a little higher, which allows you to take advantage of maybe a dozen platform-jumping opportunities total) and its five guns have to be chosen one at a time from the menu, with limited ammo for each weapon. The Tachikoma HUD is also all for show (it animates instead of reacting to play), which is disappointing given the cool things that games like Metroid Prime did with similar viewing screens.


Multiplayer helps give the game some depth, but it's a fairly shallow add-on, using a standard feature of FPS games in the most standard of ways. You can play either as Tachikomas or as Section 9 characters, but you can't mix the two, nor use the Tachikomas as smart bots fighting by your side. There are only deathmatch modes to play, with either team deathmatch or all-out deathmatch for up to four players. You can use weapons collected in the Single Player mission, but for some reason, your presets for characters and Tachis don't come over. Stat tracking is simply win/loss, and doesn't figure in friend lists or other stats. Only half of the controls can be reversed in the control set-up, so you can't assign free look on the analog stick if that's the way you prefer to play (in single-player or multiplayer). The lock-on control used in aiming (which is triggered when you get a bead on an enemy, usually by pressing the down key on the D-Pad) is carried over to multiplayer, but you can thankfully turn it off if you want a fair fight. The game only has local play -- no net play -- but still has a ton of lag in character movement on the screen. In most ways, though, this is accounted for, as hits will still be tracked if you've put the crosshairs on the person, and the overall motion is smooth even though the PSPs aren't in perfect sync. It can make for a lot of confusion when you're playing with explosive weapons (there will be times that you thought you should have been safe, although the actual impact of bullets and explosives is much more tightly synched between the two machines than movement), but despite the inaccuracy, it remains playable because of the impact adjustments.


Production design in Ghost in the Shell doesn't rise to the series standards. Detail is decent in the textures, and the character models for the leads are awesome (even though the lip sync is often off), but the levels themselves are blocky and repetitive. Stages aren't very big, often just a handful of rooms on a corridor or four to five blocks of a city street, but there are still loadtimes in the middle of some stages to load more of the same blocky and simply-textured area (there's even a door opening animation that probably was designed to hide the loadtime, except the game plays this animation before starting to load the next area.) Only a few music tracks are used throughout the game, with espionage stages getting one looping theme and action-packed shoot-outs getting a couple of different tunes throughout. The story Production I.G came up with for the game is bafflingly convoluted and a total mess until a lead villain finally shows up to put a face to it all, and the cutscenes are dull as can be. Ghost in the Shell has always been a "talky" series of shows and movies, and the underlying concepts and story detail is intriguing in the game as well, but GITS always dressed up its schooling with dazzling displays of sound and color. Here, we get talking heads in a board room, followed by talking heads on the scene of the stage, with no direction in the camera angles and nothing interesting but faces to look at. The voice acting, however, is strong throughout, as Bandai used the voice cast from the film and video series for the game, and they know how to chew through the techno-babble to make you feel like the things you don't understand are still vital to know. Also, the story sequences involving the Tachikomas are fascinating, as we watch these infantile AI units try to understand their world and test out their humanity. At one point, the four smart-tanks rejoice when they're called "pieces of crap" -- at last, they have a name besides just Tachikoma, and it's "Crap"! Another thread of story has the Tachikomas trying to understand why the AI units that they assume are kin are actually enemies trying to kill them. Even if the gameplay is rough, there are aspects of the game that a Ghost in the Shell follower might want to tap into.

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