EXTRA LIVES: GAMES THAT SHOULD BE ANIME

EXTRA LIVES: GAMES THAT SHOULD BE ANIME

Anime based on video games tends to circle the bottom of the industry's barrel of quality, alongside forgotten toy-driven shows and Gundoh Musashi, but perhaps we shouldn't write off the whole game-to-anime path entirely. After all, the problem often lies in anime studios letting inexperienced directors adapt games that had intensely clichéd or non-existent stories in the first place. That creates nothing good, but there are, in fact, plenty of games that would work well in animated form. Well, OK, there are at least three of them.

GUILTY GEAR
The 1990s gave us all sorts of completely awful anime series based on fighting games, so making another one seems a really, really bad idea. Guilty Gear, however, is one of a handful of fighters imagined well enough to support more than the usual hey-let's-fight plot of a video game. The franchise's world is a post-apocalyptic carnival of strange technology and magic, where a woman's hair can be a weapon, an assassin can wield a demonic pool cue, and a freakish, Evangelion-like cyborg can be the mother of a race of rebel machines.

A Guilty Gear anime would be problematic in story, since there are many characters and not a lot of plot threads to draw them all together. It would almost be better to approach the whole thing as a series of brief videos devoted to each fighter, with all the money dumped into spectacularly animated battles. In other words, it'd be an expanded version of the only Guilty Gear anime that exists: a five-minute clip made for Guilty Gear X. Just get better voice acting.

How It Should Go: An anthology of short films, with a different director helming each character piece. Of course, this would require some talented anime auteurs to like Guilty Gear. I'm sure Koji Morimoto is a big Sol Badguy fan.

RING OF RED
Ring of Red is often tough to enjoy as a game: battles can last for two hours of primitive combat mecha lumbering around while low-level soldiers and medics die screaming deaths below. Yet it's an interesting stage for an alternate-history where World War II saw Japan divided between American forces and filthy Commies. Two decades after this, a pilot named Masami von Weizegger faces conspiracies and the threat of all-out warfare.

The story itself needs refinement, but Ring of Red makes unique use of combat mecha in a 1960s stage. There's potential for all sorts of political and social interplay straight out of Mamoru Oshii's Kerberos films, even if anime directors normally use alternate history to show Japan as a blameless victim. I'd take that chance just to see Ring of Red become a political drama with realistic mecha and characters. It'd fare better than Code Geass, at any rate.

How It Should Go: Ring of Red needs a tightly written 13-episode TV series with a good budget and no cheap CG for the mecha. Oshii probably wouldn't direct it, but down-to-earth robot shows are Ryosuke Takahashi's bread and butter.

VAGRANT STORY
In between directing Final Fantasy Tactics and half-directing Final Fantasy XII, Yasumi Matsuno created an action-RPG that some billed as a medieval-fantasy Metal Gear Solid. The setup is similar: a cult led by the metal-armed Sydney Losstarot takes over a duke's manor, and a royal agent named Ashley Riot heads in to investigate. Ashley eventually tracks Sydney and his followers to the decaying city of Lea Monde, where all sorts of shocking revelations await. That aside, Vagrant Story's approach to plot is the polar opposite of Metal Gear Solid's long-winded melodrama. Told with brief, well-localized dialogue, Vagrant Story is no less interesting in its tale of a man's disturbing self-discovery on a stage of corrupt nobles and fanatics.

Some players are put off by Vagrant Story's combat, which emphasizes customizing weapons and exploiting enemy weaknesses. That's all more reason to turn the game into something easier to approach. Its look and storytelling are closer to European-influenced fantasy than the anime stylings of many Japanese RPGs, and an animated adaptation would be a novel sight.

How It Should Go: Vagrant Story's plot could be distilled into a two-hour film without losing much, and only a movie would have the budget to recreate the game's stunning scenery. This will never happen, of course, as publisher Square and Matsuno have parted ways.