Why do video game animes suck?
I know that’s something of a loaded question in that it presupposes the suckage, but the evidence seems to bear that out. Not counting outings that primarily have Visual Novel DNA (that’s more of its own thing, and has led to some outright great shows), I’ve reviewed a fair number of based-on-a-game or Game Tie-In shows, and there’s only one outlier I recall that scored higher than mediocrity.
To me, it’s a baffling question as to why this seems impossible to get right. At first the hypothesis that taking away interactivity and control from an interactive medium would do it seems promising, but between the Let’s Play phenomenon and the fact that video games are a legitimate storytelling medium with many examples of powerful or emotionally effective writing over their history, that can’t seem to be the case.
We should be able to get not just acceptable but awesome game-based animes. Unlike the world of film, the twelve (or more) episode format lends itself to the long running nature of many classic and effective games, and animation can replicate the wonder and style of fantastical worlds without bringing a major studio to its knees. But whether it’s common production issues or some nasty factor lurking beneath the surface, it seems as though we’re doomed to get failed outing after failed outing.
So, without any further adieu let’s at least dissect MMO tie-in Magatsu Wahrheit: Zuerst and see what’s wrong with this one.
Taking place in a fantasy world with magic and technology that resembles, in many ways, early to mid 20th Century Earth, Magatsu Wahrheit: Zuerst (or MWZ as I’ll call in from here on) starts with a bang, showing the devastation of a major city by some arcane phenomenon of bright light that sort of resembles a nuclear bomb in its destructive appeal. Sadly, these first few minutes also show some of the weaknesses that we’re working with.
For one, the devastation doesn’t look as cool as it should. There is, when portrayed well, a visceral power to how things crumble, fall apart, or otherwise move when they shouldn’t. The catastrophe of the opening has a sense of pressure, but doesn’t quite have the eye to detail to convey what it means when a building – or a city – is being subjected to that terrible pressure. On the whole, the animation in the show is standard to substandard, and this is your first real taste of the lameness.
Second, we get this huge event without any meaningful preamble, just one out of place line about a prophecy. If there’s a phrase that’s more liable to make someone mentally check out than “the prophecy”, I don’t know it. Prophecy can be used as a legitimate plot point, but it has to be introduced and given gravitas by its context, it doesn’t get anything for free.
This gets worse when we cut to some narration after that scene which seems to have… nothing to do with it at all. Was that a flash forward? Was the prophecy of that devastation and it might or might not ever happen? Or are we just going to get back to a city being nuked later? Perhaps it was the ancient past? But then architecture looks fairly similar. Without answers, we move to congress submitting a motion to their king about how to handle mutant monster attacks, and increased social unrest brought about by unknown causes (possibly the monster attacks?), in the typical dry terms you’d expect congress to use.
And for that matter, why congress like this? These are our first scenes, before we even meet any major characters, attempting to establish this world. I think we’re supposed to understand from this some how how the country is run, which isn’t bad, but the causes of unrest aren’t addressed, the proposed solutions are seemingly sensible and not the kind of acts of tyranny you’d expect if the government was supposed to be the bad guy. There’s a natural mistrust from most viewers for the authorities in their fancy hall when we’re seeing beggars and thieves on the streets, but I’m not sure if this is meant to stoke that or extinguish it.
And when we do get to the actual characters? Nothing from the blast, nor from the political talk, seems to be relevant to them. I know I’m overkilling just a couple of minutes of show here, but this issue is pretty core so it’s best to get it out of the way.
In essence, the writing is choppy and lacks focus. In Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, the show starts with a fairly meaningless major battle, to show off what the characters are capable of. But unlike MWZ, it’s both entertaining in its own right, being wonderfully animated and a dynamic sequence, and it ultimately ties in to everything and helps establish the world and characters. We see who Roy Mustang is, we meet Ryza Hawkeye, we get the seed planted that something is wrong with the nation, we get imagery that will come back when the real twists are revealed. It’s purposeful. Some of the stuff talked about here does come back, but it does so in a way where it’s re-explained when it does and we didn’t need this uninteresting council session in the intro.
For another comparison, in the movie The Fifth Element, when we’re introduced to the main villain Zorg, he shows off his callous yet theatrical nature pretty quickly. And when he does some minor administrative task, like it seems like congress is doing here in the start of MWZ, it has an immediate effect: the main character gets fired from his job, opening up some of his involvement in the rest of the film. And there’s enough relation between the events that there’s a chain of cause and effect for the viewer, so you can make sense of the progression of time in the story as well as a sense of emotion and purpose.
Here, the first character we really spend time with, Leocadio, is a new army trainee when to the show’s little credit on this topic one of the demands that were made of the king was beefing up the army. But there’s not a sense that there needed to be a new army recruitment initiative to get him in, he seems to be joining up for his own reasons and in a condition where everything is pretty much business as usual, not the frenzy of a massive recruitment drive. If he were a conscript, or an unusually young or substandard recruit that only a desperation for manpower would see taking up the uniform, that would be one thing, but as it is we’re not being told a story, we’re just being shown scenes that have no bearing on what comes before or what comes after.
Anyway, rant over, on with the show. Leo, heading to his first day of work, helps grunt laborer Innumael load up a truck, just as a nice thing to do for a stranger. This turns out to be a bad move because he accidentally loads some crates belonging to a dangerous group of smuggler/terrorist folk, putting them all out of sorts when the mysterious goods are not where they’re supposed to be. It also gets Innumael arrested when the packages are found in his truck, so there’s regret to be had all around.
The smugglers, called Headkeeper, (led locally by Schaake Gutheil, the only female character with a distinctive design so far so you know she’s relevant) decide to rescue Innumael as well as their cargo, meaning that he gets brought along as Leo is assigned to, more or less, hunt the lot of them down.
The cops and robbers have themselves a little fight, with casualties on both sides, notably Leo’s big brother figure getting killed by a terrified Innumael. They all proceed to a neighboring city where team Headkeeper meets up with local contacts but team Military is hot on their tail thanks to the unit commander being a sleaze with a penchant for torture.
While keeping some subplot about a spy whose affiliations, motives, and mark are completely unknown and establishing more that we should probably dislike congress (the Diet, properly), this turns into a kind of cat and mouse chase throughout the underbelly of the city (which might or might not be post-apocalyptic since it has an abandoned ancient subway). Well, assuming the cat and mouse are both kind of lame at what they do. Innumael throws his lot in with Headkeeper properly in order to rescue one of the locals who helped them, while Leo is clearly not happy with Commander Torture yet at the same time is reasonably upset with Innu and Headkeeper for putting his bro in a body bag.
Headkeeper gets away, burning the trail behind them by committing a little arson at the armory on their way out. The psycho commander, however, has Innumael’s dossier, and sends Leo to go arrest his little sister, presumably for nefarious purposes.
While that’s cooking we continue to do vague things with the spy, and Headkeeper deals with some monster of the week BS when they find a village being menaced by a weird Gollum sort of creature. There are nonspecific insinuations that the military was doing something evil at their now-ruined lab in the forest a long time ago, to do with “coldfire” (a dangerous phenomenon that we have precious little info on) and presumably turning humans into such Gollums, with the current one being ID’d posthumously as a missing little girl everyone was trying to find.
We then get an imperial side plot where the spy gets owned investigating a lab staffed entirely by women that studies those Gollum things, the sister is brought in without incident adding to Leo’s doubts, and we learn the crazy commander’s backstory in the prelude to a major operation against Headkeeper.
It seems that said commander was a brutally abused bastard son of a lord, whose servant mother was raped, mistreated, and either murdered or driven to suicide, resulting in the boy killing his legitimate half-brother via friendly fire, going Jack the Ripper just to frame his dad for it, and becoming the twisted psychopath who seems to be the closest thing we’ve got to an antagonist, aside from possibly a lady from congress who seems to be running the Gollum lab on money embezzled from Headkeeper?
That’s great, show, but I think we hated the guy enough already, was that really necessary? Normally I’d appreciate a little backstory but this one is pretty scattered and without enough progression to see how he went from nobody to nightmare, even if we do get at least a bit of why. It’s only a few minutes in total. In Blassreiter, would Joseph’s backstory have played well in just a few minutes rather than more than an episode? Don’t think so.
As Headkeeper prepares to try to rescue their spies (sans Schaake, whose father keeps her out of it. Honestly the frosty relationship between the two of them is the closest thing to an interesting human dynamic in the show), the military prepares to bag Headkeeper. We find the spy we’d met before, imprisoned in a holding tank in the lab. The guys bust her out, but no sooner do they do it than a mad scientist we hadn’t met before the episode turns on some equipment, mutating her and all the other podded people into horrible mutant freaks.
The mutants go on a rampage, killing just about everyone but the two Headkeeper guys on their way out of the lab, and then begin to run amok in the streets. Innumael comes late to the party, while Leo caught a glimpse of him and acts with the crazy sadist commander.
Thus we have a running fight in the capital where most of the Headkeeper members who didn’t have names and faces for the audience get axed, none of the ones who do bite it, and the psycho chases everyone down into some mines. There, he finally uses that whole hostage sister thing, which after several tries gets him offed by Leo.
Additionally, the monsterized spy manages to recover some human cognition just before she finally dies (having chased the Headkeeper team the whole way to this endgame), and spills some beans on a plot hook regarding the next vague yet massive conspiracy folks are talking about. Thus, Leo and the one other soldier with a decent moral compass let Headkeeper go and agree, roughly, to cooperate based on the evidence of a massive conspiracy. (though to his credit Leo is not forgiving the death of his brother)
And if you think that sounds like an average show’s ending – the only antagonist who was really in the limelight dead and seeds planted for the continuation that will never make the screen – you’d be right… but MWZ apparently has more to say. Four episodes more, in fact. It starts with Leo and a little girl from Headkeeper enlisting the help of a slightly less mad scientist, who knows about the drug for the setting’s incurable radiation-poisoning-like illness, Luminosis. Leo, however, isn’t great at being circumspect, and gets himself arrested for accidentally tipping off his new commander that he might know something about the conspiracy. So I guess we’re all team criminal now.
While imprisoned, Leo both runs into the one notable Headkeeper we thought was dead (the one tortured by the captain) and Schaake’s missing mom. Schaake, Innumael, and the also-rans meet with a knight the spy sent them to, and there get the nature of the conspiracy. It seems that “cataclysmic light”, last seen some five hundred years ago, will soon hit the main capital because an ancient giant rock says so. To deal with this, the king has distributed the government across to the “new capital” a ways away, while also using the old capital as the grounds for a massive system to capture and reduce the fury of the oncoming light.
This seemed set to actually work pretty well, except anti-emperor forces in Congress caught wind and have been causing trouble, including holding Schaake’s mom hostage (hence why she’s still alive imprisoned) to get her dad’s cooperation. The mastermind appears to be a dude who was a regional high-up in Headkeeper, acting along with the main congress lady we’ve seen a few times. So the mission changes to finding proof and then showing the emperor so he can presumably fix all this.
Leo, meanwhile, escapes from prison. The tortured Headkeeper tries to backstab him, but ultimately goes out fighting a mutant monster that was evidently made from whatever was left of that crazy commander guy. He and Innumael’s group meet up and resolve to steal and investigate. Just as they’re putting their plans into motion, though, the villains jump the gun and we get that whole light blasting the city from the very start.
Under the influence in the light, the show gives us what little creativity it has in having a lot of people turned into weird merged pillars or walls, the really evil and extremely mad mad scientist who only had one scene turns into a super monster and fights Innumael, who also monsters up to win, only to be eventually beaten by Leocadio, who just gets superpowers.
Headkeeper books it, picking up Leo on the way out, Innumael and one of the friendlies seem to be only mostly dead (and in Innumael’s case maybe recovered from monsterizing), and the city gets put in the magic bubble of sealed away forever. Thus, the evil congress lady wins everything she ever wanted and the show ends with a stinger two weeks later on the outskirts of the fresh ruins where a maid foists the late emperor’s newborn daughter off on the mysteriously okay Innumael and his buddy.
Even knowing this is a plug for a game, this one is shameful.
I may have gone on a rant about the opening minutes, probably disproportionately so, but here I’ll kind of bring it back. The disjointed, purposeless nature of that way of opening the show? What it ultimately indicates is how the show treats its characters as absolute chess pieces. People go places and do things, quite a lot actually, but finding anyone really invested in the goings on, or expressing actual human wants and feelings? That’s scarce as hen’s teeth.
I mentioned the thing with Schaake and her dad being the best bit, and I stand by that. It’s not even really that good, but Arietty would struggle to limbo under the bar this show sets. Leo, Innumael, the Headkeeper pawns, and the antagonists never really show much of anything.
That last bit hurts extra when this is ultimately a setup where the villains win. I would be surprised if the true villain of the piece had more than five minutes of cumulative screen time, and frankly what we’re told of her goals and see of her actions don’t add up. She apparently wants to proclaim a new Warheit empire, under the control of the Diet. Okay, that checks out. To do this, her plan is to mess with human experimentation about this cataclysmic light, call down a blast exactly where everyone in the know thinks it’s going to hit on her own terms, and more or less pick up the pieces because she was given sweeping powers by the emperor before his untimely death.
First of all, she was already deep in the Emperor’s counsel and had sweeping powers as well as an unassailable reputation. She had pretty much realized her ambitions in all but name by raw political maneuvering. Maybe she also got rid of the imperial heir who was supposed to be in the New Capital with her, hence why the baby would be important, but we’re never told or shown that. And for the old guy’s part, he and his wife seemed pretty content to sit by and let the oncoming doom take them, so once again our villain had to do approximately nothing. We’re not made aware of any other civilizations in this world, so I don’t think she’s set to use the light (which may now be defused, since the seed that calls it should be in the bubble) or the mutants to commit any war crimes, or if she is it would have been nice to know.
Given her position and everyone else’s actions with no rhyme nor reason, every bit of villainy seems to have been for the sake of extra ham as a win falls into this lady’s lap. If fate would have her lead, fate could crown her without her say, and in fact it seems like it would have.
This deprives the story of a real motive force. There’s a great cataclysm that we hear about in the last few episodes, a senseless and purposeless conspiracy surrounding it, and… what? Why should I care? Who am I supposed to feel for, or opposed to? I guess most of the Headkeeper staff seem… alright, for weapon smugglers but they’re just reacting constantly and never really advancing any sort of goal. We don’t know any of their hopes or dreams. We don’t understand their ideology. They kind of smuggle weapons because outlying provinces need the (illegal) arms to defend against random monster attacks, but is altruism their game? Why are any of the named characters we see as part of the organization actually members? The question is asked a few times and always the member being asked totally evades it.
Our connection to Headkeeper is Innumael, and he’s vehemently not a member, just a dude who got dragged along by circumstances. Except he of all people kills a guy when the chips are down, so what? He’s such a nervous wreck most of the time, including long after, that the moment there is really baffling. Except again, chess pieces. It’s what needed to happen for the story to go. Pawn takes Knight.
To an extent this does bring up another hypothesis about that question I opened with, and it’s this: in a game, the player acts without necessarily having diagetic reasons to do so. They are placed in a scenario by loading the game up and behave according to the game’s rules. In a story, this comes off as uninvested when a character mimics a player’s actions. It’s a more promising theory than the one of control.
But, at least, it doesn’t cover for MWZ. Imagine a story like Final Fantasy VII, except we never actually get a motive or backstory for anyone in AVALANCHE. No North Corel, no Nibelheim, not even a clear understanding that Mako is actually bad. That’s Headkeeper.
And there’s really not that much more to say about this one. This may be a video game tie-in but I’ve gotten more epic and emotionally effective stories in 16 bits or less, to say nothing of what modern games are actually capable of as a storytelling medium. MWZ is just junk.
As junk goes, maybe it’s not the worst. As much as the choice of how to start the show got me worked up, the basic plot would be salvageable surprisingly easily if any of the characters actually gave a clipped penny about anything other than their one quirk, so if you’re going to project onto these blank slates you might be entertained. Maybe. If you’re extremely lucky and extremely forgiving. It didn’t strictly do anything bad, it just failed to do anything good in the least, and while the animation is on the cheap end they also do have a couple entertainingly messed up visuals in that last episode. On the whole, it gets a D-, and my sincere recommendation to skip it.