A three episode 1989 OVA adaptation of an 18 volume long manga that published between 1987 to 1991, Umi no Yami Tsuki no Kage is a story about identical twin sisters, Rumi and Ruka who survive the exposure to an uncovered burial ground in a cave with deadly gases that kills every one of their classmates present but grants the twins superpowers that correspond to the cycles of the moon. One of the sisters, Rumi goes insane after she wakes up and decides to stop at nothing to acquire the boy both sisters like, Katsuyuki-kun even if it means killing anyone that stands in her way, including her sister.
The premise of this anime is fairly interesting and is what caught my attention while browsing for stuff to download, but unfortunately the anime is a lot more underwhelming in practice. There is no progression to Rumi’s insanity for example, she just faints from the cave incident and when she wakes up she is already an insane psychopath willing to use her newfound powers to whatever she decides. The other characters are not any better as they can be most generously described as horror movie stupid and make the dumbest decisions possible, worst of all they don’t take Rumi with the seriousness the situation would deserve until she has already killed a lot of people.
It is also definitely not the best looking OVA I have watched, it does not look ugly or anything necessarily, but I did find some of the visual effects weird like how Rumi turns entirely blue when using her powers or the funny way the characters just stiffly floated in the air and did this awkward hovering while chasing the other characters.
Worst of all is the fact that the anime does not conclude things as obviously the manga was still not finished at the time it was made and as such nothing is really resolved. You basically have a large portion of the town being mind controlled like puppets by Rumi (it is one of the powers she has) and the anime just ends with basically Katsuyuki daring her to take his life if she wants him so much saying “she can have his body but not his heart“, and to which Rumi actually chickens out and runs away as the anime closes without either having dealt with her or the puppets.
So why should anyone watch this? It is very short about an hour long with all 3 episodes if you don’t include the openings and endings, so the basic interest of the premise is more than enough to last you for that hour before you would get bored by it, also it has this dumb 80’s horror feeling going for it which can be appealing to you, it is the kind of anime that in many ways becomes more entertaining by its flaws, such as the dumbness of the characters contributing to entertainment. There are far worse choices if you are looking for some dumb movie length anime entertainment.
Freesia is a weird and surreal psychological action manga by Jiro Matsumoto following mostly the adventures of a mentally insane legally sanctioned bespectacled vengeance killer called Kano. The manga is fairly violent and has scenes that can range from disturbing to disgusting so it is definitely not for everyone, but those with some tolerance and the stomach for it will definitely find an enjoyable dark story here.
Premise: Freesia is set in an alternate history Japan where people are legally obliged to avenge the death of their loved ones if another person kills them, and seeing that trying to kill another person would be a highly dangerous thing for the average person to do, the majority of people opt to instead hire professionals who deal in revenge killings and enacting vengeance on the behalf of their client as proxies. The story basically centers around one such agency that is in the business of revenge killing people and follows several characters who work there. The premise is actually pretty interesting already on its own, but it is just surface level compared to the actual meat of the manga, that being its characters and the things they undergo throughout the course of story.
Story: The manga in the beginning follows a series of revenge killings that are carried out by our main characters, and as expected things start out fairly simple but they escalate with each new mission. These tasks are narratively really just excuses to have our characters go through increasingly traumatic experiences and have said experiences mold and change our characters, with all of the sanctioned killers ending up in a different direction in response to said traumas. Saying anything more of Freesia’s story would be spoiler material in my opinion, but I shall mention that it gets weirder and more surreal the longer it goes on and at some point it will abandon all sense of normalcy as if the manga and the story were seemingly breaking down along with the deteriorating mental health of our characters, and you will be left with an ending that will have you questioning what was even real in the manga.
Characters: Freesia at its core is a psychological manga so the primary focus is naturally on the characters, the story easily comes second in this case as it really is just a vessel for the manga to do it characters exploration. If you are the kind of voyeuristic sadist who enjoys watching broken and miserable characters wail around in life then you will feel right at home, because Freesia will provide exactly that. There are a number of characters all with their complexes and issues, but for the sake of brevity and for the sake of avoiding as much spoilers as possible I will only talk of Kano, the primary protagonist.
Kano is one of those rare characters that make it worth recommending their story just for them alone, he is easily the best part of Freesia and is also one of the most entertaining portrayals of an insane person I’ve seen. From the start of the story he is already very obviously mentally ill to the reader, but he is still functional enough to just get by in his daily life without being seen as such by the other characters, who instead view him as a mild mannered kind of guy that they wouldn’t think twice of after bumping onto him on the street, while his co-workers don’t take him seriously as a vengeance killer.
At his home we see just how dysfunctional he truly is as he often does not pay much attention to his vegetative state mother or the girlfriend he is living with, instead he is often concentrated at completely different things like the television or a phone that only he can hear and at one point in the story it goes so bad that the girlfriend cheats in front of him just to try and elicit a reaction from Kano. Even outside of his home and when seemingly functioning well in society it still never feels like he is operating on the same level as the other characters, his mind is always in his own world and he is just going through the motions of a normal conversation. This “being on another level” only escalates as the manga goes on and overtakes the story too as the other characters will quite literally become unable to even touch Kano and he transforms into a truly terrifying entity that cannot be understood.
Of course given that our protagonist is insane that is just one way of viewing the story and you can always bring in the unreliable narrator angle as the more the story focuses on Kano’s viewpoint the more unreal things get and if we take things at their face value then bullets really just pass through Kano as if he wasn’t even there when no other character display such seemingly magical abilities. It is entirely probable that we are seeing events as through how Kano imagines them rather than how they actually happen and there are several hints for this to be the case.
In any case, watching Kano’s progressive descent into even deeper layers of madness than what he had at the start is one of the most entertaining parts of Freesia and will no doubt fascinate readers whose interest it has managed to arouse.
Action: A significant portion of Freesia is compromised of action sequences and there is a lot of gunfighting and even some melee close quarters battles, and all of them are done pretty well. Jiro Matsumoto did a good job on making his fight scenes remain suspenseful and thrilling for most of the manga, even Kano was fairly vulnerable and suffered injuries at the earlier points of the story, The combat is also quite visceral and feels real with bullets often leaving the characters full of holes and even taking out entire chunks out of the injured bodies, though it never got to the point where I felt it was too much or too exaggerated to be taken seriously, so it was in good balance. Action sequences involving Kano were often filled with fits of insanity or delusion, which just made them even more entertaining.
Art: The manga’s art overall is not the best for sure, it is probably the category I can praise it the least amount for and it often looks a bit rough and uneven but it is kind of fitting for its story in a way, and there some moments in it where the art is chillingly good, these occur at some pivotal emotional moments in the story and do a really good job of drawing you into the moment and the feelings it wants to convey, but those only work as well as they do because the manga does not usually look that good in my opinion.
The manga’s art at its best
Conclusion: Freesia while it is definitely not for everyone it is one of the best Psychological action manga you can read with well done action sequences and interesting exploration of its characters and their psyche, because of this it deserves my strongest recommendation.
Fallen Enchantress is a 4x fantasy strategy game by Stardock Entertainment. While not a bad title by any means and the game is playable just fine, the highest praise I can give to it is just “average” as just like there is nothing particularly wrong with it there is nothing particularly unique or innovative in the game and every feature it possesses has been done better elsewhere. That said a beginner or a newcomer into the genre could find it good and enjoy it just fine, but as for me the whole time I was playing it I was constantly thinking things like “damn I would much rather play Warlock Master of the Arcane right now” or “meh, Age of Wonders did this so much better” so I don’t think that a lot of experienced 4x players would enjoy this title.
Zegapain is a 2006 sci-fi mecha anime from studio Sunrise that is often completely glossed over when looking at anime from that particular year, but unlike other cases of obscure anime this one’s obscurity is something that I can completely understand as Zegapain is not only not made for the average anime watcher but is also pretty hard to get into given how slow the initial episodes are and how it takes about 5 episodes for the plot to really start going.
So why should anyone watch Zegapain?
To put it very simply Zegapain has a very good story that can carry the entire anime on its own once you manage to get into it even despite the clear flaws that it has. Zegapain has characters but none of them are particularly memorable beyond the role they play in the story and the experiences they go through (which are actually memorable). Likewise Zegapain has action and fight scenes but it is the very dull kind of action that is solely carried by the stakes it has in the story and also feels very dated by today’s standards, lacking flashy visuals or impressive and smooth animation. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Zegapain is an anime that is solely to be watched for its strong story, but it is entirely because it is so strong in its plot that even talking about it can ruin the experience via spoilers. Nevertheless I have chosen to spoil the basic premise (which is only revealed around the 5th episode) to get the dear reader to give Zegapain a try.
So what is Zegapain about?
The Fake Premise
Initially Zegapain presents itself as a fairly generic mecha that follows standard literary devices and storytelling in the media: You have an average highschooler, Kyo Sogoru living an average highschool life whose average and normal highschool life is suddenly interrupted and shaken up with him meeting with a mysterious woman, Shizuno Misaki that only he is capable of perceiving. This woman convinces Kyo to become a mecha pilot for an organization known as Cerebrum to pilot a machine known as Zegapain to defend earth against the alien invaders (this part is initially presented as a video game/virtual reality). The basic premise feels intentionally mundane and by the books and it isn’t until the viewer is already a few episodes in that Zegapain truly reveals its hand:
The Actual Premise
At the start of the story humanity has already been long since wiped out and Kyo, Shizuno and all the other characters appearing in the story are nothing more than memories of humans uploaded onto a giant computer that is simulating their everyday life, a desperate last attempt by the old humanity to keep “humanity” going by whatever means possible even after they are gone. The mecha battles and fights that were initially presented as a game/simulation are in fact very real, as the forces that erased humanity are actively seeking to wipe out this remnant of humanity and the only defense these uploaded memories have against this threat are the robots known as Zegapain that are their only real way of interacting with the real world.
Kyo’s realization and subsequent stages of denial at the fact that his life and everyone else in it is not real, or at least nothing more than a digital existence are some of the best scenes in the anime and very well explored. The flaws of the digital world that is simulating everyone’s existence is also pretty chilling and well thought out, with the Server not having enough memory to continue the simulation forever, so it always just ends up resetting itself back to a certain point, making the digital people live a loop-like existence, save for the initiated who are guarding them like Kyo, which brings further despair to the protagonist, as he remains in the know while his friends are constantly reset including the experiences they shared.
But sadly I think the average anime watcher who just randomly picks this up will have already dropped the anime before they could even arrive at this point, which is exactly why I’m spoiling it.
One of the best things about Zegapain is how seriously it takes itself and likewise how seriously it treats the audience. It is a truly hard sci-fi story that doesn’t hold your hand or coddle you like many other anime do by constantly having things spelled out for you. That said I feel the need to stress that Zegapain isn’t anything pretentious or “super deep” if that is the impression that you thought I was going for. No, Zegapain has themes and messages obviously, but they are themes and messages that practically anyone can understand concerning basic existential questions and human drama, which are explored very well, and it never feels like it is too far up its own ass.
Honestly even talking of the story any further would just ruin your potential experience and I think I already said enough to entice the potential viewer to watch it, so I’ll bring this article to a close.
Zegapain has a story that basically anyone who cares about humanity or the fate of humankind to any degree can get enthralled by, provided that they get through its seemingly bland and raw presentation and the hurdle of the initial episodes.
A not scary horror manga following the misadventures of a young highschooler who can see ghosts and sense the paranormal (via nosebleeds). It is rigidly structured in an episodic formula where a new story is started each chapter and concluded within the same chapter. Its biggest problem, the lack of an ability to create any kind of suspense or tension can be most likely attributed to this episodic treatment, as by the time you realize something scary is happening it’s already over. The recurring characters suffer from chronic idiocy, shoutout in particular to the girl who almost got sacrificed by some Lovecraftian Cult and decides to found an occult club and investigate more spooky stuff instead of being scarred for life. This and coupled with the fact that each of the chapters was solved by the protagonist’s ghost girlfiend solving whatever problem was in the chapter lead to me to dropping this manga somewhere in the second volume.
Time Recoil is a fairly standard fast paced top-down shooter with an utterly basic story: Evil mad scientist dictator, Mr. Time took control of Europe, you have to stop him by traveling through time and accomplishing objectives in the past, but mostly just killing a bunch of dudes. The game itself takes you throughout the lifeless and uninteresting maps consisting of nothing more than offices, more offices, the warehouse of offices and some occasional research labs sprinkled in, which are populated by the same 3 enemy character models (technically there are more, but half of them are just color-swaps) while constantly playing the 2-3 music tracks they made for this game.
Mechanics
Time Recoil’s unique gimmick centers around time and time related powers, namely when you shoot any of the enemies, time slows down for a certain amount of time and killing additional enemies will add more duration to this counter, and when you kill 2 or more enemies you will be able to perform a ‘dash’ an instantaneous limited range teleport that gibs or stuns any enemy you teleport into. There are other abilities in the game too such as the psy blast and the complete time stop, but these are the only two abilities you will be using 99% of the time.
Power Problems
The idea behind the gameplay itself is solid however the implementation is bad. Let’s start with something I already mentioned: powers. Technically you have 4 distinct abilities that activate automatically or can be activated by the player after accumulating kills, these are as follows:
Time Slow – Automatically activates after killing any single enemy and at 1 kill it barely lasts like 2~ seconds, further kills however extend the duration
Time Dash – Can be activated after killing 2 or more enemies, an instantaneous, short range teleport that can be used to kill or stun enemies. Using it cancels Time Slow unless you kill people with it.
Psy-Blast – Can be activated after killing 6 or more enemies, an instantaneous ranged area of attack that will kill or destroy anything in range. Using it cancels Time Slow unless you kill people with it.
Time-Stop – Automatically activates after killing 8 enemies. Stops time completely for a short duration.
Kills are marked by the skull icons around the character in a circle. The remaining Time Slow is marked by the full white of the circle, which quickly ticks down.
Now the problem comes from the fact that the single most useful ability in Time Recoil is Time Slow due to the fact that enemies in this game have godly reactions and godly aim plus on top of this your character dies from a single glazing hit even if it comes from a pistol, which means you always want Time Slow to be active otherwise you can easily die to even the most basic enemy in the game, but unfortunately this means that you get to use the other 3 a lot less, because using any of them will instantly cancel Time Slow and allow bullets to catch up to you and penetrate your character’s body.
Time Dash is useful for any general bad spot or when you want to do things faster (there are several maps where it completely lets you bypass content by going through walls or mines) and the most useful thing about it is that it doesn’t expire, so if you kill 2 enemies, you will always have 1 Time Dash stored up until you use it, this unfortunately doesn’t apply for Psy-Blast which doesn’t get stored up and you have to use it in a limited amount of time if you want to make use of it, and aiming it is kind of a pain, especially when bullets are still traveling quite fast in slowed time, but probably the worst thing about is that once you get enough kills for it, it just supplants Time Dash, meaning you can’t use Time Dash because now you have Psy Blast and you have 0 control over this (because they are on the same button) even though Time Dash would be more useful in 99% of the situations.
Time Dash’s range is marked by an arrow. It especially useful and versatile due to its ability to allow the character to go through walls.
Time-Stop sounds like it should be something awesome or powerful, especially since it is really hard to get the amount of kills for it (most rooms are populated by 2-4 enemies and the kill count disappears quite fast between moving from rooms to rooms) but in actuality it is more of an annoyance than a boon, mostly because of the fact that bullets don’t travel at all in this state, which is of course logical, but it also means that bullets you fire in stopped time won’t kill the enemy until time resumes itself, which means that when time resumes itself the enemy will be still alive for a brief millisecond before the bullet hits them and that will be more than enough time for the god-tier reaction enemies to kill you with a well aimed final shot just before they would be hit by your bullets. The simple fact that it automatically activates (no player control again) makes it a very unreliable power at best.
Other Problems
If the issues with Time Recoil had ended with only at the powers then I might still consider it a good game as the gunplay in slowed time is still really fun and entertaining, but unfortunately the problems only accumulate the longer you play the game.
RNG and Weapons: Every mission starts with a pistol start (which has 8 bullets) but other weapons (Shotgun, SMG, Rifle, and Rocket Launcher) can be picked up on the map or be dropped by enemies, but the drops by the enemies are completely randomized and whether you get lucky or unlucky with the drops can lead to a completely different experience with the mission because the weapons aren’t equal: The shotgun is arguably worse than the pistol due to its small ammo count and is only situationally useful, the SMG is straight upgrade to the pistol, the Rifle is a gamebreaker, while the Rocker Launcher is so rare that I only got to use it twice in my play-through.
The above is pretty important due to the fact that while weapons do not carry between missions, they do carry between maps of the same mission (missions can be compromised of multiple maps), so if you get lucky and pick up a rifle and carry it to the next map, then you can have a super easy time on many of the maps and completely cheese through them. But why is that so? You might be prompted to ask. Well that’s because the rifle in this game for some reason can shoot through walls and through multiple enemies, it is completely awesome and also completely unbalanced because it means that you can just kill enemies through the walls before they could do anything due to your top down view granting you vision of them, but enemies with the same rifle cannot do the same because they require direct vision to fire at you. Even without time powers involved the player and the NPCs aren’t equal when using the same weapons.
Enemy Variety: To be fair there are several types of enemies ranging from simple gunmen to rocketeers to shield guards to armoured grenadiers etc. But the problem is that the game uses them in horrible proportions, the rocketeers for example barely show up while the grenadiers become scarce shortly after their introduction, while the standard gunmen are everywhere and the shield guys get overused in the later stages (to pad out the content because they are immune to almost everything but Time Dash) and in general it feels like there wasn’t much thought behind the enemy placements on the maps. The enemy upgrades also weren’t really logical, for example why did they make an entirely separate grenadier enemy (who is completely powerless beyond the ability to throw grenades every few seconds) instead of just giving grenades to the normal enemies on top of their already existing weapons? That would have been a lot more dangerous than the most trivial enemy in the game.
Environments: Earlier maps in the game are a lot more enjoyable because environments are more interactive and fun due to the fact that they are more destructible, while later levels limit the player’s freedom by populating everything with indestructible walls, essentially removing one of the tools that was at the player’s disposal from the start (and also looked awesome). The game also has glass walls, which enemies (and you) can shoot through, but because of the graphics and how everything almost looks the same, it is very hard to notice them while playing until you died to some goon shooting you through the window. Many of the later maps in particular are more or less designed in a way to kill you a bunch of times before you learn their layout to successfully navigate and cheese through them.
Padding: Like many other short games, Time Recoil falls to intentionally trying to pad out its game time by making the later levels substantially harder without proper escalation, it does this by throwing piles and piles of enemies at you (these are often endless in the later levels meaning they will keep coming until your accomplish your objective), having 80% of the enemies be compromised of shield soldiers (immune to gunfire from the front), non destructible walls and laying every path with mines to slow down your progress. All in all it leads the later levels feeling more like a chore since every bullet counts and even the tiniest mistake will be punished, at these stages it ended up feeling more like Time Recoil was some kind of flashy puzzle game rather than a proper action game.
Mr. Time
Trivial Boss: The whole game was about trying to catch the Mad Scientist, Mr. Time, trying to discover his secret location and kill him in the past to prevent his reign of terror in the future. He was built up as a huge threat that entire countries bowed to and a super genius, but despite that when you finally arrive at the final confrontation he isn’t anything special, just a dude with a gun, and lots of armour, no tricks, no schemes, barely any traps, no special time powers, just a dude with some armour that can be easily killed in less than a minute once you figure he is stunnable via time dash (stunning him 2 times and emptying your magazine into him will do the job) or when you find the conveniently placed rifle on the map that can just shoot him through the walls. Not only is the boss underwhelming but is not even a fitting one considering he ends up chasing you like some kind of terminator with a machine gun rather than a mad scientist who is characterized by their genius.
The Final Level can be completed in less than 30 seconds.
Nitpicks: If you stand close to a wall or a door, you will not be able to fire your weapon for some reason, which is probably the hardest thing to get used to Time Recoil because most of the time you are assaulting rooms from doors and if you stood too close to it while it was opening, you will not be able to fire your weapon for like a few milliseconds, which matters a lot because your enemies can fire at the same time, granted this mostly happens if you approach a door while hugging a wall, but it is nonetheless a really annoying feature.
Conclusion
A mediocre top down shooter that is actually pretty fun to play for about the first half when it is still novel and the slow-mo gunfights are still enjoyable because the game isn’t throwing piles and piles of crap on you as a pretense of difficulty, ultimately I think Time Recoil is brought down by failing to properly balance its game mechanics especially on the time powers’ front and the intentionally padded second half that was just made to extend the length of an already short game, though I must applaud it for actually having some replay-ability via 3 difficulty modes (1 of which only unlocks after beating the game). You can have some quick fun with this game, but I definitely wouldn’t buy it for the 14 Euro prices it goes on in steam though.
Eggplant Club 