This project has multiple elements I hate at once - aesthetics of group student art projects, shallow anime clichés with no substance beneath their veneer, and gameplay of Sonic the Hedgehog.
Ranko Tsukigime's Longest Day is one part of Short Peace, a multimedia collaboration that includes 4 short animated productions. The listing on the PS3's digital store includes a download of the movies to the system as part of the purchase, and they are the highlight of the package. Clocking in at a little over an hour, the four stories are disconnected in style and stories, but are all engaging. Possessions, the first of the set, was nominated for Best Animated Short at the 86th Academy Awards.
By comparison, Ranko Tsukigime's Longest Day feels like an embarrassment to be included in the same branding. Although its plot starts with the premise of a girl donning an evening gown to assassin snipe her father, that is a red herring. Quickly the game devolves into literal incoherence, introducing and dropping characters and scenarios by the minute. Every scenario exists as an excuse to draw something cool, whether its high school girls, dragons, yakuza bosses, sentai heroes, or luchador wrestlers. Such hollow, meaningless noise made me wince once I recognized that this was game design as pop-art portfolio exhibition, with no desire for meaning. I don't know what to make of the opening cutscenes having PSA ticker tape at the bottom of the screen apologizing that the gameplay hadn't started yet, because while I at first thought it a cheeky joke, by the end I felt like I had not been adequately prepared for how completely the "story" elements had wasted my time.
Speaking about the gameplay, it is pure left-to-right Sonic the Hedgehog running with boss fight mini-games. That is, the game is about running fast and gaining speed, and then putting obstacles in your way to stop you from doing so and have a bad time. You have no health bar, but instead are attempting to outrun an instant-death force chasing you from the left. Defeat enough enemies to charge a meter that can repel this instant death force temporarily. Each level is less than 2 minutes to run through, and 3 of the ten levels are boss fights, making the game fairly short and easy to finish,the only connection it has to the bundled animated shorts.
To the game's credit, there is an interesting mechanic where hit enemies explode into abstract art that can chain explosions upon other enemies that, in some circumstances, can create spears of exploded art that get stuck in walls, allowing you to jump on them to reach new paths and collectibles. Visually, this effect is fantastic, and if you play through the game completely skipping all the cutscenes, I think you'll have an ok time. The perspective of the camera is just fish-eyed enough that you'll bump your head trying some of the trickier platforming sections. I say trickier, but they'd be simple in another game that had more responsive controls and more finely tuned physics.
In my rating system, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game. I award Ranko Tsukigime's Longest Day a D rank with 1 star. As a multimedia project, it adds nothing to the superior films. As a standalone story, it is too worthless to warrant critically tearing apart. As an aesthetic, it is passable in the gameplay segments, but can get down-right ugly, (in ways that are obviously on purpose, (but still ugly)). As a game, I could only recommend it to people who really, really love Sonic the Hedgehog games and art projects that exist entirely for their own sake. But absolutely do not spend money on this.
Ranko Tsukigime's Longest Day is one part of Short Peace, a multimedia collaboration that includes 4 short animated productions. The listing on the PS3's digital store includes a download of the movies to the system as part of the purchase, and they are the highlight of the package. Clocking in at a little over an hour, the four stories are disconnected in style and stories, but are all engaging. Possessions, the first of the set, was nominated for Best Animated Short at the 86th Academy Awards.
By comparison, Ranko Tsukigime's Longest Day feels like an embarrassment to be included in the same branding. Although its plot starts with the premise of a girl donning an evening gown to assassin snipe her father, that is a red herring. Quickly the game devolves into literal incoherence, introducing and dropping characters and scenarios by the minute. Every scenario exists as an excuse to draw something cool, whether its high school girls, dragons, yakuza bosses, sentai heroes, or luchador wrestlers. Such hollow, meaningless noise made me wince once I recognized that this was game design as pop-art portfolio exhibition, with no desire for meaning. I don't know what to make of the opening cutscenes having PSA ticker tape at the bottom of the screen apologizing that the gameplay hadn't started yet, because while I at first thought it a cheeky joke, by the end I felt like I had not been adequately prepared for how completely the "story" elements had wasted my time.
Speaking about the gameplay, it is pure left-to-right Sonic the Hedgehog running with boss fight mini-games. That is, the game is about running fast and gaining speed, and then putting obstacles in your way to stop you from doing so and have a bad time. You have no health bar, but instead are attempting to outrun an instant-death force chasing you from the left. Defeat enough enemies to charge a meter that can repel this instant death force temporarily. Each level is less than 2 minutes to run through, and 3 of the ten levels are boss fights, making the game fairly short and easy to finish,
To the game's credit, there is an interesting mechanic where hit enemies explode into abstract art that can chain explosions upon other enemies that, in some circumstances, can create spears of exploded art that get stuck in walls, allowing you to jump on them to reach new paths and collectibles. Visually, this effect is fantastic, and if you play through the game completely skipping all the cutscenes, I think you'll have an ok time. The perspective of the camera is just fish-eyed enough that you'll bump your head trying some of the trickier platforming sections. I say trickier, but they'd be simple in another game that had more responsive controls and more finely tuned physics.
In my rating system, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game. I award Ranko Tsukigime's Longest Day a D rank with 1 star. As a multimedia project, it adds nothing to the superior films. As a standalone story, it is too worthless to warrant critically tearing apart. As an aesthetic, it is passable in the gameplay segments, but can get down-right ugly, (in ways that are obviously on purpose, (but still ugly)). As a game, I could only recommend it to people who really, really love Sonic the Hedgehog games and art projects that exist entirely for their own sake. But absolutely do not spend money on this.