Akira Psycho Ball 2002
Log Status
Completed
Playing
Backlog
Wishlist
Rating
Time Played
--
Days in Journal
1 day
Last played
February 24, 2023
Platforms Played
Freeze! Jackpot! Shoot Green Target for ExtraBall! Jackpot! Jackpot! Jackpot! Jackpot! ball lost...
I was young, too young to remember the exact circumstances of it, but I have a very hazy memory of staying in a hotel with my mom and watching her flip through channels on the TV. She stopped on one of the premium networks for a moment, and I'll never forget it. Nezu's compound was being attacked by the Colonel's forces. In a moment of desperation, Nezu shoots one of his operatives, Ryu, and makes his escape, only to die a few moments later of a heart attack, throat full half-choked medication. It was the first time I had ever seen an anime, and the first time I could ever conceptualize such "real" violence appearing in a cartoon. I felt like I had seen something forbidden.
Years later while thumbing through an anime magazine, now fully initiated in the genre, I saw an article on Akira that allowed me to connect the dots between that experience and its source material. I borrowed the movie from a friend and was hooked. I'm a bit of an Akiraphile now, owning three different editions of the manga, including a mostly incomplete collection of Epic Comic's colorized release. Even my art style was highly derivative of Otomo's until I made a concerted effort to ween myself from his influence, and I find myself staring at the 4k release of the film at least once a month debating if I should buy it despite knowing it is Fucked and Bad. I am a very big fan, thank you.
Anyway, they made a pinball game based on Akira. I don't know what to do with that information, and I suspect you don't either.
For the longest time, Psycho Ball only existed for me in the pages of EGM. It was never released stateside, relegated to the Japan and European markets, leaving me with just a couple small blurry screenshots. They made an Akira game? Ohh... I had to play it! Thankfully, we live in the age of emulation, so I decided to sit down with a few friends in voice chat and commit myself toa psyche ward finishing this stupid pinball game.
Akira Psycho Ball is a lot like Sonic Spinball in that, at best, it's 50% a decent pinball game and 50% outright garbage. Each of the four tables will take you across a pivotal moment of the anime, with objectives roughly correlating to actions the characters take in the film. FMVs play each time you complete an objective, both progressing the story while signaling a table "transformation," most of which are nothing special, adding a few new ramps and bumpers while tasking you with completing the same objective you've just completed only again. The second and third tables, The Laboratory and the A-Room, are especially irritating due to how barren they are, and how their objectives require a level of precision in your shots that is complicated by the somewhat "off" sense of momentum your balls have.
Though the middle two tables are dull and overly long, Psycho Ball does start and end strong. The first table has you "battling" Joker, leader of The Clowns motorcycle gang. You essentially have two tables strapped together, side-by-side and locked in a permanent multi-ball state. Your goal is to get your opponent to lose more balls than you, and I think this is a pretty fun concept that should've been expanded on. You probably could put some more thought into this gameplay style and make a whole video pinball game around it, but unfortunately it shows up exactly once here and lasts all of five minutes. The final level is another multi-phase table like The Lab and A-Room, but between each phase is a "boss fight" where you have to attack Akira's cryogenic chamber, glass vials containing his body parts, and the SOL in a zero-G arena. I wish this level of variety was present throughout the rest of Psycho Ball, because while it's still kinda clunky in practice, god damn is it more interesting.
I do really like the look of this game, which is simultaneously appealing to me as an Akira mark while also being decidedly low budget. FMVs sometimes cut off mid-sentence, a few textures depicting screen captures from the Anime are too low-res to be readable, and anytime you unlock multi-ball mode or some other bonus you're treated to a short hyper-active montage of clips from the anime with a ton of video filters layered on top, the announcer in his excited yet somehow passive voice belting out things like "Super jackpot! wwwRONG key! pre-PARE for psychic BATTLE!" The soundtrack is also way better than it has any right to be, incorporating just enough of Geinoh Yamashirogumi's percussion-heavy style as to be identifiable as "Akira music" while making it sound appropriate for something you'd hear in the back of a pizzeria or bar.
What the hell does "PSYCHO" ball mean, anyway? Of course there are psychics in Akira, but is any character really a psy-cho? No, I think what it's actually referring to is how, after being stuck on the second table for two hours straight, your mind and those of yours friends starts to dull in a way that leaves you punchy enough to find each "Jackpot!" and "Freeze!" hysterical, while slipping further and further into a state of total mental degeneration as the hour hand ticks past midnight. Yes, the real Psycho Ball is the brain cells we lost along the way...
I was young, too young to remember the exact circumstances of it, but I have a very hazy memory of staying in a hotel with my mom and watching her flip through channels on the TV. She stopped on one of the premium networks for a moment, and I'll never forget it. Nezu's compound was being attacked by the Colonel's forces. In a moment of desperation, Nezu shoots one of his operatives, Ryu, and makes his escape, only to die a few moments later of a heart attack, throat full half-choked medication. It was the first time I had ever seen an anime, and the first time I could ever conceptualize such "real" violence appearing in a cartoon. I felt like I had seen something forbidden.
Years later while thumbing through an anime magazine, now fully initiated in the genre, I saw an article on Akira that allowed me to connect the dots between that experience and its source material. I borrowed the movie from a friend and was hooked. I'm a bit of an Akiraphile now, owning three different editions of the manga, including a mostly incomplete collection of Epic Comic's colorized release. Even my art style was highly derivative of Otomo's until I made a concerted effort to ween myself from his influence, and I find myself staring at the 4k release of the film at least once a month debating if I should buy it despite knowing it is Fucked and Bad. I am a very big fan, thank you.
Anyway, they made a pinball game based on Akira. I don't know what to do with that information, and I suspect you don't either.
For the longest time, Psycho Ball only existed for me in the pages of EGM. It was never released stateside, relegated to the Japan and European markets, leaving me with just a couple small blurry screenshots. They made an Akira game? Ohh... I had to play it! Thankfully, we live in the age of emulation, so I decided to sit down with a few friends in voice chat and commit myself to
Akira Psycho Ball is a lot like Sonic Spinball in that, at best, it's 50% a decent pinball game and 50% outright garbage. Each of the four tables will take you across a pivotal moment of the anime, with objectives roughly correlating to actions the characters take in the film. FMVs play each time you complete an objective, both progressing the story while signaling a table "transformation," most of which are nothing special, adding a few new ramps and bumpers while tasking you with completing the same objective you've just completed only again. The second and third tables, The Laboratory and the A-Room, are especially irritating due to how barren they are, and how their objectives require a level of precision in your shots that is complicated by the somewhat "off" sense of momentum your balls have.
Though the middle two tables are dull and overly long, Psycho Ball does start and end strong. The first table has you "battling" Joker, leader of The Clowns motorcycle gang. You essentially have two tables strapped together, side-by-side and locked in a permanent multi-ball state. Your goal is to get your opponent to lose more balls than you, and I think this is a pretty fun concept that should've been expanded on. You probably could put some more thought into this gameplay style and make a whole video pinball game around it, but unfortunately it shows up exactly once here and lasts all of five minutes. The final level is another multi-phase table like The Lab and A-Room, but between each phase is a "boss fight" where you have to attack Akira's cryogenic chamber, glass vials containing his body parts, and the SOL in a zero-G arena. I wish this level of variety was present throughout the rest of Psycho Ball, because while it's still kinda clunky in practice, god damn is it more interesting.
I do really like the look of this game, which is simultaneously appealing to me as an Akira mark while also being decidedly low budget. FMVs sometimes cut off mid-sentence, a few textures depicting screen captures from the Anime are too low-res to be readable, and anytime you unlock multi-ball mode or some other bonus you're treated to a short hyper-active montage of clips from the anime with a ton of video filters layered on top, the announcer in his excited yet somehow passive voice belting out things like "Super jackpot! wwwRONG key! pre-PARE for psychic BATTLE!" The soundtrack is also way better than it has any right to be, incorporating just enough of Geinoh Yamashirogumi's percussion-heavy style as to be identifiable as "Akira music" while making it sound appropriate for something you'd hear in the back of a pizzeria or bar.
What the hell does "PSYCHO" ball mean, anyway? Of course there are psychics in Akira, but is any character really a psy-cho? No, I think what it's actually referring to is how, after being stuck on the second table for two hours straight, your mind and those of yours friends starts to dull in a way that leaves you punchy enough to find each "Jackpot!" and "Freeze!" hysterical, while slipping further and further into a state of total mental degeneration as the hour hand ticks past midnight. Yes, the real Psycho Ball is the brain cells we lost along the way...