Every week in August, I’ll be posting about something I enjoy that debuted in August. I think that’s pretty straightforward.
(August 18th, 2004)
There were a few times when video game reviews pointed me to things I never would have considered playing otherwise—case in point, the glowing reviews of Astro Boy: Omega Factor on the Game Boy Advance in Electronic Gaming Monthly convinced me to try it out, despite my reasonable wariness of licensed games and their propensity for mediocrity. The GBA has a very interesting library—because of its graphical capabilities, we were seeing a lot of games made in the mould of the SNES/Genesis era (when companies weren’t just porting games from that era) or just plain weird stuff, but because the Game Boy line still had a child-friendly reputation and was cheaper to develop for, there was also a lot of junk you had to sift through. What made this one different, as the reviewers pointed out, were the people behind it: a collaboration between Sega’s Hitmaker division (developers of Crazy Taxi and Sega Rally, among others) and Treasure, the team that had been creating cult classic games for nearly ten years straight by then. Since most of Treasure’s highlights (including games like Gunstar Heroes, Guardian Heroes, Dynamite Headdy, and many others) were bound to Sega consoles, I didn’t get a real chance to experience their work—some brief time with Mischief Makers on the N64 aside—until their arcade vertical shooter Ikaruga was released on the Gamecube in 2003, and then quickly followed up by Wario World, a game that was clearly made for no one but me. Even Treasure’s lesser efforts (which even includes a Ronald McDonald game on the Sega Genesis, fyi) show a level of craft and boundless creative energy that separates them from almost every other action game—and when they’re firing on all cylinders, they made some truly memorable games. Omega Factor is a good example of them firing on all cylinders.
I knew about Astro Boy, and had even checked out some episodes of the new animated television series that Omega Factor was based on, if only because from the commercials it appeared to have a generally higher quality of animation compared to most other cartoons, including other anime (I didn’t watch a lot, though, because fifteen-year-olds weren’t supposed to be watching Saturday morning cartoons…or, at least, not a lot of them.) Considering its pedigree as the signature series of the artist who essentially created manga and anime as we know it—cliche comparisons to Disney/Mickey Mouse go here—projects involving Astro Boy generally get to have a prestige quality to them, because it’s Osamu Tezuka and his legacy deserves it. In this light, the overall quality of Omega Factor shouldn’t be surprising (although there have been bad Astro Boy games), but what helped propel the game further was just how much of Tezuka’s vast array of works were integrated into the game, taking what was meant to be a tie-in to a contemporary series and turning it into basically a celebration of one cartoonist’s entire oeuvre. Through the game, I was introduced to just how wide and interesting a career Tezuka had.
The game itself is an action sidescroller, Treasure’s bread-and-butter, made to feel like a beat-em-up, but with additional sections that are more shooter-esque. The handful of enemies that show up over the course of the game (so many of those little nondescript goggle robots)—some of which end up being made bigger by the simplest sprite scaling imaginable just to make some of them feel different—make it seem like it would get very repetitive very quickly, but there’s a surprisingly robust and satisfying fighting system in there, focusing on juggling enemies and knocking them into each other, as well utilizing Astro Boy’s jet powers and super moves (including his infamous butt-mounted machine guns) defensively. The GBA can barely handle what’s happening on screen about half the time, leading to plentiful slowdown—but considering how frantic it can get, that ends up providing you with breathing room when you’re trying to combo three laser-wielding robots and two bats. The game gets exceedingly challenging at times, even more so when you get to the boss battles, where Treasure’s design chops really shine—each boss feels highly unique, and will quickly shred you if you don’t understand their patterns. I still get anxious just thinking about the extremely claustrophobic Artificial Sun and Carabs battles.
That’s the kind of stuff you expect from a Treasure game. You may also expect the plot to take unexpected turns, as Treasure has been known to do that even within the rather loose storytelling in their games (they can do a lot with a little.) For the most part, the action is threaded around the plotline of the 2003 series, including its themes of humanity, prejudice, and evolution, but also includes turns that allow the game to reference characters and events from older Tezuka works. This means that every stage is filled with cameos by Tezuka’s many characters, and meeting them adds them to Astro Boy’ titular “Omega Factor”—basically a Dungeons & Dragons-style alignment chart, except in grid form (there’s also an in-game encyclopedia giving you some short blurbs about each character)—and allows you to upgrade your abilities, giving these things both an aesthetic and gameplay purpose. This is integrated into the main story in some bonkers ways: for example, a plot thread about the first robot president of Antarctica being targeted by assassins eventually transitions into the characters getting on an undersea train and being sent back in time to the ancient civilization of Mu, where they fight a psychic-powered god child. What’s even more amazing is that seemingly nonsense turn of events is actually integral to the entire thing.
The swerves continue all throughout Omega Factor. After defeating what seems to be the final boss, the game ends with Astro Boy (and every other robot on Earth) being destroyed, and then being revived and sent back in time by Tezuka’s Phoenix character so you can replay the game, except with many elements slightly altered. This may seem like just a cheap way to pad the game out—and in some ways, it is—but the suddenness and severity of this plot twist is so audacious, it’s completely commendable. They also get a little cute with the time travel elements, not only having Astro Boy acknowledge that he already knows what’s going to happen and just wants to speed things along (sometimes confusing the other characters), but also showing “alternate” versions of events, such as having the robot presidential candidate lose to his jerk human rival. By the time you’ve finished the second playthrough, the game changes its structure again, becoming more about searching through each level to find certain characters who can advance the plot (in one particularly silly example, an archaeologist refuses to listen to Astro Boy’s warning about the aforementioned psychic-powered god child until he summons Ambassador Magma, because if alien robots can exist, then I guess anything can?), giving it almost an adventure game feel. Despite having a lot going on, in terms of characters and backstory, Omega Factor stills feel rather minimalist, and utilizes a lot of small but clever ways to keep the story aspect and the gameplay aspect simpatico—even if you have to repeat certain boss battles, they will change just one or two things and give them a different feel.
It feels like an intentional mishmash of every Tezuka thing they could get their hands on, but what’s surprising is just how well they make that work coherently, while still keeping it in line with Tezuka’s actual stories. His career spanned decades, genres (including some he almost single-handedly invented), and tones, and famously he would often reuse characters from different series (the characters in his so-called “star system”), putting them into new stories in similar or even completely different roles—it’s a utilization of the iconography he created and the possibilities of cartooning that I’ve always found incredibly fascinating. Omega Factor actually does the star system idea justice, and while some characters are literally just standing there in the corner doing nothing in particular, a surprising number of them are important to the story and take advantage of their history in other Tezuka stories (which the in-game blurbs helpfully explain.) It didn’t even matter that Jetter Mars or Rainbow Parakeet were completely unknown to most people outside of Japan (maybe some English speakers would recognize Black Jack or Unico), having them there and having the game tell you about them provided an intriguing glimpse into a wide and varied history. The themes of the stories are also kept mostly intact, and not even the somewhat muddled nature of the narrative, or the somewhat shaky nature of the localized dialogue, can detract much from the characterization and humanism that was important to the source material. You’re obviously getting a compromised version of the original stories, but what Treasure and Hitmaker manage to retain gives it something that a lot of other action games of the time didn’t have, while also providing a nice introduction to Tezuka. I probably wouldn’t have considered reading the fantastic Naoki Urusawa manga Pluto (a retelling of a famous Astro Boy story, featuring many characters who also appear in Omega Factor) if the game hadn’t given me a base level context.
Omega Factor is the kind of project that feels like it could only have come out of the GBA’s heyday, which in turn felt like an alternate universe where the 16-bit era never ended and could iterate on and experiment with its ideas without having to consider some pesky new thing like 3D graphics (the indie game scene today feels very similar.) It has the classic Treasure gameplay, but with some innovative structure and concepts (which, now that I think of it, is what Treasure usually brought to all their games) that could be ascribed to them really taking inspiration from the source material, but in a way much more creative and broad than just directly adapting a TV series. There was plenty of the latter on the GBA, some of it better than others, some of it barely better than staring at a blank wall—but this did adaptation in a way that felt unique, unequalled, among that sort. I could always sense that it cared a lot, and wanted to express both of the creative legacies—Tezuka’s and Treasure’s—at the heart of it.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 