heavy metal thunder
a game for sony playstation2
published by square-enix
developed by media.vision
with character designs and a story by harold sakuishi
and music by sex machineguns, megadeth, michael schenker, and others
a review by tim rogers
1/2

Deep, deep into the Thursday nights, there's a television show that runs on Tokyo TV. I can't even remember what channel it is. Just that every Thursday night at around two in the morning, I turn on the television and flip around until I see big and tall Russian dominatricies in black patent leather heels and aviator sunglasses. They look like hookers. Well, since they apparently have paying jobs, I guess we can call them reformed hookers. Or maybe if they go back to being hookers we can call them "reformed models," based on the quality of this modeling: They're posing in police caps, while holding machineguns, or maybe they never hold machineguns -- maybe it's just guitars. They hold these big, tacky, gaudy axe-shaped, sword-shaped, skull-shaped, glossy guitars, and grimace. Candy red lipstick, hair as blonde as a yellow crayon. Guitars blare in the background. An announcer screams.

No, this isn't a tangent. This is my way of jumping right into the game, here.

The show is called "Heavy Metal Thunder." It stars several Japanese metal rock experts, who stand in a chain-link fence-cage with microphones and ask honored special guests about topics related to metal music. The special guest is usually Marty Friedman, ex-guitarist of Megadeth, though that Mr. Big guy was on there once, and Michael Schenker was on there a couple of times. You who read this might not even know who Michael Schenker is; I won't consider you subhuman for this. Instead, I'll just tell you, yeah, he's the very definition of "Big in Japan." I hesitate to call Mr. Big "Big in Japan," because the word "Big" is in his name. It'd sound repetitive. Even if it's true -- did you know Mr. Big screams in Japanese weekly as a participating member of Tokyo's underground thrash metal scene? Well, he does!

What does all this have to do with Heavy Metal Thunder, a videogame released by Square-Enix for the Sony PlayStation 2 on September 1st, 2005? A whole hell of a lot, actually. See, the show "Heavy Metal Thunder" started, auspiciously, on the same day Japan's finest heavy metal band (this isn't saying much) Sex Machineguns released their album "Heavy Metal Thunder." The vocalist, Anchang, was the show's first special guest. The commercial ad spots for "Heavy Metal Thunder," which somehow became a cult hit (probably because it's on at two in the morning on one of the five channels available to the 125 million people in this country; anything can and will become a cult hit under such circumstances), are all paid for by Square-Enix, who was, at the time of the show's debut, hard at work on the Heavy Metal Thunder game. They'd show honest commercials for things like Dragon Quest VIII or Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song, which are both better, more honest videogames than Heavy Metal Thunder. The commercials for Heavy Metal Thunder were always clever (?) enough to avoid showing gameplay footage, and instead focused around the game's "producers" -- a yakuza dude in a leisure suit, sunglasses and pompadour and all, and two masked professional wrestlers. Square-Enix made an interesting point out of never running the same commercial twice; supposedly, according to a thread on 2channel, if one had recorded each episode of Heavy Metal Thunder and then edited it down to all the ad spots, one would have something of a whole episode of a television that made absolutely no sense. Most of the time, the yakuza dude is screaming at the wrestlers to "get more heavy metal in there!" This leads to the revelation about halfway through Heavy Metal Thunder's run that the wrestlers didn't know what the yakuza dude meant about "heavy metal," and stuffed the game full of giant robots who are, surprise surprise, made of metal, and in weight, are very heavy.

I applaud this kind of self-absorbed, self-referencing game-making. That doesn't mean I actually like it. I mean, it's possible for me to like it; it's just that my liking it has yet to happen.

What kind of game is Heavy Metal Thunder? Well, it's a role-playing game of sorts. In this RPG of sorts, you play the role of Denki Akihabara (which is a really bad pun on the name of Tokyo's famed electronics district), a young boy who longs to be the world's greatest robot fighter, in a future where robots fight on television to the tune of blaring heavy metal music all day, every day. The game system is simple enough: you win fight after fight, increasing your rank, and earning money. Between fights, you buy new equipment with which to strengthen and (slightly) personalize your robot. Also between battles, you witness snatches of a story written by and starring characters designed by Harold Sakuishi, author of cult-smash hit manga Beck. That this story happens to star the deep voice of Akio Otsuka, also known as Solid Snake of Metal Gear Solid fame, as the hero's somewhat impossibly flambuoyantly gay father is a priceless gem in and of its own. I hesitate to say it's worth the price of admission to hear Mr. Otsuka, also famous for his work as tough, heavy-metal (literally -- he's a robot!) cop Batou in the "Ghost in the Shell" animes, hiss and squeal in a flagrant lisp.

I say I hesitate to recommend the game on this little weirdness alone for the same reason I say I hesitate to recommend it for its theme song. The theme song, called "Heavy Metal Thunder," is a veritable symphony of heavy metal, performed by Sex Machineguns, with guest guitarists Marty Friedman and Michael Schenker. Technically, it's a beautiful piece of heavy metal music, with solid riffs, great vocals, and some poignant use of explosions. Though I'd like to give this game four stars for Akio Otsuka's vocal performance (the instruction manual has a rather . . . interesting photograph of him) and the theme song alone, the game itself holds me back.

What's wrong with the game, then? Everything, one could say. The graphics, outside of the hand-drawn animated cut-scenes, are ugly and jagged. While the heavy metal music plays, we can't appreciate it, because we're playing the damned stupid robot battling game. Yes -- battling robots is stupid. I can understand the context well enough, as the game explains it and as the hero dreams it -- I just can't appreciate the way it's implemented. I mean, for God's sake, it's a paper-rock-scissors battle system! And I don't mean paper-rock-scissors as in Pokemon, where your monster's attributes are generally opposed by other attributes. I don't mean like how Squirtle can bean Geodude, though if Geodude has morbidly enough hit points, he's going to always win. I mean it like this: the battles progress through rounds of paper-rock-scissors. Except the choices are not paper-rock-scissors; they're "punch," "grapple," and "special." I think. I don't even remember. Either way, one option beats another yet is weak to the third, et cetera. The thing is, to score a hit, you have to win two little rounds of paper-rock-scissors in a row. They come fast, so there's an illusion of speed in the exercise. Surely enough, if you don't press a button, the enemy will hit you. Program in two commands and the round progresses. If you choose rock/rock and your opponent chooses scissors/scissors, you'll score a hit. However, if you choose rock/rock and your opponent chooses scissors/rock, no one will score a hit. This gives the battles illusions of fierce competition and some shadow of depth. The weapons and armor you purchase in shops between battles will increase the amount of damage you do when you do damage, or the amount of damage you'll take when you take damage. Other than that, there's nothing else.

I beat it in four hours. Every battle felt like luck.



In case you didn't know, the programming duties for Heavy Metal Thunder were handled by none other than Media.Vision -- the same team responsible for all of the Wild Arms games, which includes the recent, wonderful Wild Arms 4 and the spotty Wild Arms 3. And the face-only-a-mother-could love of Legend of Legaia.

The thing about Legend of Legaia -- I used to really like it. I played the first twenty hours with deep concern. I got to the big city -- Sol Tower -- and then just kind of gave up. Heavy Metal Thunder, in its atmosphere and graphical presentation, eerily reminds me of Legaia; however, where Legaia had too much (I turned it off after twenty hours with the vague feeling that it would go on forever, and I didn't have forever to waste), Heavy Metal Thunder has not enough. For one thing, music: the front of the box bears names of such high caliber that a true metal head will fall to his knees and bow in reverence, moaning "We're not worthy!" like Wayne and Garth in "Wayne's World," while everyone else in the game store stares at you. Yet -- where are all of these people, in the game? They're there, surely; they're just not jumping out at us. They're background music. We've got about twelve songs in this game, and they just loop in the background regardless of what's happening on the screen. In the end, it's not enough. There is too great a divide between the game and the music. One could exist without the other, and by the end of the experience, we get the feeling that one would have been better off without the other, had the developers taken time to develop one aspect into something worthwhile.

That's me being optimistic.

What a pedigree this game has -- great voices, great character designer / story-writer, great musicians, and even a great team of programmers! Yet what it exhibits, plain as day, is the scary, poignant fact that throwing together a bunch of people talented in different fields doesn't mean that they're going to produce a good product. Aside from the theme song, which, yes, rocks quite hard, every other creative effort squeezed into this game represents a one-off for the artist involved. Take Sakuishi's story and characters, for one: the fruitastic father, surreal, hard-rocking, and gorgeous as he is, just doesn't seem to fit into anything. All of the characters feel this way. Sakuishi's Beck is grounded in the real world -- indeed, one of the protagonists has a dog named after Jeff Beck and Beck Hansen -- and it tells of a grunge rock band (one Mongolian Chop Squad) rising out of the underground. Sakuishi does well with this material, because of his roots in real-life rocking. His drawings, usually, suck; he admits on a television interview (which aired at about three in the morning, come to think of it) that every drawing in which a character has to hold a guitar was just copied off a picture of some famous musician. Says he, with a smirk, "There are a lot of pictures of musicians in the world, you know." When Sakuishi tries to populate a story of giant robot battling in the future with his rather shoddy drawings and only the most bizarre of his characters, it ends up feeling like that one bar ten miles up the highway from a town with fifty bars, all wiped out by a hurricane. In the wake of disaster, everyone needs something to drink, and they all find themselves somewhere they never thought they'd be.

And then someone puts Megadeth on the jukebox and a fight breaks out.

I'm . . . vaguely not sure if this is what the creators are going for or not. They jab the player in the ribs with their collective elbow so many times, though, that I'd not put it past them. The game is being booed on Japanese messageboards all over the internet, yet, one week after release, it's still selling. A reader of my Japanese blog commented (on my other review of the game) that the game is most definitely of the genre "????" "kusogee" -- "Shit-game." Says he, "It's as though they made a shit-game on purpose. That would make this the first purposely-made shit-game since Beat Takeshi's Takeshi no chousenjo."

In this light, the game is rather pitiable. I love the instruction manual, and I adore the cover art, and I get a semi-stiffy at the poster included inside, though to what end? Does it not make me a hopeless geek to hold this game in my hands, or to even write more than four words about it on the internet? I suppose it does. Well, it couldn't hurt to say more:

This game sucks.

That's only three. Here's even more:

When you tweak the right analog stick during battle, you are treated to the sound of a metal guitar lick of randomized intensity. According to the instruction manual, this "Will not affect the game in any way whatsoever."

Oh, har har! Oh, that's rich! I'm about to pass out with laughter over here.

. . . okay, so not really.

Self-referencing in games. It's the next big thing. Metal Gear Solid 2 did it in 2001, and it was just so original back then. Killer7 did it, and everyone compared it to David Lynch. Katamari Damashii 2 did it on obnoxious, contextless, never-ending text-balloon cascading levels, yet I can forgive it because the underlying game was solid. Heavy Metal Thunder isn't solid. Heavy as it may be, it's hollow and dull. It was crafted from the ground up with the goal in mind being to create a cult hit -- or just a cult game. The creators (I'm looking at you, pompadour yakuza dude and your two professional wrestler assistants) made it out of rather selfish desires to get together heavy metal superstars and involve a high-profile cult manga artist. Did they see this as a money-making venture? Did they see it as a good idea?

Lord only knows.

In the meantime, now that the game has been released and the "Heavy Metal Thunder" cycle has been completed, the show will end its run. Come the first week of October, after four weeks of continuing to push the game deep into the Thursday night, "Heavy Metal Thunder" will quietly disappear from the Japanese airwaves. Thinking about it from the ground-up, like this, I get kind of misty. Thursday nights in a lonely part of Tokyo, wearing a gray kimono shirt and a pair of tangerine-pattern boxers, I used to relax after a hot bath by eating a bowl of peaches and listening to Marty Friedman's Japanese get better and better in real time. I'm sure he'll find another job in this country soon enough. Ganbatte, Marty.

Now that I think about it, that show was kind of cool. For a few weeks, they flew Marty around the world, so he could play his guitar at famous world landmarks, and become "The first man to rock the entire world." He played in Tiananmen Square, he played at Namdaemun in Seoul, he played in Hong Kong, he played in Vietnam, he played on the Great Wall of China. He played in Rome, in Venice -- they bought him a lot of airplane tickets. I suppose that's how the marketing machine works. Some metal-loving dude in black leather and studs is going to walk up to a display in a store, see Marty's name on the package, and think, "I remember when they flew that bastard to China. Well, as a metalhead, I must buy this." And so he will.

Was I tricked, though, into playing this game? Maybe. What was it that tricked me? Think back . . . one night on the show, they had an air-guitar championship, and some Japanese guy dressed like Gene Simmons from KISS, quite inaccurately playing an air-guitar and not an air-bass, took the grand prize, and the Russian hooker-women sat on his knees and felt up his chest with their white-gloved hands. Was that it? Or was it the weekly segment where the anime voice-actress girl held a guitar as a camera panned around her and an announcer read off the guitar's specifications and price, even though there was no phone number or address of anyone to get in contact with should you want to buy that guitar? Or the weekly segment where the same girl sat with a pair of headphones and, new to rock and roll, was asked to hum the guitar riffs of the music she was being made to hear, so that the two metal-guru guests (usually including Marty Friedman) could properly, quickly, and precisely name the song?

No, it was most definitely the weekly segment where they sat Marty Friedman down with his guitar and demanded him to display his freakish adaptability. They did this by playing him a traditional Japanese enka song, which he was then to perform as heavy metal. Marty had said, a long while back, on the show, that all traditional Japanese folk music was perfectly adaptible into heavy metal, that the Japanese were, "culturally and historically, the most metal people on earth." The weekly segment was a means of testing this theory. He did beautifully. Week after week, I think that was what kept me tuning in. He'd hum the melody, and some other guy (usually the too-hardcore-looking host, who had a good rich voice) would sing the lyrics. It always felt tragic to see this kind of thing. Yet I could not look away. The two Russian women in the black patent-leather police caps would stand there bobbing their heads, sometimes chewing gum with nearly unflinching expressions, the girl-host would stand there with her arms crossed and her jaw dropped, and Marty would slide up and down that guitar like a Harley on an icy road, grinning with teeth white as plastic, with the same embarrassing perm he'll probably always have.

Sometimes, one of the other hosts would play the guitar, and Marty would make the same awed expression as the young girl as this old geezer played. Long black-gray hair permed like a rat's nest, grizzly beard, fingers that move like God's. This guy used to be a kind-of-famous guitarist in a kind-of-famous band not even I am hip enough to remember the name of, a friend tells me one night. Now he's a millionaire. How'd that happen? I ask. Well, explains my friend -- now he plays the guitar for Ayumi Hamasaki (Japan's worst and biggest pop star ever) at all her live shows. Can you imagine that? my friend asks. That he'd give up rock and roll for that?

It actually makes perfect sense for me, for just a minute. Metalheads aren't punkers; punkers want to fight the system and see laziness and selling out as the ultimate evil. Metalheads do as they like, and if they like having a stable income and being able to do as they like more than they like rocking, whipping the mule's ass on stage, as they call it, then so be it. It's always depressing to watch metalheads get jobs and slot themselves into nine-to-five culture. Punkers, meanwhile, die grizzly deaths, true to their cause.

Then the show changes to something inane involving a man in a giant robot suit, and the young girl is flashing devil horns at the camera, and I recall a creative writing class which taught me the eternal lesson of writing for an audience. I wonder aloud, "Who is this show made for?"

No reply comes.

Writing this, I've figured it out. The show "Heavy Metal Thunder" is made for the same people as the game Heavy Metal Thunder -- that is, people with nothing better to do at two o'clock on a Friday morning.

--tim rogers, 09062005

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