Ghost in the Shell 1997 Game Review

Okay, when I first beat this game years ago, I found the game to be pretty good but after replaying it again, I am not so sure how to feel. It's not terrible but it feels rough around the edges in so many areas. I'll start with the good, the anime cutscenes are pretty well done and are charming and in some ways the most faithful adaptation to the original manga of Ghost in the Shell from it's character designs all the way to the tone. The story is okay and does a decent job at giving enough context for the levels even if it feels something like cliffnotes version of something like GITS SAC would offer. The fujikomas were also a nice precursor to the tachikoma from the very same series. The voice acting is okay and I felt Mimi Woods kind of did a better job in this game then she does in the dub of the 1995 movie. The in game visuals have an interesting late 90s look to it and the music is fantastic and is a super high point of this game. The overal controls feel decent enough, the feel of combat gets the job done and sticking to walls is a unique style of gameplay not really replicated to this day. Also, the level where you have to chase a therm optic camoflague user through the level and you have to use the water to detect his movements was a nice piece of GITS fan service in gameplay form. The game also isn't overly long, and the length fits the kind of gameplay this game has.

Now, the negatives, the difficulty is all over the place, one minute it's manageable then another minute the difficulty spikes like crazy. When you are fighting enemies, the controls are okay but sometimes the enemies shoot projectiles in a way thay isn't always easy to evade and the controls to strafe left and right while not the worst isn't as quick as what the game wants out of me. The timed mission on "Firecracker" was really bad in that the game expects you to disable explosives much faster than your character can move, while enemies are shooting at you and you have to memorize the bomb locations in order to quickly dispatch within the time limit. The "hold down square to shoot multiple lock on missiles" also doesn't work as consistently as I would like. It locks on then doesn't and I keep holding sqaure then it either does or doesn't. The rest of the game is fine but the above mentioned issues can sap the fun out of the combat. Some of the bosses can be pretty awful too, the one where you are on a timer while you have to shoot the cores is especially ergregious since you have to shoot cores that take a while to destory while the enemies is reigning all kinds of attacks on you. The final level is especially awful in which you have to do awkward 3D platforming in a game that didn't really require you to do up until that point, I was kind of just getting sick of the game's bs by that point, and it is good that the platforming didn't last overly long because my patience was being tested.

Also, I ran this game on the Duckstation emulator and while it ran generally fine, there were weird parts. Like a glitch in Mission 8 where there was always one target remaining to progress to the next area even though I killed everyone, and weird visual flickering in the penultimate mission.

Overall, a decent game and maybe in some ways the best offical GITS game ever made but I felt the game still could've been better.