I want Showa American Story

 Love and hate have never ridden so close to one another

We all have those moments where we see something and fall instantly in love, don't we? From the very first glimmer of a hair bouncing off that refracted glint in our eye, we know that this is a unique little something which will sweep us away against our very agency. But sometimes that instinctual feeling might betray us, and leave us, or specifically me, feeling utterly confused once I watch the damn thing and realise- you know what, enough vague talk. This is a recently unveiled game from the right the heck out of nowhere called Showa American Story and I do not know how to feel about it, honestly and truly, I'm at pure equilibrium stalemate right now. Maybe just by breaking things down about this trailer to you, blog person, I'll be able to untangle right way up of  'Do I hate or love this' that's doing battle up in my noggin' right now.

So Nekcom \Entertainment is a company I've never heard of before, but their only other game on Steam is positively reviewed so I can assume they're actual developers. What they've put together is a 80's stylised project (Yawn. With the current state of pop culture trending to the 80's, it'd be more out-there if the game was set in modern day) which tells the story of America suddenly becoming an unofficial colony of Japan. (Hold on, this sounds like it actually has potential.) Yeah that was pretty much all this trailer needed to say to instantly hook me, but backing that up with headscratchingly visual icons was a nice backup. Audiences have already been treated to shots of the Golden Gate bridge reshaped with Torii towers and paper lanterns, so god knows what the goofballs who dreamt this up are saving for the actual game. God knows that I'm a sucker for anything that shoves Japanese surrealism in places where it doesn't usually go, which is likely why I'm a never ending sucker for Cyberpunk, apparent Weeb that I am.

And then you kick of the trailer with a little bit of the ol' ultraviolence in that grind house B-movie fashion, with a touch of sexuality to garnish, as our protagonist blows the genitals off of her (I presume 'former') boss. I mean how can you not just help admiring one of those games that goes all 'hammy gore movie' on you? Kind of like Bethesda's 'Wet', only hopefully a bit more of a full game than that game ever was. And the campiness isn't fleeting, no it sticks around for this whole trailer and practically sings it's sonorous melody in a frequency that the degenerate deep inside me responds to. There's cheesy heavily antiquated J-pop music, a replacement to the Hollywood sign that reads 'Neo Yokohama', the Statue of Liberty in a Kimono, that aforementioned Japanified Golden Gate bridge; the cheese is everywhere and it's oh-so glorious that I couldn't help but guffaw for those first few seconds of the trailer. And then the gameplay starts.

Now typical disclaimers apply, it's hard to judge a game's play from trailers, this is an unfished product, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law, yadda yadda. But I don't like it. In fact, the gameplay makes my skin crawl. And I cannot for the life of me think why. On the box, or rather in the description, we're told straight up that this is an RPG, but in the gameplay what we see is movement-free hacking and slashing game on zombies accompanied by damage numbers and godawfully floaty over-the-shoulder shooting sections. Thus I can only assume this is one of those 'faux-RPGs' which gives you a skill tree but doesn't really design it to have playstyles or anything, it's just the minimum requirement to print 'RPG' on the box. Then there's the damage numbers which really makes me think of loot-flood game, where you get drowned with endless 'rarities'  and 'level' of new items that has you picking through menus and comparing meaningless numerical values every other encounter or so. And finally there's the, almost modern Tomb Raider feeling, shoulder cam; what does this game remind me of? Oh god, it reminds me of Metal Gear Survive.

It all makes sense now. The instant dislike, the unexplainable foreboding. Seeing a setting as cool sounding as this one be used for a Zombie game made my mind shoot to the worst possible scenario, and it's not because I hate zombie games or anything, just because those are some of the most easily exploited titles. MGS-urvive was a character assassination of the venerated Metal Gear name by Konami, in their task of making a 'profitable' low effort zombie survival game with ill-fitting crafting mechanics stretched across that already-horrific edifice. That's the instinctive thought I get whenever I see this thing in action and, fair or not, I recoil in abject horror at these jittery animations and damage numbers. Which is a darn shame because everything else about this game I simply love.

The absolute absurdity of a continent as large as America being a 'colony' of Japan, the fun nature of the gangs roaming the post-apocalypse, including one group called The Warriors who clearly steal some design prompts from 'The Baseball Furies' in the film, The Warriors. The old-school Japanese action movie posters littering our hero's trailer which glitter with nostalgic goofiness. And, of course, the rampant fan service as our stuntwoman revenant, Choko, does strange workouts in hotshorts with curious body-part physics. The game looks irreverent and a lot of fun, until the bouts of gameplay inbetween which aren't awful, but just remind me of something much worse underneath it all. Something I thought I'd gotten over long ago.

To be fair this is my very emotional response to the game, and emotions are whirling, turbulent little buggers that are hard to pin down to one spot. Love and hate dance and pirouette about each every other day, one displacing and replacing the other with the drop of a hat. That's why love is fleeting, and hate it's shadow, because intensity can, by it's very nature, only burn for so long. That which I dislike about this trailer could oh so easily blow me away a couple years from now, or at least prove decent enough to house the genuinely silly and enticing world that Nekcom are teasing. And I really hope it does either of those two minimum victory scenarios, because god do I want to see this world up close for myself, get embroiled in the stupidity and maybe even feel a touch of nostalgia as I go along. Not so much for the 80's, but of irreverence for irrelevancies' sake.

So I guess what I want to say is; I love to look at Show American Story and want to see endless trailers in this version of America so bad. I just don't know if I'm going to love to play it, and foreboding creeping doubts has be thinking I'm going to hate it's moment to moment activity. Then again, I learnt to love the new Tomb Raider games with their pretty meh combat, so I could learn to love a game like this too. It's going to be a relationship of understanding, and as much as I want this game to be the best thing ever just from it's mouth watering premise alone, I may have to come to terms with the reality of that just not being the case. Still, I want more of these trailers already. Just keep showing me popular US landmarks twisted to be Japanese cultural hubs and you'll have me wrapped around your little finger for good, Nekcom!