Review #292: Short Peace - Ranko Tsukigime's Longest Day

 Suda 51 in its purest form.

 Short Peace is a 5 piece project by Katsuhiro Otomo, made up of four shorts and a videogame. And it fell upon Suda 51 to write the game, and it shows, oh boy, does it show!

 The story makes absolutely no sense. Seriously. But it's downright hilarious, there's a bunch of cutscenes and they all use different animation styles, to very amusing results. Mind you, the game is rather short, made up of about 10 stages, each one 1 to 3, at most, minutes long, for a game that can be beat in under an hour. UNDER ONE HOUR. The game is packed with unlockable concept art(By finding certain boxes and killing certain enemies), as well as unlockable in-game costumes, but even then, you'll be lucky to get over an hour worth of gameplay out of this... but what an hour! Even taking that into account, the game is packed with all four shorts, in beautiful, crisp HD, which add little less than an hour of entertainment. Each short features different animation styles, plot and themes, and they are... interesting, to say the least.

 This game is what modern-day Sonic wishes it was. This is a high speed action game, that has you jumping and slashing your way to victory. I hesitate to call it a platformer, since pits don't mean death, they just mean multiple routes, and there's a ton of alternate routes on each level. The square button is used to attack enemies on your way, but you won't do much of that, since killing enemies results in visually overloading 'side effects' upon their deaths that will kill even more enemies, and sometimes, even produce platforms so that you can access alternate routes. The real challenge comes in the way of an unbeatable enemy-type-thing-wall-thingie that's chasing you, and you can only slow it down by firing your laser, of which you have limited shots, and you earn more by killing enemies. Honestly, the game is very, very easy. I only died during the game's three boss battles, and only once per boss, as I figured out how to defeat them. This is a very easy game, but a very fun one.

 The controls are responsive, and work well... when you are on the move. There's a few sections in which you might have to backtrack slightly to defeat a certain quota of enemies, or find something, and in these instances you'll notice that the jumping is a bit... finicky. Sometimes it's hard to get your jumps to stop where you want them to stop, which isn't a big issue when you are constantly running to the right, but when you require precision, that's when they let you down a bit. The localization is also rather lazy, they didn't even translate the in-game dialogue windows, opting instead for annotations that look straight out of a Youtube video. There's some cutscenes in which either the subtitles either go by too fast or some lines go unstranslated, it's very noticeable in the 'animated manga' cutscene.

 I had a blast with Ranko Tsukigime's Longest Day, but it's not a game for everyone. It's probably the craziest game Suda has ever worked on, and that's saying something. Plus, the short length of the game will turn a lot of people off, but I think it's worth it, there's few games like Ranko, and you even get the animated shorts! Plus, Sonic could certainly learn some lessons from this game...
 8.0 out of 10