Akira is a cancelled video game based off of the anime film and manga series of the same name. The game, published by THQ, was intended for release sometime in 1994 and was planned for multiple consoles, including the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Sega CD, Game Boy and Game Gear.
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why couldnt we have gotten TREASURE to develop this 😭
Putting aside the parts of the game that obviously aren't finished, this game is super fucking cool. Tetsuo and Kaneda's level 1s make a great first impression being technically impressive and really fun to control, despite no enemies placed in the level yet. There's a reason why the bike scene from the movie is so iconic, and the bike level would've been done great justice in the game adaptation. Kaneda's sewer level had a really cool water sludge water effect trudging through the sewers and I liked that you could swap between foreground and background. The crouch being toggleable, I can't tell if that was intentional or incorrectly coded, but it was really funny tapping crouch and mashing C to kick the rats to death while ducking bullets. There's also a really impressive pseudo-3D effect during Kaneda's level 3 on the hoverbike.
The only level I think is fair to say is rough to play are the dungeon-crawling hospital levels. Long corridors of nothing but identical doors, and the control scheme (may have been ironed out on a final release, might not have been) was confusing. Up and down move forward and back, and left and right strafe. You have to hold C to turn? B moves the cursor in your inventory (with seemingly no way to select the item in your inventory), and A fires PK blasts from your hands. It's super neat that you can also use left and right to move your hand inside the screen to aim multiple different places on the screen. Probably would've been really interesting during combat encounters.
The cutscenes are also super cool. They're seemingly partially reanimated from the movie? Like, the art is copied and traced from the film's cels? It's really on-model and looks just like the film. It's one of the more impressive licensed games I've been made aware of.
I wonder if I'd be praising it so highly if it were a standard game release as opposed to an unfinished prototype. When I play game prototypes like these, I'm viewing them more "professionally" in the sense that I'm looking at them exclusively from a game design standpoint because I know it's unfinished and won't be able to have fun with it the same way I would a finished game. Or I'll be comparing it to the latest version of the game to notice differences, if there is one. I'm sure if this released it would've been pretty impressive but also a bit unremarkable. I just find this so fascinating as a piece of gaming history that was only found a few years ago.
It gets a 3 star because I love the ideas and gameplay diversity on display here. With more refinement and finished level layouts, I think this would've been a nice game.
The only level I think is fair to say is rough to play are the dungeon-crawling hospital levels. Long corridors of nothing but identical doors, and the control scheme (may have been ironed out on a final release, might not have been) was confusing. Up and down move forward and back, and left and right strafe. You have to hold C to turn? B moves the cursor in your inventory (with seemingly no way to select the item in your inventory), and A fires PK blasts from your hands. It's super neat that you can also use left and right to move your hand inside the screen to aim multiple different places on the screen. Probably would've been really interesting during combat encounters.
The cutscenes are also super cool. They're seemingly partially reanimated from the movie? Like, the art is copied and traced from the film's cels? It's really on-model and looks just like the film. It's one of the more impressive licensed games I've been made aware of.
I wonder if I'd be praising it so highly if it were a standard game release as opposed to an unfinished prototype. When I play game prototypes like these, I'm viewing them more "professionally" in the sense that I'm looking at them exclusively from a game design standpoint because I know it's unfinished and won't be able to have fun with it the same way I would a finished game. Or I'll be comparing it to the latest version of the game to notice differences, if there is one. I'm sure if this released it would've been pretty impressive but also a bit unremarkable. I just find this so fascinating as a piece of gaming history that was only found a few years ago.
It gets a 3 star because I love the ideas and gameplay diversity on display here. With more refinement and finished level layouts, I think this would've been a nice game.
A very interesting prototype.