Armored Warrior Iris
Review
Seeing
as it’s Halloween, what’s Halloween without some schlock? So for that we’ll be
turning to good old Black Lilith for what can also qualify as a sci-fi creature
feature of sorts in Armored Warrior Iris, originally released in Japan on March
24, 2006 (digitally with the physical release following a week later) and
released in English by Mangagamer July 18, 2014 with a physical release on May
4, 2015. Some of you may remember Space Pirate Sara and the praise I had for
it; it had a decent plot in between all its ero scenes and a likable heroine. I
bring this up because one of the writers for this game wrote for Sara as well.
So with that surely there’s the same level of quality, right? Well, sort of,
but…
Pros: Good story concept, the intro’s really good, Iris is a
decent heroine, very good art for the characters, mechs and aliens, good voice
acting.
Cons: The concept has been done better in another game, a
certain important plot element is given minimal addressing, can’t save at the
“customer” selection screens.
WTF?!: While “this is no Zaku” it sure goes down about as
quick as one.
In
Armored Warrior Iris, you play as the titled character, Iris Rebel, a first
class space cop who takes down space criminals throughout the galaxy with her
partner, Mei Li Naceri. While on a routine mission the pair’s mechs are shot
down and Iris is captured, taken into hostile territory to a city known as Dark
Town to be sold into slavery and ends up being forced to work as a prostitute
by the city’s leader Bozuk and under the supervision of his top servant Riruru,
who bears an uncanny resemblance Mei Li. As she tries to find a way out of this
situation, Iris must also figure out the fate of her missing partner…
I admit
that this story doesn’t sound like much, but in all fairness AWI does put in
some effort into establishing its main character. The game’s prologue does a
good job introducing Iris and is convincing enough in showing that despite the
main events of the game she is pretty badass. In fact the story segments in between all the
ero scenes help at giving her some character as depending on some of the
choices you make can alter her outlook slightly, which become especially
noticeable as the endings approach.
Speaking of which, aside from the many bad endings there are two possible
endings where things turn out well for Iris: a good ending and an evil ending,
the former being canon though the latter is still worth looking at since it
does have a couple minor but still interesting extra bits of info about Iris
and Mei Li’s group. Also well done are the interactions between Iris and Mei Li
as thanks to those scenes it is easy to believe these two as being partners and
from that you are curious to find out what happened to the latter character. If
only the revelation were handled better…
Since
we’re starting the flaws I figured I might as well start with the
aforementioned (and don’t worry, I won’t spoil it): while what happened to Mei
Li is one of the main plot threads, the revelation isn’t handled all that well.
We’re given an answer, but it’s not given the appropriate treatment a
prevailing mystery should have (even taking account this is a nukige). We’re
basically just given a brief explanation and then the plot moves on to the
ending. It also leaves a couple plot holes regarding some stuff we’re told that
we now have to accept as false too. Sadly can’t give any specifics without
spoilers.
Moving
on the root of AWI’s flaws is if you’ve played Space Pirate Sara then that may
weaken the experience of the former. Basically AWI is a proto-Sara since while
the characters are different, the structure is very similar. Our main heroine
is basically trapped in a hostile location at the mercy of its ruler, you’re
given the choice of what ero scenes are to occur while she plots her escape,
and we have a heroine in a similar position who could be a potential ally. The
thing is with Sara being the later game it manages to do it all better: Bozuk
is a pretty flat villain compared to the twins as he lacks the writing that
made them intimidating, there’s a stronger purpose behind Sara’s enduring the
events the twins force her into choosing among while with Iris it’s more like
biding time until an opportunity arises, and while Iris and Riruru interact far
more than Sara and Sylia do the latter pairing manages to have better chemistry.
On the
technical side I’m afraid there’s another aspect where AWI falls short compared
to SPS. While you select what type of ero scene is to occur, you can’t save at
the selection point unlike in SPS. This creates a little bit of an
inconvenience since in this game scene selection determines what ending you get
so when you want to save at a branch point you have to save at some point
before the choosing and when you want go a different path you load to that
point and then use the skip function to
get to the selection point. I admit this isn’t a big issue, but it is
still a bit of an annoyance.
In the
area of presentation Armored Warrior Iris does pretty good. The artwork is really
good for the characters, who have a design style somewhat reminiscent of anime
from the 80s and 90s, and more especially for the aliens we see in this game.
That’s basically the qualifier for why I picked this for Halloween: a number of the creature designs are based on
(and probably tributes to) alien creatures from various scifi movies. This
ranges from obvious ones like Bozuk being based off the Hutts from Star Wars or
a Martian based off the ones from scifi comedy Mars Attacks to ones that are a
bit more obscure like a background alien in a CG being of similar design to a
certain alien from one of the Star Trek movies. I admit it may be a flimsy
justification, but hey, don’t we all have at least one creature feature in our
queue of movies set aside for this month?
Of
course there is one more aspect of the art department that’s worth mentioning:
the mech designs. While admittedly we only see them during the prologue, they
make for a good window dressing, especially with one action scene we get with
them and their obvious Mobile Suit Gundam inspiration. Really makes you wish
Black Lilith would make a game in a Gundam-esque setting…
In the
area of sound AWI does good enough. Its only problem is the music is
forgettable, but thankfully that’s barely noticeable thanks to the good voice
acting for our two heroines. Of the two
I’d say the one who does the best performance is Iris’ VA: An Kasuga, who some
of you may recognize as the voice for Mizuki from Kansen 3, Makoto from Kansen
4 or Sigurd from Valkyrie Svia.
As for
the ero scenes they’re all really good, provided you’re into the dark stuff.
I’ll say when it comes to the different types of scenes you’ll see AWI is about
as diverse as Sara, though in an interesting difference from the latter you
won’t get much of an idea as to what kind of ero scene you’re going to get from
the selection screen, which only tells you what species the client is. It’s an
interesting way to make the player see one thing from Iris’ perspective, being
as in the dark as she is as to what’s to come with each choice. What makes this
an interesting difference between the two games is how it’s a different but
still somewhat similar approach to the ero scene choice: Sara could only choose by category and what
the choice would entail on that front would be for her to find out.
In Conclusion:
Armored
Warrior Iris is an overall decent dark scifi nukige. It has a likable lead and
it’s well drawn and acted. Its main problems are its overarching mystery is
given a pretty lackluster solution and if you’ve played Space Pirate Sara you
may feel like you’ve played a better version of this game already. Still I can
say it isn’t bad for what it is, and admittedly it is interesting to see for
yourself what aspects of AWI would be better used in Sara. Just don’t go in
with high expectations and you probably won’t be disappointed.
Final Score: 6/10 Above Average
Author Recommendation: For Fans Only.
As for
the anime, it’s actually a pretty good adaptation that follows the good ending
path. We also get some additional scenes that would have been nice to see in
the game like some mech action in the first and last episode and I have to say
the anime does the Mei Li mystery reveal a little better. That’s not to say
this is a perfect adaptation: there are some animation flubs here and there
where the animation doesn’t look as good as the rest and for some reason not
only is the prologue skipped over but so is the good ending’s epilogue.
Strangely there is a DVD extra scene but it isn’t an adaptation of the epilogue
which seems strange since if the point of that extra was additional H content
then the epilogue had that and it would have been more memorable than the
throwaway scene we got instead. I guess that would be one more win from Iris vs
Sara as the latter’s extra scene was an epilogue…even if it wasn’t in the game.
No comments:
Post a Comment