Game OVA Reversal: Episode 3—Download

Thanks to the new adaptation of The Ghost in the Shell presently airing I've been in a cyberpunk mood of late, so here we go with Download—something those darn cyberpunks be doin' all the time—and its well-regarded OVA adaptation. Another reason I've gone with something as relatively obscure as a TG16 shoot 'em up (in case you were wondering what Download was) is because there's usually a dark horse undercurrent to Game OVA that I haven't been observing with these bigger name picks so far: my goal has always been to torpedo what little SEO potential this series has so I can reach way, way back into the VHS closet for the tragically memory holed. Outside of visual novels, though, there aren't too many super obscure game-to-anime conversions for probably obvious enough marketing reasons, so I was fortuitous to discover Download.

Since we're in Episode 3 of this season of Game OVA I'd better link to Episode 1 (Ys) and Episode 2 (Ganbare Goemon). Episode 1 also has links to all the previous seasons of Game OVA in case you want more game/anime double threats in your life. I ain't judging.

The Property

Download is a 1990 horizontal shoot 'em up for the PC Engine developed by Alfa System and NEC Avenue, the latter being the official publishing label of computing giant (and co-creator of the PCE platform) NEC. It made the relatively uncommon choice of using a cyberpunk theme while most of its peers remained futuristic sci-fi, and supplemented its side-scrolling action with a heavier than usual amount of exposition cutscenes. It was soon followed by a sequel, Download 2, the following year for the PC Engine CD platform.

Inspired by a popular period for cyberpunk/internet-based media in the 1980s, Download would then see a 1992 OVA adaptation loosely based on both games, released about four years after the Akira movie and three years before The Ghost in the Shell movie for perspective's sake. We'll get into both halves of Download in the sections below.

The Anime

Download: Namu Amida Butsu wa Ai no Uta, or Download: Devil's Circuit as it was localized, was released as a standalone OVA movie and has some serious pedigree behind it. Its animation studio was Madhouse, a household name for any hardcore or casual anime enjoyer (they're behind a great volume of classics, but most recently the Frieren: Beyond Journey's End and Orb: On the Movements of the Earth adaptations), and its director and writer was Shigeyuki "Rintaro" Hayashi, a legendary anime director best known for his late-'70s and '80s output including a couple of Galaxy Express 999 movies and the Space Pirate Captain Harlock show (both adapted from Leiji Matsumoto works, whom I'll always remember for the Daft Punk movie) as well as a pretty sweet 2001 anime movie adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis (thematically similar to but otherwise distinct from Fritz Lang's movie of the same name). He's also the co-founder of Madhouse, by the by. The chief animator, meanwhile, is Yoshinori Kanada: another who got their start in several of Rintaro's '70s/'80s productions but later became best known for his collaborations with Studio Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki on several of his finest films, including Porco Rosso (the GOAT) (or, uh, PIG) and Princess Mononoke. All these heavyweights for a 47-minute OVA based on a PC Engine shmup? You can see why I'd be curious.

Other than the theme I know next to nothing about the Download movie, so let's get into it:

Download: Namu Amida Butsu wa Ai no Uta (Madhouse, 1992)

Download doesn't seem to be one of those genre pics where there's a big exposition dump at the start to explain where and when we are and what is happening and why, but rather a vibe piece that throws you in at the deep end and provides the particulars later on gradually through context. In this case we have a young hacker named Angel who accesses and downloads a suspicious piece of code on the internet only to be subjected, Ludovico-style, to a rapid series of visual stimuli that leaves him vaguely catatonic. The message included in this assault on the senses indicates that he needs to spread the message of the ecstasy of bio-technological unity or some nonsense to several others or else die in a matter of days. Sure enough, a sleepwalking Angel takes a stroll in front of traffic as a group of biker delinquents look on in shock. Hopefully he gets isekai'd to somewhere with better bandwidth.

We then switch to Shidou/Sid, a novice Buddhist monk that has taken over his deceased father's temple, who instead of chanting sutras is patronizing a burlesque show featuring his favorite new dancer Namiho. Turns out that, though he is the spiritual center of his little urban community, he's something of an inveterate poonhound. This results in a troubled relationship with his friend/love interest Youko (a local nurse who works for her doctor father) who doesn't much care for his philandering ways but still occasionally helps out with his funeral work. After an opportunity to take Namiho home for some "conversation" goes awry after the earlier delinquents stomp on his balls, quite literally, Sid slinks off as Youko's father's clinic to get patched up and meets with Youko's younger brother Shun, a computer whiz who is curious about the "Death Mail" phenomenon that took out Angel (and, it's suggested, several others). On cue, we have another half-asleep hacker opening fire with an automatic weapon on top of a building; the police try to talk him down and he duly complies by walking off the edge and tumbling to his death still in a stupor.

The delinquents hang out here, at this arcade/bar/question mark with this glorious façade. I don't know what a Moon Dog is but I suspect he has the power to be man's best friend.

If there's any anime hero who deserves it more... wait, who am I kidding? I've seen enough of these to know there's dozens more deserving.

After a CEO's limo almost runs Sid's moped off the road while he's hawking Temple amulets and he's momentarily distracted by the guy's beautiful secretary while trying to receive recompense, we're back on another date with Namiho this time on a fairly upmarket boat restaurant. The delinquents still find a way to crash their date, however, by driving off a dockyard ramp onto the barge and starting a fight. Before the cops arrive, the delinquents split but not before their leader ominously warns Sid that Namiho means trouble and that their beef is with her rather than him. Briefly detained by the po-po for his involvement with the fracas, Sid attempts to meet up with Namiho again only to discover that she quit her dancing gig and that her Chinatown apartment has been abandoned: he finds a piece of microfilm stashed behind a tribal mask at her place and from it discovers she was involved with some potentially diabolical business, involving both the company that the earlier CEO works at as well as possibly the Death Mail virus.

Since Sid's apparently a cyberninja on the side, he not only manages to dig up dirt on the company—the Echigoya Conglomerate—but tracks down the secretary he met earlier, Fujiko Yamamoto, after breaking into her penthouse apartment in the company HQ via a zipline cannon. He has a hunch, y'see, and it proves to be correct: Fujiko happens to be none other than Namiho. She's done her research too: Sid's real name is Murata Shinnosuke and he's a notorious underworld hacker codenamed SYD. That would explain the sudden competency at this ninja spy shit even though he was getting his cashews cracked by hoodlums just fifteen minutes ago. She joined Echigoya for the sake of revenge and was moonlighting as a dancer in Sid's corner of Downtown to get closer to him in case she needed his services to complete her mission; Sid's not that bothered about getting used in this way though, given she's beautiful and he's permanently horny. Alas, the delinquents even find their way into this penthouse (Sid may have left the zipline up) and suggests that while Namiho/Fujiko might not be entirely truthful about her situation they're all on the same side working against Echigoya: turns out the dead hacker Angel, who was one of their gang, gave them a lead about who was responsible for the Death Mail in his dying breath and they've been investigating Echigoya ever since.

Shun's badass set-up, built into the cockpit of a disassembled American fighter plane. I swear, some kids get all the best toys.

The delinquents prepare to jump onto the loveboats' love boat. Elwood and Jake silently approve of any and all vehicular chaos.

Speak of the devil, the Death Mail has found a new victim: it's our resident script kiddie Shun. While getting attacked by the "drug program", as the leader of the delinquents (Pinky) puts it, a failsafe triggers and destroys his cyber-helmet before it can finish the job of brainwashing him. Shun deduces that the goal of Death Mail is to turn unprepared low-level hackers into unwilling assassins, as the last order he remembers being given was to kill someone (though the program ended too early to know whom). Their experiment complete, Echigoya goes ahead with the plan to send Death Mail to everyone equipped with their company's model of cyber-helmet to create a legion of loyal mind slaves (and plenty more dead bodies from those unable to withstand the process, like Angel and the kid on the roof). Sid, Shun, and Pinky team up to hack Echigoya's research lab and delete this program before it can kill others. Part of the process involves putting the number of a popular band's ticker seller on the Echigoya website which apparently produces a DDoS attack (is this the first time a movie has used that terminology? It might've just been in the loc subtitles). With Pinky digging up info from their database and Shun in charge of DDoS distractions, Sid locks in and transforms into Kaneda from Akira with his hacker-bike-computer rig (it's like someone turned a Super Hang-On arcade cabinet into a high-spec PC). I seem to recall from the small time I spent with them that the protagonists from the video games rode around in something similar.

Turns out it's a real bike though, and the team-up of Sid and the delinquents assault the remote Echigoya laboratory shown in the microfilm where the Death Mail virus was constructed. Despite heavy firepower from the corpo security forces Sid's able to drive his motorcycle into the building to get physical access to where they're storing Death Mail as Shun sends in his own designer virus to distract their cybersecurity further, all while Pinky's gang create enough of a ruckus outside that the city's Computer Police (oh shit, getting serious now) are brought in to assess the situation. Having captured the Death Mail program's source onto a floppy, Sid corners Echigoya as the fat cat and his executives are trying to escape the police raid and promises to "download them directly to Yama, the King of Hell" in a threat that would be badass if it didn't come from the same guy who was getting his stones smushed earlier in the flick. Even with the rad, red Akira bike it's hard to take this dumbass seriously. Echigoya attempts to leave via the elevator but Fujiko/Namiho is waiting in there with a gun, keeping them in place until one of the Computer Police choppers crashes through the window and obliterates them as Sid and Namiho escape.

The thing is they actually make mice that look like this now, albeit with fewer cables. This OVA was ahead of the curve on hacker chic.

Everyone's very impressed with the bikeputer. Probably a pain to get it back into this tiny computer lab stashed under the temple.

The OVA ends as Sid is about to get his "reward" from Namiho, only to wake up a few moments later surrounded by Pinky and the crew (and Youko, who I guess must've walked here) having discovered that Namiho pulled an Eva from MGS3 on him by knocking him out with a sedative and running off with the priceless Death Mail virus disk. My guess then is that there's a City Hunter type of situation going on where Youko is the main love interest but Sid gets a new, more glamorous heroine to fall for in every adventure? Not that there's any more Download anime out there to test that theory with. Shun says they're good though: the virus he created, Mongoose the Third, ended up devouring Death Mail during the attack and that Namiho has quite the surprise waiting for her should she boot that disk up. Youko finally asks who this Namiho girl might be as she spots the woman in question's garter belt wrapped around Sid's head as a farewell gift and we do the whole freeze-frame laugh as it cuts to credits.

So that's Download. As hopefully evinced by all these screenshots the cyberpunk vibes are on point and it's another of many examples of how anime remains maybe the finest medium for portraying that particular genre outside of Ridley Scott and CD Projekt Red. The story has a "double-length episode in the middle of an ongoing show" sorta vibe, due to the limited runtime they had to work with and how that probably meant jettisoning a lot of the initial worldbuilding that might've eased us into this universe of hackers, corpos, and cyberbikes a little cleaner. That said, it moves at a decent clip given that same time limitation and both the establishing shots and the action scenes have the level of detail you'd expect from a Madhouse production. As a fan of City Hunter I can deal with the Pepé le Pew horndog energy but I can also appreciate that it's tough to ask an audience to root for an aggressive sex pest protagonist (the nutshot helped humanize him a bit little, at least).

You won't see something like this in Hackers. Fisher Stevens on a skateboard is all you're getting there.

Driving alongside Salisbury Plain confirmed what we should've already guessed: Namiho was British all along! No wonder the delinquents said we couldn't trust her.

One curious thing about this movie I didn't mention anywhere yet is that, despite the futuristic setting, almost the entire soundtrack is folksy bluegrass and jazz and it helps to some extent maintain its more comedic tone in spite of its darker cyberpunk thriller plotting with all the dead hackers and the implied dystopian police state. It's so reminiscent of Cowboy Bebop that I can't help but think Shinichiro Watanabe must've been at least partly inspired by this OVA. Another fun tidbit is that Download's urban noir setting is "Moonlight City", which reminded me that the main setting of Cyberpunk (the 1988 TTRPG as well as the later video game and anime based on same) is Night City. Probably a coincidence, but possibly also not?

Does it do right by the games? Uhhhh, ask me again in a moment.

The Game(s)

So I did play Download as part of a wiki project on the PC Engine—I worked on every PC Engine game page that needed sprucing up, though I limited the purview to only those released on the HuCard format (those SD-looking things that the original PCE/TG16 used before they switched to CDs)—but spending a few minutes to grab some screenshots and get a feel for its gameplay ain't exactly the deepest of dives. Download 2 meanwhile is a JP-exclusive PC Engine CD-ROM game so I've no exposure to that one whatsoever. I had intended to swing back around to the comparatively vast Japanese PCECD library back in my wiki days but I balked at downloading all those .isos. Well, if we ever get the wiki in tip-top shape again that'd be a fun project to consider.

For our purposes here, I'm going to play as much of both Downloads as I can tolerate (shoot 'em ups are decisively Not My Thing) and see if the source material can match up to its anime adaptation.

Download (Alfa System, 1990)

Definitely the same Syd from the anime. Says "SA" and "problematic" right there.

Syd's hounded by nightmares of his partner(?) getting sucked into the inner workings of a computer like that villainess from Superman 3. Hate to see it.

The PCE couldn't really do parallax scrolling too well, at least compared to SNES and Mega Drive, but they gave it a shot here and there. The road is moving slightly faster than the background, and this big hornet looking chopper was actually visible in the background for the whole stage.

If anyone knows Download for anything, it's probably for these expletive-laden game over screens. Hey, you just got your shit wrecked by a giant robot bee, if you can't swear at a time like this then when can you?

I managed to get as far as this Stage 1-2 boss but it fires like a hundred heat-seeking missiles every few seconds and I'm just some schmuck on a giant bike. I really don't have the aptitude for this.

Beyond the heavy lore dump at the start of this game (so that's where it went) it's fairly standard as games of this genre go. You have a choice of loadouts—two main weapons and three sub-weapons, one of which is purely defensive—and you can upgrade the main weapon up to five times with power-ups. If you get hit you lose a weapon upgrade level and if you get hit three times total you die and need to start that stage over. You can restore your shields with other power-ups though. Given the resolution of the PC Engine and the relatively large protag sprite (a guy riding a hoverbike, just as I recalled) it is very easy to get merked by the fast moving enemies and their projectiles, hence why I suppose they let you absorb a few hits.

The game does feature Syd, as shown in the screenshots, but he seems older here: either the anime was a different interpretation of the character or it was meant to be a prequel of sorts. Beyond that, without a translation I couldn't quite follow the story though there's aspects of its opening cinematic like emails that were in English and the Japanese subs were translating it. Then again, after seeing that game over message I probably don't need to demonstrate this game's mastery of the English language any further so I'm just going to move onto the sequel.

Download 2 (Alfa System, 1991)

Worth staying on the title screen for a while to listen to these gnarly guitar licks. I notice they didn't go bluegrass here.

The intro has plenty of cool shots, like Syd sitting down to watch what has to be one of the heaviest looking CRTs I've ever seen.

The first stage looks much like the first from the previous game, though it has had a mild visual upgrade. This first boss requires initially destroying those six little tanks it's riding on (half of which shoot rockets at you faster than you can blink) before taking on the main thorax.

Maybe it's splash screens like this that convinced Rintaro and Madhouse to take on this adaptation project. Anything that can squeeze this much gadgetry on the screen at once has to have animators salivating.

Now, this is more like it. Not only do we have CD music courtesy of the platform but there's a host of gameplay improvements throughout this thing. They switched out the one-death game over to an extra life count but retained the shield system, though you have to find the shield upgrades first otherwise you're a sitting duck. Along with speed and option upgrades, there's an all-purpose "P" power-up now and instead of choosing a loadout you can just switch between bullet types whenever you want: spread shot is better suited for narrow tunnel sequences where there's enemies on the floor and ceiling, for example. The power-ups you've so far collected are automatically applied to any weapon mode you switch to, so no having to juggle them around to distribute the power-ups evenly.

The story, from what little I could parse, is absolutely nuts: you fight the cyber-corrupted version of Hitler at the end, in case you were wondering if the guy on the box art was who you thought it was. I don't think any of that made its way into the movie, and that's probably for the best. I found this sequel far more palatable than the first even if I eventually checked out during the psychedelic hacking sequence on stage 3 after losing all my lives: as generous as it was with its 1-Ups and shields, I still suck at this genre and some of those enemy patterns were rough to handle. But hey, you aren't meant to beat games like this the first time you play them, so reaching the third stage before crashing and burning is reassuring enough.

Did the anime do right by the games? I'm still not entirely sure how some schlocky sci-fi shoot 'em ups managed to get a City Hunter-esque cyberpunk action-comedy that proved to be more influential than anyone could've anticipated but I'm glad it did. This is one case where I think the anime eclipsed the games, at least from the perspective of a non-shmup fan, and if I had been the beleaguered designer trying to write a story to connect a bunch of outlandish action stages and it turned out some legendary figures from the anime world wanted to turn that mess into an OVA I'd have been thrilled. The games certainly aren't bad but the anime takes the crown this time.

That's going to do it for Game OVA for another week. All that's left is to thank you all for reading, despite the ongoing clear and present danger to our collective sanity that the internet presents, and to remind you all to...

...Stop all the downloadin'!