Game OVA Reversal: Episode 5—Sin

It's the penultimate episode of this season of Game OVA Reversal and, much like the cast of Final Fantasy X, we're going to spend our time here trying to figure out what this whole Sin business is all about. I really wasn't too sure about this one but, as with the previous two entries, it was a situation where I hadn't any exposure to the games or anime adaptation alike and thought it'd be funny to acclimate myself to a game series via its low-budget cartoon first.

So, Sin. This isn't Sin and Punishment incidentally, the well-regarded N64 rail-shooter that's already very anime-coded, but rather the western FPS that was built on the Quake II engine and was an early release for Ritual Entertainment. Yeah, that Sin got an anime movie. I didn't know that was a thing. I don't even know why it's a thing. It is true though that western creators were starting to pay more attention to anime by the early 2000s—Daft Punk's Interstella 5555 arrived in 2003—so I could totally buy some fresh, young developer studio commissioning an anime movie tie-in to boost their street cred, as it were. At any rate, I've always perceived this series to be a little tryhard (the protagonist is called "John Blade," for criminy's sake) and maybe kinda leery so I imagine this will be an eye-opener by some applicable metric or another.

Before we begin, though, a recap of what we've encountered so far: Episode 1 had us hunting for a mythical floating continent in the Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished adaptation; Episode 2 had us check in with Goemon and pals for two jokey OVA spin-offs; Episode 3 had us jacking into the matrix for a surprisingly solid animated take on the Download cyberpunk shoot 'em up series for PC Engine; and Episode 4 had us wielding ninpo and dragon swords for Ninja Gaiden and its semi-canonical OVA.

The Property

Sin (sometimes stylized as SiN) is a 1998 FPS released by Ritual Entertainment, their debut game excepting a Quake map pack. It features Captain (or Colonel) John Blade of the Hard Corps (sigh) police/security firm who is tasked with looking into a deadly drug that has flooded the slums and appears to have originated in the major pharmaceutical corporation SinTek, led by the enigmatic (and frequently nude) Elexis Sinclaire. Taking the fight from the dirty, rundown streets to spotless corporate executive suites, the game is beholden to the tropes of near-future wealth-inequality cyberpunk fiction as depicted in TTRPGs like Cyberpunk and Shadowrun or novels like Neuromancer. The game competed directly with Valve's Half-Life, having been released the same month, and due to technical issues did not perform quite as well in sales (though it did better than fellow November 1998 FPS Blood II: The Chosen, as far as I can tell).

The game was followed by an expansion, Sin Mission Pack: Wages of Sin, and was to see an incremental series called Sin Episodes: Emergence in 2006 only for that to be kiboshed after a single episode when Ritual Entertainment itself was sold off. Finally, Sin was revived in 2020 as part of Nightdive's purview of remastering '90s FPS games as Sin Gold, which incorporated the Wages of Sin expansion levels as well as modern resolution settings and various bug fixes. Nightdive's now working on a lavish graphical remaster, SiN Reloaded, though it's unclear when that'll be done. Probably have some big date reveal stream hours after this article goes up. The universe is weird that way.

There's also the tie-in anime movie, of course, which released in 2000. Let's get more into that.

The Anime

Sin: The Movie was created by Phoenix Entertainment with Yasunori Urata as director, Ryoma Kaneko and Kensei Date as the writers, and Masamichi Amano as the composer. Phoenix Entertainment has a few normal credits like a '90s Giant Robo movie and the girls' baseball sports drama Princess Nine but the majority of their works seem to be pornographic in nature, so I suppose Elexis is what attracted them to the project here. Their most famous work is Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend and if that title rings a bell, well, you're probably an anime fan from the '90s that was never quite sure what you were going to get from the next VHS from Manga Entertainment. Urata largely worked as an episode director for shows like Hellsing and Patlabor, though his few times as director included Legend of the Blue Wolves and Demon Warrior Koji, both of which were also hentai. Starting to get a little worried here, guys. Kaneko and Date seem to be in-house writers at Phoenix, so they penned many of their productions. Finally, Amano scored the Urotsukidoji anime but, more importantly, he also scored Quest 64. Now that's a name I didn't anticipate would pop up here. Learning that there's one degree of separation from Brian Wizardboy to demonic tentacle jorkin' was not on my 2026 keno slip.

All right... so... Legend of the Overfiend, huh? Well, maybe Sin: The Movie won't be quite as licentious. I mean, hard to say with that name, but... it's based on a video game where you shoot a bunch of dudes, right? I didn't screw this up did I? Too late to back out now:

After a quote about the human genome, which I almost thought was real for a moment (it's from a character in the movie), we open on the rather grim scene of John Blade (for it is he) at the funeral of his tech support hacker guy John Christopher Armack (only Johns allowed in Hard Corps) interspersed with flashback clips of the botched assignment that took his life. Rather than simply dying in some ambush, though, he was mutated by some weird goop in the sewer and the rest of Hard Corps were forced to gun him down as he begged for death in a pretty grisly sequence. That moves us right into the intro credits and its very circa 2000 EDM track as names and biological diagrams flash across the screen. I suspect, probably not the only time during this movie, that we're going to find out that The Matrix has a lot to answer for. John Blade (for it is he) contemplates his friend's gravestone while some old dude in a wheelchair warns him that this case might prove too dangerous if he keeps digging for answers. Literally had to wheel that cliché out, did ya movie? Some blonde woman is listening in via one of those high-tech sound-picker-upper gizmos, but we're not quite sure yet if she's friend or foe.

We then switch over to Elexis Sinclaire at SinTek HQ, conducting her customary all-hands executive meeting underwater in an oxygen tank that she claims gives her sexual powers (not really). She permits some shady dude to let him hock SinTek's experimental drugs in the city underworld as free human testing, and then the dude kisses his own bone ring in a weird way. I dunno if that's going to be relevant later but I'll record it for now. The eavesdropper turns out to be a military analyst and demands control of the investigation from Hard Corps, but John Blade's too invested at this point after losing one of his own. Turns out the blonde is none other than Jaime Armack, JC's sister, and swears vengeance against both the "major corporation" that's possibly responsible for these creatures and at John Blade, whom she perceives as a dirty cop that associates with underworld figures (that wheelchair guy was Mafia, turns out), for allowing her brother to die. Probably won't be an issue. We get another fatal flashback of John's father getting gunned down outside the courthouse by the Mancini family, the kingpins he was hoping to put away with the help of smaller (and presumably less evil?) Mafia families, before we swap back to that drug creeper getting to first base with Elexis. She decides to get him further in the mood by showing satellite footage of her genetically altered monster minions wrecking shop in various war theaters across Europe before drugging his drink and surgically turning him into a mutant freak as well: turns out this guy is (was?) also head of the Mancini family, so I guess all's well that ends well. Man, if I had a nickel for every Tinder date that ended with me being surgically altered into a hideous monstrosity I'd struggle to hold them all even with three pincers and counting.

The main Hard Corps crew. From left to right: John Blade, Tim Perko, John "JC" Armack, Kait Palmer.

I'm not sure what's more unserious about this dead cop (very) cold open: that they spelled the dude's name wrong on his grave, that it makes no mention of his family (which he's confirmed to have in a photo in a later scene), or that they essentially killed off John Carmack in the opening minutes of the Sin movie to make a point. Watch out, Quake and Doom: there's a new FPS in town.

Jaime immediately shows up to throw her weight around. Neither her attitude nor her '90s bob is winning her any favors here.

I neglected to mention that JC managed to rescue a mysterious waif named Elyse in the sewers just before he croaked and that she's spent this whole time recuperating. The doctor says she's mute from the trauma but she seems to open up to John Blade pretty quickly, even introducing herself (got over that fast), as John Blade explains that also he barely survived an accident and had to become a cyborg as a result, choosing to survive in this state so that he could avenge those that didn't. The doctor explains the same thing to Jaime standing nearby and her unwavering gaze on John Blade, Handsome Badass Cyborg Cop Who Is Good With Children, suggests she's gone from wanting to shoot him in the back to maybe just keying his car. Progress! John Blade gets called away to another monster attack incident and we switch to an unlucky police unit as they get ambushed and horribly slaughtered by... Elyse. Or at least it looks a lot like Elyse, only with a monstrous teddy bear and swords for arms. While the main Hard Corps division is on their way, the newly mutated Mancini (whom I'll call Inhumancini) walks through the Hard Corps lobby murdering dudes left and right. He's looking for "the Final Key" (guessing it's the sane Elyse) but gets ambushed by Jaime and Tim, the latter being John Blade's wisecracking aide-de-camp. Though they blow away Inhumancini, he's able to reform and take over Tim's body, and Jaime's unable to shoot him (understanding what happened with JC) and gets knocked out for her trouble. Tim... does not survive the movie. (I wonder if The Daily Tims from Ninja Ryukenden last Game OVA will print an obituary?)

Realizing he was set up and that the street mutant was a ruse to leave Elyse unprotected except for almost an entire cop precinct, John Blade consults with the station's oddly well-informed doctor—Elyse's DNA is vital for creating even more mutants like Inhumancini in short order—and Jaime finally reveals from her confidential analysis that SinTek is the only corporation with the technology and knowhow to pull this off, as the military has been side-eyeing it for a while. That's enough probable cause for John Blade and he suits up to assault SinTek HQ, only to be told to back down due to SinTek's many connections with politicians and military top brass alike. Meeting with his bewheeléd Mafia pal Vitelli, John Blade is once again warned not to mess with SinTek but, given Elexis was also behind the assassination that took out John Blade's father Charlie Blade and turned Vitelli paraplegic, this old Catholic crime lord might look the other way if John Blade were to take his batch of mutant-killing chemical bullets and do that wacky genocidal big pharma CEO a disservice. Jaime arrives to pick him up in a police chopper, having resolved herself to avenge JC even if it means a court-martial, and they (plus John Blade's deputy Kait) fly off to Luigi Mangione a situation.

Mancini on a probably intentional crucifix-shaped operating table. The surgery hasn't started yet; he just had a huge thing of spaghetti bolognese beforehand (I swear there'll only be two or three more Italian jokes, tops).

Hell of a thing to tell a post-traumatic kid. John Blade: Expert Child Psychologist.

I realize this is supposed to be a terrifying body horror moment but the color palette makes it seem like these two overdid it at the mud bath during their spa day.

Speaking of whom, Elexis gives the captive Elyse a little backstory on herself: her father was the brilliant geneticist who is quoted at the start of the movie but got ostracized by "conservative scientists" for his outlandish beliefs, like wanting to turn people into dinosaurs instead of curing cancer. Shortly thereafter his wife is mysteriously murdered and the despair drives him to suicide, with Elexis swearing to avenge them both. As John Blade loads up his gun with the bullets he got from Vitelli that give mutants instant cancer (when I play the game later, I really hope these are a thing) Jaime attempts to hack her way into SinTek's system but cannot reach its confidential files: she can, however, pull up schematics for the building's layout and automated defense placements, and the group conceive of a strategy to get past them with the chopper's stealth camo. It's mostly pure action for a while after this, as John Blade (followed by Jaime, who doesn't do much) fights his way up several floors of SinTek HQ gunning down various mutants with his bullets, including a spider guy, a big guy with a little guy riding around on his shoulders, and some bulky guys whom I'm going to assume are all in the game too. Finally, the only mutant threat left is Inhumancini, who's just chilling in some purpose-built final boss room with a gramophone playing classical music and everything; the former Mafioso puts up a good fight but is eventually tricked by John Blade's retractable blade ("do you know my name?" he uses to set this up) which he sticks through the monster's eye to get a cancer bullet past his impenetrable steel skin.

Finding Elyse, John Blade and Jaime are trapped inside a quarantine shield and poison gas is pumped in to eventually kill them after the amount of time it takes Elexis to finish monologuing about her evil plans. She explains that Elyse was a creation of her and her father's and was the key to understanding the power of DNA lying latent in our genomes. As John Blade's vitals continue to drop, either from the gas or from boredom, Kait shoots a few more grapple hooks into the building to take down the quarantine shield and Elexis is forced to use her ultimate weapon: a giant mutant bug monster containing the corpse of her dead father. Nothing says daddy issues like a bioengineered monster made of daddy's tissue. It quickly absorbs all the Elyse clones in nearby pods and the cancer bullet proves ineffective due to... I guess because it would be too easy? Summoning the last of his strength after recalling his dying father's last words, John Blade then uses his cyber arm to punch through the monster's dome and take out Doc Daddy's brain, which causes the monster to go haywire and project spikes in every direction: one knocks Elexis off the building and another almost skewers Kait's helicopter. Jaime quickly reroutes power to a laser satellite weapon SinTek just has lying around and redirects its beam to destroy the monster before it kills everyone. It also happens to bisect the lattice-structured building and John Blade, Elyse, and Jaime are forced to leap off and into the helicopter to escape in time which, sure. We then roll credits, which calls Captain John Blade "Colonel John Blade" and Jaime "Jennifer" for reasons probably unimportant (and also calls Charlie Blade "John's Father" despite being one of the few characters to be named in the movie).

Not the bambini! Una diavoletta!

It's not a motorcycle crashing through a window but I'll still count it. The streak continues!

Not sure what's going on with this thing anatomically speaking but it has "final boss" written all over it.

I'm not going to say that was an especially good movie or anything but that fifty-five minute runtime did it plenty of favors. If it had been a more standard 80-90 minute length there'd have been some pacing issues for sure given how many flashbacks and exposition scenes it managed to squeeze into an hour. The animation's not too bad, with some very early CGI for vehicles and larger monsters that didn't stick out (in a bad way) too much, and there's a shocking amount of gore here which I suppose felt compulsory given how violent FPS games were known for being: the dudes that got merked by that fake Elyse mutant really got got. It was a little more... serious? than I was expecting given how campy the game is presented as but overall mostly just kinda fine. If I were the IP owner I don't think I would've been unhappy with a video-game-to-movie adaptation from this era that just about makes it over the "adequate" bar: that's still batting way above average.

My take as well.

Does it do right by the games? Once again, I gotta defer until after I've actually played the game.

The Game(s)

SiN Gold is, as stated above, a mostly bug-free version of Sin that was released in 2020 as part of Nightdive's campaign to revitalize the boomer shooters that time (or modern Windows OS versions) forgot. It includes the map pack Wages of Sin and is currently the best and most convenient way to revisit this game, at least legally. All I know about the content is what I gathered from the movie: it's a cyberpunk FPS that eventually throws bioengineered experiments at you before too long, and that the antagonist is a female pharmaceutical CEO who hates to wear clothes but does love impromptu surgery.

Plenty to say about the game after playing it for a while. First, the '90s comic book edge is a lot more overt here than in the more measured anime, JC is your sardonic support throughout (and still looks like a nerdy John Carmack type; if anything, they bulked him up for the anime for all the good that did him), John Blade and his quips make him a much more apparent Duke Nukem stand-in, and the music is both very nu-metal and very loud. It does the standard late '90s FPS thing of hiding dudes behind corners or on lower/upper floors so they manage to get a few hits in before you know they're there and the game even starts with a turret sequence, which I suppose at the time was still fairly novel.

It's nice that they start you off with a weapon that can do actual damage, because you're going to be stuck with peashooters for a while after this.

I played on the medium difficulty and it made almost every enemy a bullet sponge—they went down slightly faster if you aimed for the head, but you still typically needed 7-8 shots with the standard SMG (shotgun's better but near useless at long range). When you combine that with how difficult it is to find healing items or armor, it can feel a bit more like GoldenEye 007 in that it becomes a process of repeating the stage after memorizing the ambush points so you can hold onto as much precious health as possible: one difference in Sin is that your health carries over to the next level, so you'll run into cases (like Grubb frequently does with that abysmal Cyberdillo game) where even completing a stage might not feel like progress if you hobbled over the finish line with almost nothing left in the tank for the next fracas, to the extent that reloading an earlier save file might prove necessary.

I will say Sin has elaborate level design in the sense that you need some degree of spatial awareness to figure out where to go next: you'll occasionally have to jump across rotting support beams or duck through windows to find the critical path. There's even computers you can interact with, such as during the opening level at the bank where you need to disable all the security doors (and a turret) by using the terminal at the security office. Like Half-Life, there was plenty of consideration towards using objects and furnishings in the environment to both add to its verisimilitude as well as funnel you to where you needed to go in a way that felt like natural improvisation on the player's part, so I can commend that aspect. The maps would occasionally toss secondary objectives your way but with no currency/upgrade system that I could find I'm not sure what sort of rewards you'd get out of it.

The starting bank heist level allows Sin to show you many of its cards up front, including interactable (and destructible) objects, NPCs you're not meant to shoot (ostensibly because you're the police), and a circuitous route through the level dependent on finding the right breadcrumb trail of keys and hacking.

On the whole the game's very much a product of its time and I wasn't getting enough of the cyberpunk vibe as I'd anticipated, though that could be chalked up to only seeing the relatively sedate opening chapters of the game. Once I'm fighting mutants and security robots in skyscrapers shaped like futuristic pinecones it'll lean harder into its genre trappings I'm sure. It had that bad luck of competing directly with Half-Life, which has some antiquated issues of its own but overall felt far more timeless than this. I might not be totally against picking this game up again when that Nightdive Reloaded remaster comes out but I typically find that with many of these older FPS games the nostalgia's doing a lot of work.

We even get the same scene of Elexis betraying Mancini by changing him into a monster against his will, though with this cutscene it's just a quick hypodermic to the neck while he's simpering. He didn't even get to feel her up first, bummer for him.

Does the anime do right by the games? I really can't decide which I prefer, to be honest. The late '90s edgepunk attitude's a little toned down in the anime but at the same time it feels unusually respectful towards some pretty weak material—let's just say if I had played the game first, I probably would not have expected to see the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra in the movie's opening credits—which is an odd thing to say about a movie produced by a studio that largely dabbled in hentai (not to say they couldn't take their work seriously). Either way, neither the game nor movie were all that great but not terrible either so I guess this is a tie.

That's going to be a wrap for Episode 5 here. I will admit it's a little strange that I've had two of these in a row where the OVA's plot was about hunting down the CEO of a major pharmaceutical corporation by slaying an army of bioengineered monsters just roaming around their company headquarters like they were interns fetching coffee. I'm pretty sure that won't be the case for the sixth and final episode of this season of Game OVA Reversal but I guess I can't rule it out completely. Either way, stay tuned to find out what that'll be (though just know it'll be a very "me" choice).