Game OVA Season 3: Episode 1 — Area 88

I've been looking for something to help me through the hot 'n' humid summer months and what better way to beat the heat than to stay indoors watching questionable anime and playing questionable games based on said anime? For a rundown of this little project, check out the first episode.

Good animorning or animevening to one and all as we embark on a third season of my summer-y summary of usually mediocre licensed video games and the hopefully better animated properties they were based on. Ever played some random 16-bit game and wondered if all these anime characters and/or robots came from something? And if that something was any good? Then this is the series for you, you damn otaku.

I was still batting around the idea of doing a reverse Game OVA (OVA Game?) where I'd play games that later went on to have anime adaptations and do a compare and contrast that way around, but for as elucidating as it would be I'm still a little hesitant stepping into the shoes of the inestimable Ryan Davis and taking over his TANG concept. Maybe once I run out of ideas here. Fortunately, or at least in a very broad definition of "fortunate", there's no shortage of lackluster anime tie-ins from the Japanese side of this fair industry and my recent delves into the frequently-cursed WonderSwan library has cemented that fact firmly in my mind. (Speaking of which, I'm going to try to resist—for now—the siren call of putting N64 and WonderSwan anime games in here while those features are ongoing: next year could well be a different story, however.)

As it stands, I'm going to be pulling from the old dependable SNES/Super Famicom and its not-inconsiderable library for this season's opener and, man, did I not quite anticipate how serious this licensed property was. Hard to tell just how dark an anime will be if all you've seen is the Bowdlerized console game version. Like watching RoboCop or The Terminator for the first time after growing up with those Saturday morning animated tie-ins they made for kids: it's a bit of an adjustment, for sure.

The Property

Oh boy, here I go weighing in on the military-industrial complex and the horrors of war in my silly anime feature. Area 88 began as a manga written by Kaoru Shintani that was serialized in Shogakukan's Shonen Big Comic and published into 23 tankouban (or trade paperbacks) between 1979 and 1986. It follows hotshot pilot Shin Kazama after he is tricked by an embittered childhood friend into signing up for a three-year contract at a mercenary air force base (the titular Area 88) in a fictional approximation of a country like Afghanistan (called Asran, which has been used as a Middle Eastern stand-in before) that sees a high fatality rate and his attempts to wriggle out of it by earning enough cash to buy out his contract and return home to Japan and a promising future with a beautiful airline heiress (who, naturally, is the reason for his friend's betrayal). The drama comes both from the conflict inside Shin as he finds himself becoming accustomed to (and eventually excelling at) the war-torn world of horror and violence that he now occupies and how he might never be able to return to a life of normalcy after the events he's experienced, and a slight ticking clock NTR angle as his former friend makes romantic overtures towards the fiancée who is puzzled by Shin's sudden apparent abandonment. Shin's fellow mercenary pilots, all of whom have their own reasons for signing up for a high gain/low life-expectancy contract, fill out the rest of the cast.

Towards the end of the manga's run, it was adapted into a three-part OVA after which several games soon followed. It was then adapted again into a 12-episode TV anime series in 2004, coinciding with a completely different period of armed conflict in Afghanistan. It was one of the first manga to see traction overseas, probably due to the appealing military theme (Top Gun having been a recent hit) and sympathetic American characters, and was handled by Eclipse Comics which would also have a hand in several other localizations of '80s manga (including Appleseed, a previous subject of Game OVA).

Cast

• Shin Kazama: The floppy-haired protagonist. Set for life as a commercial airline pilot married to the boss's daughter, he's betrayed into signing up for a mercenary jet fighter contract for three years. Given his comfortable origins, he's shellshocked by what he experiences there and eager to find a way out.
• Mickey Simon: An American associate of Shin's who flew in the Vietnam War for the US Navy and found himself unable to adjust to civilian life afterwards. He signs up to the Asran contract to continue doing what he does best. Has a prominent widow's peak.
• Greg Gates: A heavy-set, barbigerous Dane who proves surprisingly durable despite the damage he and his plane incurs. He mostly serves as the comic relief.
• McCoy: An elderly fixer who makes sure the pilots have everything they need, though not without cost. Kazama regularly has to decide between saving up his money to buy out his contract or purchasing the armaments he'll need to survive.
• Goh "Rocky" Mutsugi: A photojournalist who is sort of like Dennis Hopper's character in Apocalypse Now, in that he gets a little too close to the action. He's intrigued by Shin specifically, as the only other native Japanese at Area 88.
• Saki Vashtahl: An Asran native and the commander of Area 88. Filled with shame over the choices he's made since civil war broke out in his country, he's a stoic presence and a mostly disliked one due to his heavy-handed management. He's not all that bad though.
• Ryoko Tsugumo: Shin's fiancée, the affluent heiress of the airline company Shin was due to work for and born with the unfortunate physical malady of having cotton candy for hair. She became infatuated with Shin back when he was still in flight training and, once she eventually discovers about his exile to Area 88, works to bring him home however she can.
• Satoru Kanzaki: Shin's close childhood friend with whom he shared an orphanage upbringing. Satoru turned on Shin after they fell in love with the same woman (Ryoko) and Satoru has since schemed to have her all to himself, tricking Shin into signing up for a one-way ticket to a war zone and maneuvering himself to be the airline CEO's alternative choice for successor to ensure his role as Ryoko's future husband. Kind of a jerk.

The Anime

We're only going to be focusing on the first of the OVAs here, of the two that emerged after the original three were edited for international release. This was mostly done for the sake of consolidation however, rather than cutting huge swathes of footage, so we're talking a robust one hour and forty minute runtime here. Released across 1985 to 1986, the Area 88 OVAs were produced by Studio Pierrot and directed by Hisayuki Toriumi. This is the third Studio Pierrot project we've featured on Game OVA, following the Eien no Filena OVAs and the Magical Hat TV series, though given how prolific the studio was I doubt it'll be the last. As a reminder, they're the studio behind Naruto, Bleach, Tokyo Ghoul, YuYu Hakusho, and many others. Director Hisayuki Toriumi has been active in the anime world since the 1960s, starting out by directing episodes of Speed Racer before being given the showrunner role for Science Ninja Team Gatchaman. He was also the showrunner for Tekkaman, a mecha anime that might yet feature on Game OVA due to a SFC adaptation, and a childhood favorite of mine The Mysterious Cities of Gold, a Franco-Japanese co-produced adventure serial set in Central America during the age of the Conquistadors (I reviewed a game based on it way back).

OVA I: Blue Skies of Betrayal

We open on a F/A-18 Hornet absolutely destroying a bunch of mobile artillery, its pilot grousing all the while about the unreliable communications technology of his host country while adopting a workman-like approach to eliminating military targets. This is of course our protagonist Shin Kazama, his plane identifiable by the "00" designation and a flaming unicorn decal on the plane's tail. I've often said that nothing inspires terror in your enemies like a unicorn. He returns back to Area 88 and we get our pyrotechnical opening credits to "How Far to Paradise" by Derek Jackson (I'm not sure he's any relation to the usual five): it's not quite the sexy Bond intro we got with Dirty Pair: The Movie, but I'll take it. Soon after landing we're also introduced to Rocky, the photojournalist, and Shin's fellow pilots Greg Gates and Bucksey: the former presently on fire and the latter crashlanding after his gear gives out, ably demonstrating to Rocky (and the audience) that nothing and nobody at Area 88 is likely long for this world.

Bemoaning his lot in his quarters after tossing his drinking glass against the wall, we're treated to a quick flashback of Shin and his buddy Satoru as they finish their training in Paris and prepare to fly back home. It's pretty much as I outlined above: Satoru gets Shin drunk, has him sign some bogus contract under false pretenses, then has the Asran military come pick him up at the tavern he passed out at using the threat of execution for desertion to force him to come along. With friends like these, huh? He relays his homesickness, if not the specifics of why he's there, to Rocky after the newshound comes snooping and the next scene has Rocky getting permission from Area 88's commanding officer, Saki Vashtahl, to write his story about the base. He then meets up with our fourth named Area 88 pilot, the American Mickey Simon, and McCoy the fixer. I'm starting to wonder if Rocky isn't the protagonist now. Turns out Shin is elsewhere, taking on another mission soon after the previous: his goal is to buy out his contract for a cool $1.5m, and while in the middle of fighting some dudes has a flashback of how he met Ryoko which, well, I'm not going to tell a guy when he should or should not be having flashbacks but flying around at mach speed near enemy jet fighters doesn't seem like the time. McCoy's looking to unload some potentially dubious Sidewinder missiles on Shin but the imposing Boris, our fifth named pilot (eighth if you include a trio of anonymous African pilots), talks Shin out of it. We learn that Boris sleeps with the lights on because "if he goes into the darkness he might never come back out" which is either very badass or he's some kind of vampire. I know which one I'm hoping for.

Vashtahl introduces a new mission, opt-in, where the pilots have to clear the way for the country's royal air force by taking out an enemy base filled with anti-air ordnance. Naturally, the commission fee is doubled to match the danger, and we're treated to the first of what I hope will be several power ballad musical montages as everyone gears up for take-off. All this needs to be more like Top Gun is a beach volleyball scene that some (not I) would call gratuitous. Asran certainly has enough sand to make it work. The following combat scene is kinda cool, as the enemy base commander manages to destroy most of the encroaching jets with his secret weapon—the Giant Jungle Gym of Death—as an enormous lattice of metal bars springs out from the sands and catches the fighters who had employed a low-altitude approach to avoid being targeted by the anti-air missiles. Shin and Boris slip through by raising their wing tips (not sure that would've been enough, but let's roll with it) and demolish the base, letting Mickey clean up any stragglers coming from above. Boris argues that he doesn't intend to split the commission money three ways; Mickey accepts this, given his role was minimal, but Shin objects and forgoes his share in solidarity with his friend. Boris then clarifies that he meant he's not going to take his share because he got fatally shot at some point, but survived long enough to deliver the news in a cryptically cool way. He then monologues about how he stopped making friends because they all died before him: if he goes to sleep in the dark, he'll just see their faces. Already, this guy's like the MVP for most quotable lines, so I hope he pulls through and keeps delivering on... oh, wait, no, he crashed. Folks, let's all raise a glass of vodka to one badass dude. Try not to throw it across the room this time, Shin.

Turns out Mickey and Shin were the only survivors of the sortie, though it didn't seem like Greg or Bucksey participated. The latter is still waiting for his friends that took part in the mission, doing his best Hachiko impression, while Shin and Rocky talk about how everyone has a reason for being at Area 88 and no-one is willing to share, least of all Shin himself. The OVA, though, figures we're due for a check-in back in Japan and lets us know that Ryoko is being pressured to marry Satoru by her father while Satoru, fiend that he is, is working some underhanded corporate takeover scheme by buying up shares instead of waiting for the Yamato Airline CEO to hand the company down to him. Things aren't going better for Shin either, as he runs out of ammo just one enemy fighter away from retirement (oh, the retirony) and gets shot down, now dealing with the prospect of losing a big chunk of his savings to replace his totaled fighter. Of course, by this point he's like a few grand away from what he needs so he could probably just sell whatever's salvageable (or maybe a kidney) but instead he decides to desert later that night, which seems far more sensible when you're in a foreign air base that's surrounded by guards which are in turn are surrounded by scorching sand dunes. I suppose he could just fly out in his plane and... oh, right. While choosing some other plane to hijack, since he's not making any friends with the Asran military either way, he's accosted by the three African pilots. Turns out they're the notorious "Escape Killers": bounty hunters that go after deserters. They're intimidated away when Mickey, followed by Greg and about a dozen other pilots (does no-one sleep around here?), promise to help Shin escape by keeping the anti-deserters busy. Vashtahl is also here, because I guess he heard the ruckus, and tells Shin not to give up: with his skills he's bound to earn that money back. He also drops the bombshell that his own father is leader of the anti-government faction of the civil war, which is why he's not too stoked about participating in this conflict either. At least Shin has a good reason for fighting, he claims (except he doesn't; he was tricked into it. I guess that never came up during orientation though).

Mickey, feeling left out with all this trauma dumping, decides to regale Shin (and the audience, through flashback) with how his time in Vietnam changed him: much like Shin, he wished for nothing but a ticket home before he could be killed in action but after coming back to the States safe and sound he realized he couldn't adjust to the peaceful life and left behind a girlfriend and a cushy job to keep on fighting. This is something that's been on Shin's mind as well, but I guess it helps to have it spelled out to the audience. We're pretty dumb. Deuteragonist Rocky's been quiet, and it turns out it's because he's decided to join a flying mission to get inside Shin's head a little more: he's sitting in the co-pilot seat of Bucksey's fighter, as he and Mickey take on a mission while Shin checks out the new F-5E Tiger II that McCoy procured for him. Looks... kind of identical to the other one? But then I'm not some plane otaku. Maybe if I finally started playing some of those Ace Combat games I'd be more discerning? (Speaking of which, it might not surprise you to learn that Area 88 had a collaboration event with Ace Combat Infinity, the online F2P entry). Unfortunately, the Bucksey stops here as his fighter is unable to escape a missile despite a high-velocity loop (leading to a redout) and it's the end for both him and his passenger Rocky. They had a good run. A good flight, rather. Well, no, I guess they didn't.

As if to highlight further just how well Shin's day is going we move back to Japan and to Ryoko and Satoru's rehearsal wedding. Looks like we're on the Highway to the NTR Zone now. Will that mopey fuck ever catch a break, I wonder? As luck would have it, escaping the reception to get away from her dick of a groom Ryoko spots Shin's picture in an article published by Rocky (talk about your ghost writers (too soon?)) and realizes what had happened to her beloved: he didn't abandon her and her father's airline for some lucrative job elsewhere, he did it so he could go murder people in the Middle East. Or, uh, I guess he was tricked, or something. Ryoko bails on the shindig to get some answers along with her father's well-connected secretary Yasuda and Satoru wanders in and spots the same article—must've had some real eye-catching font work or something—realizing that his soft-hearted rival managed to survive over a year of armed conflict and is probably sporting a grudge the size of Persepolis (or fictional Not-Persia equivalent). Satoru wises up to what Ryoko's doing and intercepts her at Paris before she can hop on a plane to Tel Aviv under the guise of inspecting company property so she can dig further into Asran's Area 88. Since he's there he decides to engage in even more skullduggery by calling in on some old Italian guy in a wheelchair to put out a hit on Shin. My man just knows all the best people. Satoru then thinks back to his first encounter with Shin at the orphanage, where they talk about how great moms are (Shin never knew his): turns out Satoru's mother abandoned him, leaving him with a deep-seated resentment against the world. We just saw you put out an assassination on the hero, my guy, this feels like a weird time for the OVA to try to get us to sympathize. I guess "asking Don Corle-anime to whack a guy just because" would've crossed the line into full-on cartoon villainy without something to humanize him a little (OK, sure, this is a cartoon, but still).

By pure coincidence, Area 88 receives a new pilot in Charlie: a returning veteran who, like Mickey, claims the civilian life was far too slow for him. Maybe his best friend Guile talked him into it (so that's why Capcom made the tie-in!). By actual pure coincidence, Ryoko is joined on her flight by none other than Commander Vashtahl, who I guess was in Paris on a croissant run or something and is here to make a connecting flight from Tel Aviv back to Asran. Ryoko intends to see if this mysterious gentleman happens to know anything about his country's secret air force bases, a topic I'm sure he's keen to discuss with foreigners, except that particular line of inquiry is stalled by the revelation that someone planted bombs on the airliner that will go off if it drops in altitude. The main thing I'm learning from this OVA is that planes are bad news and to never get in one. Awkwardly, in order to remove the bombs that were placed specifically to kill off Vashtahl, he summons his best pilots Shin and Mickey to get in close and, I guess, shoot the bombs off with their jet fighters so they won't detonate? The pilot of the airliner, one Satoru Kanzaki, listens to this plan in a somewhat ambivalent state: he's doing the mental math to figure out if there's a scenario where everyone, including the jet pilots, will die except for him and maybe Ryoko (though she's been kinda uppity of late) (hehe, "uppity", that's an airline heiress joke). In order to get a good shot at the underside of the plane where the bombs are, Shin and Mickey decide to flip upside down so they can get in close without colliding with their tail fins. The plan goes off without a hitch, somehow, and Shin bids farewell to the Yamato Airline plane with a sorrowful expression, never realizing who else was on it besides the Commander. Well, it's not like he asked.

While we're enjoying a quiet moment, an elite enemy squadron calling themselves the Wolf Pack decide to attack Area 81, the main air force base for the royalist faction, to some rocking guitar solos and some of the best ragdoll flops I've ever seen as they gun down the pilots too. They're coming after Area 88 next, and after Mickey identifies their tactics as similar to those deployed by the US at Vietnam he supposes that they're almost certainly veteran foreign mercenaries too: the coming dogfight will be very evenly split. Probably even more in their advantage if you consider the secret assassin that may or may not be in Area 88's midst. The sheer chaos of the resulting dogfight is some of the best action of its kind I've seen, with so much happening everywhere you look and pilots dying in vivid, sudden ways. There's a sequence where you have a first-person view of a cockpit as it's suddenly ripped off the front of the plane and you have a beat before the rest of the plane (and its pilot) goes with it. Another has a first-person strafing run down the length of a fighter ending with a shot through the cockpit dashboard. It's some brutal stuff and even with the breakneck pace of it all it manages to find a space for these shocking moments to breathe. Speaking of finding one's moment, Charlie decides to fire a missile Shin's way—wow, could he be the hitman that old Italian dude hired?—but Shin's afterburners catch it in time. Charlie explains that it's simply business before scoring a glancing hit with his machine guns. Shin manages to get one up on his would-be killer by spooking a flock of seagulls and causing them to fly into his pursuer's engine, clearly having remembered his Charlemagne. Don't worry Shin, you can just shift the blame onto Shadaloo later. Ditching his second busted up ride in the OVA so far, Shin parachutes out into the middle of the desert and starts slowly making his way across the dunes. Statistically speaking if he picks a direction at random and starts walking it's extremely unlikely he'll return to Area 88, but at this point Shin would prefer to be anywhere else seeing as he's going to be forced to buy yet another aircraft and be even further away from his goal. The odds are definitely in his favor this time that he'll wind up somewhere new.

And so the first OVA ends as Shin, in a state of exhaustion and dehydration, strolls into Area 88 a thoroughly defeated man cursed by all the anime gods as yet another ballad plays ("Memory of You"). Hey, buck up loser, at least that big floofy haircut of yours probably protected your face from the worst of the sun's rays. Silver linings and all that.

I think I've probably written far too much here but you better believe I'm checking out that second OVA eventually. The fight with the Wolf Pack was electric and all the dopey near-misses with his contract and his fiancée along with the absurd dramatic stakes make this as thrilling as any Tom Clancy pulp fiction. I don't think I'll ever get tired of watching the Most Unfortunate Man in Anime get dropped into yet another mishap. I'm fully expecting an anvil to fall on his head in OVA #2.

Well, the anime was fun, but what about that game? It's been a hot minute since I played any U.N. Squadron so I wonder how much of the subject material survived the transition to video games (and at least one localization) unscathed. I'll tell you one thing: I'm probably not going to pick Shin Kazama as my playable character. Not unless I've suddenly adopted a death wish.

The Game(s)

There were a few Area 88 tie-in games but by far the most famous was the 1989 arcade horizontal shoot 'em up created by Capcom that was rebranded with the somewhat misleading title of U.N. Squadron overseas. That game later saw an enhanced port on the SNES close to that system's launch, which is where we'll be focusing our efforts.

General story of the game is that Shin, Mickey, and Greg are tasked with destroying a secret weapon of the enemy forces, Project 4, while being on standby to deter any direct attacks on Area 88. As you complete stages you expand the map and how far you can go, the exception being the enemy squads that you need to intercept before they get too close to Area 88: if they close the distance you're forced to deal with them before anything else, and they get pretty tough between a submarine and our old friends the Wolf Pack.

Among its other novel features is a system where you buy special weapons before every mission, and have to consider what you'll need going in and what would be the most cost-effective purchases. For instance, a stage that has a lot of ground targets might call to invest in bombs but they'd probably be a waste in an aerial dogfight. You do get refunded for any special weapons you didn't use but I don't think it's the full amount. A change that the SNES version made over the arcade original was introducing an alternative vehicle purchase feature: all pilots start with the F8E Crusader and can then save up their cash for a better plane. In the arcade, I think Shin only uses the F20 Tiger (an all-rounder), Mickey has the F14D Tomcat (best at anti-air), and Greg with the A10A Thunderbolt (best at anti-ground). Each plane has a certain finite selection of the special weapons it can use (besides the best one, the F200, which can use everything).

Does it do right by the anime? I'd say so, the feature of buying new equipment and weighing it against the potential loss if you get shot down immediately after starting is similar to the stakes presented to Shin in the story. There's no feature in-game for buying out a contract for an early "good ending": for one, the cost of the new planes is far higher than Shin's debt. You don't quite get the cat-and-mouse aspect of the dogfighting with a horizontal shoot 'em up but I guess Capcom didn't want to step on Sega's toes with an After Burner-alike. Between the visuals, music, and smooth gameplay this is absolutely a Capcom joint through and through and probably still my favorite game of its type on the SNES, though granted there's not a whole lot of competition outside of the Gradius/Parodius family and the Mode 7 charms of Axelay. (And if you wanted some more U.N. Squadron coverage, you can also read when I covered its Atari ST port over here.)

As well as Capcom's game, Area 88 saw two mid-'90s adaptations for the NEC PC-9801 which are more in line with what you'd expect from the military theme: Area 88: Ikkakujuu no Kiseki ("Trails of the Unicorn"), a flight simulation game with some typically rudimentary 3D for the era; and Area 88: Etranger 1995 ("Foreigner 1995", though in French this time), which looks to be a very dense strategy game. I'm just going to invent some excuse about how difficult it is to emulate older PC games so I don't have to try to parse either of them with my broken Japanese.

With that, we're going to draw this premiere of Game OVA: Season 3 to a close. How's everyone feeling about Game OVA these days? Any ideas for subjects to cover or suggestions about the format, feel free to let me know. This might be a shorter season since I was busy in June but I'd like to squeeze a few more obscure beauties in here before the summer's over. Thanks for reading, and keep watching those skies: you never know, there might be some long-suffering anime dork flying overhead.