Iron Gaia: Virus

Your mother is dying around you. In three hours, she will be your tomb. Not one for sentimentality, you decide to cut your way out.

On your side you have superhuman reflexes, an intimate knowledge of the workings of machines, and the ability to tap magic from a current of tortured dreams. Arrayed against you are bioengineered angels, skin-clothed terminators, automated defense systems, and what could very well be a head crab.

Iron Gaia: Virus is a tightly paced cyberpunk/horror rpg in the style of System Shock, while also heavily influenced by the music of Coheed & Cambria. It picks up immediately after the events of Iron Gaia, following supporting character Dietrich Slade as he tries to escape the space-station-turned-god that gave birth to him. If that sounds confusing, that's because it is.

Iron Gaia: Virus relies heavily on prior player knowledge of the IG universe. It throws a lot of names and characters and concepts at you at once, and expects you to at least recognize most of them. From a strictly mechanical perspective, it surpasses its younger brother completely, working in a functional ATB, consistent mini-games, balanced combat, and resource management--all without overloading the player. It is a harder game, and the deadline for completing it does make it possible to save your way into an unwinnable state, but the game is also only three hours long. Restarting, freshly fortified with a sense of well-I'm-not-going-to-balls-this-up-this-time, is perfectly possible. Most of the challenge in the gameplay is in developing working strategies and coming up with puzzle solutions, with combat playing a part in both.

IG: V is not flawless. It does have its rough edges. Some of the good-concept-somehow-turned-to-clunky-game-design that was a part of the first Iron Gaia is still evident here (mostly in the form of a game-within-a-game required to continue the plot,) and at least two puzzles are monstrously hard. The entire game takes place in a fairly limited maze of corridors and rooms, and fights to keep this environment from becoming stale by including walk-speed upgrades and introducing new enemies as time goes on.

While generally balanced, some fights in IG: V are brutally hard, and they have a frustrating tendency to come right after extremely long cut scenes. Saves are provided after these scenes, but they don't give the player the option to re-equip, re-arm, or even heal. As a result, a fair bit of the game's challenge (and its horror factor) comes from the constant threat that your healing items will run out.

For all the effort that was put into its combat system, IG: V is still a very story heavy game. Sometimes this story completely hijacks the player's attention, but mostly it cooperates with and enhances gameplay. Battles feel all the more compelling because the player is invested in caring about the characters involved, and the lengthy cutscenes are tolerable because of the interesting philosophical spin they put on the plot.

IG: V is not a first choice for the easily frustrated, but it is a compelling experience. If you've ever liked Shadowrun, System Shock, or rock operas about murder and betrayal in space, give this a shot.



Most of you probably do not care. Feel free to skip ahead to the end. There are spoilers lying dead ahead, and the review briefly breaks from analyzing the game itself to analyzing some abstract issues related to the plot.

Still with me?

Okay.

I've already pretty much established how much I enjoyed this game, but it has forever been the way of the critic to scowl and poke and nitpick in pursuit of a greater understanding of art.

My biggest problem with Iron Gaia: Virus is that it is too gaideny. It knows that it's a side story, and every time the plot tries to break free of that, it remembers that the things it's doing aren't supposed to be as awesome as the things happening in the central plotline, and so it tones them down.

For example, a good half of the game deals with the ominous possibility that Gaia, Slade's Shodan-esque mother/god, might still be alive somehow. She even goes so far as to very nearly interact with him in several abstract and easily misinterpretable ways. By the end, the plot seems to have assumed that she is still alive and is trying to wake back up, but she never has any sort of a confrontation with Slade. Instead, out of absolutely nowhere, another villain is introduced. The Vision. Yes, she's an allusion to the character of Chase from Coheed & Cambria's The Amory Wars, and the narrative even goes so far as to have her quote a few lines. However, you don't get to fight her either. You don't even get to fight the Mengle-esque doctor who you spend the whole game playing cat-and-mouse with. The final battle is with a pile of unstable cells. It's as if the plot had to be coerced into saving all the good bits for Iron Gaia II.

There is still some resolution. In many ways, the denouement of the game is quite satisfying. However, it missed its opportunity to be collar-grabbingly intense. IG:V was content to sit in its quiet little corner and just be a gaiden, which was a shame, because it's way better than that.

My other principal issue with IG: V as a narrative is that it made the awkward jump from using Coheed & Cambria as source of inspiration to quoting it outright. I really don't mind the occasional line, especially as oblique references for fans to pick up on and feel absurdly self-satisfied about, but this happened several times in close succession near the end of the game. It wasn't lamp-shading or allegory or reference, it was trying to tap into the narrative energy of another work, which is only really effective if you do it once. If you have a character that quotes direct from the bible in a really awesome way during a really awesome scene, that's great. But if he quotes from the bible all the time, he becomes "that guy who quotes from the bible" and the things he says get lost in the label.

For someone like me, who enjoys both Coheed & Cambria and IG, there's a lot of fun to be had in looking at the ways IG uses C&C as a reference point but then goes somewhere completely different with its own plot. None of IG's characters are expies of anything in a Coheed & Cambria universe. Some of them occupy the same archetypes (Dr Cross and Dr Hohenberg, Cross' Russian bodyguard and Mayo Deftinwolf, etc,) but the roles they play in the story are all scrambled around, and their personalities are very different.

Delirium Trigger, the song that plays over the main menu of IG: V, sets the tone perfectly. This is because the first few lyrics are essentially a jumping-off point for the game. Lemme just type them out for you.



That's good stuff, if it's the kind of thing you like, and the song and IG: V quickly split off into different narrative trajectories after that. However, towards the end, the game quotes this song several times, occasionally forcing the deliberately odd wording of Sanchez' lyrics into lines of rational dialogue. It doesn't quite fit.

A better treatment of the same basic idea is the way IG: V uses the song IRO Bot. It does play during a particular sequence, but I only remember it being quoted once in the story, and then only vaguely. Like Delerium Trigger, it fits the mood of the game because it was unmistakably an inspiration for it, but unlike Delerium Trigger it makes the player work to discover how deep that connection runs.

IRO Bot talks about how "systems lost their mind," and describes "the ride home through perilous." Most importantly, though, it sums up all of IG: V in a single lyric.



If it hadn't deliberately relegated itself to the role of a gaiden, giving up a lot of narrative tension in the process, IG: V would have completely overshadowed the original.



Play if you like:
-System Shock
-Coheed & Cambria
-Attention to polish and technical detail

Skip if you hate:
-ATBs
-Gaidens
-Poorly defined boundaries between rooms
-Resource management