Policenauts, Finally In English

well, i just beat Policenauts. all told, it took approximately 10 hours in total for me to finish, which isn't too bad and fits right into the "beatable games" category for me these days.

LONG ANSWER:

i have a lot to say. so first i'll start with familiar territory: the translation. overall, playing the game in English was a real treat. the oddest thing about this translation is how inconsistent it is, though. it's almost like a few different people wrote it. which i believe is the case? if so, it really shows. they do an impressive job conveying and explaining a lot of the fake Kojima science stuff that's in all his games, as well as some technical stuff that i imagine would have been pretty obscure. but then you have things like the game using "win," "fail" and "QFT," which are just so out of place. to top this off, aside from perhaps the instance of "fag" in the game (which everyone says is apparently accurate), the game tends to go for the juvenile a lot of the time. any chance to throw in a curse word, the game goes for it. here's an example from the last chapter:

"you're nothing more than one of his bitches!" says Jonathan in the translation in regard to a guy he's facing off with. now, the word he uses in Japanese is "inu" which means "dog," not quite "bitch." i mean, they're the same animal, yes, but substituting bitch in place of dog (which honestly would still make sense and would probably make more sense simply as a phrase) is clearly meant to make it edgier or something. there's a LOT of this in the game and it can be grating at times, especially if you are able to understand just a little bit of what the characters are actually saying.

but, all in all, it's not quite enough to ruin the experience. 85% of the translation is done well enough to draw you in. it's just a shame that these little moments of stupidity exist at all to drag you out of things the other 25% of the time.

next, the game

if you liked Snatcher, you'll probably at least sort of like this. if i had to recommend this game or Snatcher to someone (if, say, they were really dying to play a Kojima pre-MGS adventure game), i'd probably go with the latter as i think the characters, setting and story are probably more interesting.

the game starts off strong (for about 15-20 minutes) and then immediately slows down to a grinding halt for the next three or so hours. after that, the story takes some pretty obvious turns and "twists," but i feel like the obviousness of the plot twists has to be an homage to the whole buddy-cop genre from which this game borrows so heavily. at some point towards the end of disc 1 and into disc 2 we begin to read/hear some things which are actually kind of interesting looks into the future and we start to see what Kojima's M.O. for the game is.

see, that's the thing with every Kojima game: he always needs to tackle some kind of political topic; generally something obscure that interests him or something that's fairly widespread at the time. every single one of his games has a moment where one of the characters (bad or good) will go on for over 15 minutes straight about some obscure political or scientific topic which, hopefully, you find interesting enough to hear about.

and that's what it all comes down to; this game, like Metal Gear Solid, would have probably blown me away when i was 16 when i bought it. it tackles a lot of stuff other games don't, but to anyone over the age of 20 who has some modicum of intelligence and who actually tries to keep up with current events to some degree, the plot of these games is really not enough. Kojima is like the Tool (the band) of video games; his work is essentially a cursory glance at a range of topics that his target audience has probably never heard of before (in the case of Tool it's Crowley and in the case of Kojima it's Richard Dawkins). this is good for that particular group, but kind of boring for those outside of it. in fact, it becomes downright perplexing when this information is coupled with absurdity (take the boob grabbing in Policenauts, OR even better, take Mike's story about being confused why Otacon would bother explaining to Solid Snake, a chain-smoking hired killer, how anime inspired him to build giant robots).

SHORT ANSWER

if you enjoy Kojima's games, with their quirks, constant exposition and general strangeness, then you should probably give Policenauts a shot. and hell, you may as well beat it.