Okay, But What If Chainsaw Man Was A Video Game?

0

Well, we’re just a few weeks out from the end of the first season of the Chainsaw Man anime, and don’t we all miss it already?


Tatsuki Fujimoto’s mega-hit manga was always primed to work as an animated action series, but it shouldn’t have to stop there. Plenty of anime series have made the jump to video games, and Chainsaw Man has all the potential to do the same. The series provides opportunity to set foot in multiple different genres with its material, so let me make a contract with the Game-Design Devil, and run down what I think the best choices would be for adapting Chainsaw Man into a format where we aren’t just watching Denji rip and tear, we’re jumping into the action ourselves.

DUALSHOCKERS VIDEO OF THE DAY

Action Game

Let’s be honest, this is probably the first option that comes to mind when you think of adapting Chainsaw Man into a video game. A big, bloody, brawly spectacle fighter in the vein of Devil May Cry or just about anything made by PlatinumGames. I think we’d all be down for another round of chainsaw mechanics like in MadWorld, right?

The series basically already has the mechanics in it just waiting to be converted into gameplay; the blood-drinking regenerative powers of Devils are already akin to Metal Gear Rising’s rip-out-and-recharge system. The album’s worth of ending theme songs already in Chainsaw Man would work perfectly complement the kind of blood-pumping background music these games like to have.

RELATED: 15 Most Powerful Chainsaw Man Characters, Ranked

Beat ‘Em Up

Streets of Rage 4 with Denji from Chainsaw Man

“Is this really that meaningfully different from an Action Game?” I hear you ask. And the answer is yes, because I am specifically talking about old-school, belt-scrolling, 2D Beat ‘Em Ups.

Chainsaw Man is a series that bleeds action in general, but it’s also built around the age-old concept of the Buddy System. So a retro-style multiplayer masher in the style of Scott Pilgrim vs The World or TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge would be a perfect fit for the series. Denji and Power are already gross trash-gremlins in-story, it would be totally in-character to see them scarfing down health-replenishing meat they found on the street like someone out of Final Fight.

Adding Aki in brings the potential co-op player count up to three; he’s already got attacks that specifically cost his life to use, just like in any Beat ‘Em Up worth its salt, so he’s basically tailor-made for it. And it could all come wrapped in some 16-bit retro-styled aesthetic (perhaps with an anime leaning in the vein of River City Girls), which would be totally fitting given that Chainsaw Man itself that takes place in 1997.

Fighting Game

Mockup of Chainsaw Man as a fighting game

Spinning off from the Beat ‘Em Up basis, it seems like adapting a series like Chainsaw Man into the fighting-game format is how it often goes for anime. This lets you get the widest selection of your favorite Devils, Fiends, and devil hunters to play as, after all. And given how esoteric some of the abilities of Chainsaw Man’s characters get, it could prompt some real creativity in interpreting their movesets for something like this.

How does the touch-initiated life-leeching of Angel Devil play compared to the outsized blood-based bashing of someone like Power? How do you incorporate the screen-filling presences of Himeno or Aki’s contracted Devil pals? How the hell do you balance Makima for competitive play? Compelling questions to be sure, to say nothing of whether this would work best as a side-view fighter or a more open arena-based brawler like so many modern anime fighters do.

Dating Sim

Dating Sim with Denji from Chainsaw Man

Let’s, for a moment, put aside all those adaptations of anime violence to video game violence. If you’re really familiar with Chainsaw Man, you know that Denji is a lover, not a fighter. Or rather, he’d like to be a lover, but every other element of his oddly occurring life keeps getting in the way and necessitating that he fight instead.

So let’s give Denji what he really desires, with a Chainsaw Man dating sim! Forget all those previous options, fans know that this is the format the series was meant for. Denji’s entire motivation for the first part of the series is to get to first base with a girl, so why not work our poor boy’s quest for love and affection into an entire suite of game mechanics?

There are bound to be unconventional obstacles (as Denji himself says “Every woman I meet tries to murder me!”), but that shouldn’t stop players. Will you strive to recreate the infamous “vomit kiss” with Himeno? Or will you skip through all the text and ignore all the red flags for a chance with Makima? For what it’s worth, the relationships are so integrated into Chainsaw Man’s narrative that you could easily incorporate this gameplay as an additional mechanic for the other genre options outlined above. Just imagine something akin to the Persona franchise’s Social Links system alongside all that hacking and/or slashing.

These are just a few base concepts of course, but as thought experiments they make clear just how broad the options are for adapting Chainsaw Man into an interactive format. There are all sorts of other considerations to be made in terms of developers who could be put on such a project, or whether their artistic sensibilities applied to a hypothetical game would lean closer to the grittier style of Fujimoto’s original manga, or the smoother filmic interpretation of studio MAPPA’s anime adaptation.

Either way, there would be one more, most important question to answer about a Chainsaw Man game: Would you be able to play it using the Resident Evil 4 chainsaw controller?

NEXT: Chainsaw Man Season 1 Ending Explained: Who Is Reze?

 

Read original article here

Denial of responsibility! Gamers Greade is an automatic aggregator of the all world’s media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, all materials to their authors. If you are the owner of the content and do not want us to publish your materials, please contact us by email – [email protected]. The content will be deleted within 24 hours.

Leave A Reply

Your email address will not be published.